The American (41 page)

“Please say nothing against her,” said Newman.

“Poor woman, she
is
cruel. But of course you will go
after her and you will plead powerfully. Do you know that as you are now,” Mrs. Tristram pursued with characteristic audacity of comment, “you are extremely eloquent, even without speaking? To resist you a woman must have a very fixed idea in her head. I wish I had done you a wrong, that you might come to me in that fine fashion! But go to Madame de Cintré at any rate, and tell her that she is a puzzle even to me. I am very curious to see how far family discipline will go.”

Newman sat awhile longer, leaning his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and Mrs. Tristram continued to temper charity with philosophy, and compassion with criticism. At last she inquired: “And what does the Count Valentin say to it?” Newman started; he had not thought of Valentin and his errand on the Swiss frontier since the morning. The reflection made him restless again, and he took his leave. He went straight to his apartment, where, upon the table of the vestibule, he found a telegram. It ran (with the date and place) as follows: “I am seriously ill; please to come to me as soon as possible. V. B.” Newman groaned at this miserable news, and at the necessity of deferring his journey to the Château de Fleurières. But he wrote to Madame de Cintré these few lines; they were all he had time for:

After this he had only time to catch the night express to Geneva.

N
ewman possessed a remarkable talent for sitting still when it was necessary, and he had an opportunity to use it on his journey to Switzerland. The successive hours of the night brought him no sleep; but he sat motionless in his corner of the railway-carriage, with his eyes closed, and the most observant of his fellow-travellers might have envied him his apparent slumber. Toward morning slumber really came, as an effect of mental rather than of physical fatigue. He slept for a couple of hours, and at last, waking, found his eyes resting upon one of the snow-powdered peaks of the Jura,
¹
behind which the sky was just reddening with the dawn. But he saw neither the cold mountain nor the warm sky; his consciousness began to throb again, on the very instant, with a sense of his wrong. He got out of the train half an hour before it reached Geneva, in the cold morning twilight, at the station indicated in Valentin’s telegram. A drowsy station-master was on the platform with a lantern, and the hood of his overcoat over his head, and near him stood a gentleman who advanced to meet Newman. This personage was a man of forty, with a tall lean figure, a sallow face, a dark eye, a neat moustache, and a pair of fresh gloves. He took off his hat, looking very grave, and pronounced Newman’s name. Our hero assented and said: “You are M. de Bellegarde’s friend?”

“I unite with you in claiming that sad honour,” said the gentleman. “I had placed myself at M. de Bellegarde’s service in this melancholy affair, together with M. de Grosjoyaux, who is now at his bedside. M. de Grosjoyaux, I believe, has had the honour of meeting you in Paris, but as he is a better nurse than I he remained with our poor friend. Bellegarde has been eagerly expecting you.”

“And how is Bellegarde?” said Newman. “He was badly hit?”

“The doctor has condemned him; we brought a surgeon with us. But he will die in the best sentiments. I sent last evening for the curé
²
of the nearest French village, who spent an hour with him. The curé was quite satisfied.”

“Heaven forgive us!” groaned Newman. “I would rather the doctor were satisfied! And can he see me—shall he know me?”

“When I left him, half an hour ago, he had fallen asleep, after a feverish, wakeful night. But we shall see.” And Newman’s companion proceeded to lead the way out of the station to the village, explaining as he went that the little party was lodged in the humblest of Swiss inns, where, however, they had succeeded in making M. de Bellegarde much more comfortable than could at first have been expected. “We are old companions-inarms,” said Valentin’s second; “it is not the first time that one of us has helped the other to lie easily. It is a very nasty wound, and the nastiest thing about it is that Bellegarde’s adversary was no shot. He put his bullet where he could. It took it into its head to walk straight into Bellegarde’s left side, just below the heart.”

As they picked their way in the gray, deceptive dawn, between the manure-heaps of the village street, Newman’s new acquaintance narrated the particulars of the duel. The conditions of the meeting had been that if the first exchange of shots should fail to satisfy one of the
two gentlemen, a second should take place. Valentin’s first bullet had done exactly what Newman’s companion was convinced he had intended it to do; it had grazed the arm of M. Stanislas Kapp, just scratching the flesh. M. Kapp’s own projectile, meanwhile, had passed at ten good inches from the person of Valentin. The representatives of M. Stanislas had demanded another shot, which was granted. Valentin had then fired aside and the young Alsatian had done effective execution. “I saw, when we met him on the ground,” said Newman’s informant, “that he was not going to be
commode.
³
It is a kind of bovine temperament.” Valentin had immediately been installed at the inn, and M. Stanislas and his friends had withdrawn to regions unknown. The police authorities of the canton
⁴
had waited upon the party at the inn, had been extremely majestic, and had drawn up a long
procès-verbal
;
⁵
but it was probable that they would wink at so very gentlemanly a bit of bloodshed. Newman asked whether a message had not been sent to Valentin’s family, and learned that up to a late hour on the preceding evening Valentin had opposed it. He had refused to believe his wound was dangerous. But after his interview with the curé he had consented, and a telegram had been despatched to his mother. “But the marquise had better hurry,” said Newman’s conductor.

“Well, it’s an abominable affair!” said Newman. “That’s all I have got to say!” To say this, at least, in a tone of infinite disgust, was an irresistible need.

“Ah, you don’t approve?” questioned his conductor, with curious urbanity.

“Approve?” cried Newman. “I wish that when I had him there, night before last, I had locked him up in my
cabinet de toilette!
“
⁶

Valentin’s late second opened his eyes, and shook his head up and down two or three times, gravely, with a little flute-like whistle. But they had reached the inn, and a stout maid-servant in a night-cap was at the door
with a lantern, to take Newman’s travelling-bag from the porter who trudged behind him. Valentin was lodged on the ground-floor at the back of the house, and Newman’s companion went along a stone-faced passage and softly opened a door. Then he beckoned to Newman, who advanced and looked into the room, which was lighted by a single shaded candle. Beside the fire sat M. de Grosjoyaux asleep in his dressing-gown—a little plump fair man whom Newman had seen several times in Valentin’s company. On the bed lay Valentin, pale and still, with his eyes closed—a figure very shocking to Newman, who had seen it hitherto awake to its finger-tips. M. de Grosjoyaux’s colleague pointed to an open door beyond, and whispered that the doctor was within, keeping guard. So long as Valentin slept, or seemed to sleep, of course Newman could not approach him; so our hero withdrew for the present, committing himself to the care of the half-waked
bonne.
⁷
She took him to a room above-stairs, and introduced him to a bed on which a magnified bolster, in yellow calico, figured as a counterpane. Newman lay down, and, in spite of his counterpane, slept for three or four hours. When he awoke, the morning was advanced and the sun was filling his window, and he heard, outside of it, the clucking of hens.

While he was dressing there came to his door a messenger from M. de Grosjoyaux and his companion, proposing that he should breakfast with them. Presently he went down-stairs to the little stone-paved dining-room, where the maid-servant, who had taken off her night-cap, was serving the repast. M. de Grosjoyaux was there, surprisingly fresh for a gentleman who had been playing sick-nurse half the night, rubbing his hands and watching the breakfast-table attentively. Newman renewed acquaintance with him, and learned that Valentin was still sleeping; the surgeon, who had had a fairly tranquil night, was at present sitting with him. Before M. de
Grosjoyaux’s associate reappeared, Newman learned that his name was M. Ledoux, and that Bellegarde’s acquaintance with him dated from the days when they served together in the Pontifical Zouaves.
⁸
M. Ledoux was the nephew of a distinguished Ultramontane bishop. At last the bishop’s nephew came in with a toilet in which an ingenious attempt at harmony with the peculiar situation was visible, and with a gravity tempered by a decent deference to the best breakfast that the Croix Helvétique
⁹
had ever set forth. Valentin’s servant, who was allowed only in scanty measure the honour of watching with his master, had been lending a light Parisian hand in the kitchen. The two Frenchmen did their best to prove that if circumstances might overshadow, they could not really obscure the national talent for conversation, and M. Ledoux delivered a neat little eulogy on poor Bellegarde, whom he pronounced the most charming Englishman he had ever known.

“Do you call him an Englishman?” Newman asked.

M. Ledoux smiled a moment and then made an epigram.
“C’est plus qu’un Anglais—c’est un Anglomane!”
¹⁰
Newman said soberly that he had never noticed it; and M. de Grosjoyaux remarked that it was really too soon to deliver a funeral oration upon poor Bellegarde. “Evidently,” said M. Ledoux. “But I couldn’t help observing this morning to Mr. Newman that when a man has taken such excellent measures for his salvation as our dear friend did last evening, it seems almost a pity he should put it in peril again by returning to the world.” M. Ledoux was a great Catholic, and Newman thought him a queer mixture. His countenance, by daylight, had a sort of amiably saturnine cast; he had a very large thin nose, and looked like a Spanish picture. He appeared to think duelling a very perfect arrangement, provided, if one should get hit, one could promptly see the priest. He seemed to take a great satisfaction in Valentin’s interview with the curé, and yet his conversation did not
at all indicate a sanctimonious habit of mind. M. Ledoux had evidently a high sense of the becoming, and was prepared to be urbane and tasteful on all points. He was always furnished with a smile (which pushed his moustache up under his nose) and an explanation.
Savoirvivre
—knowing how to live—was his specialty, in which he included knowing how to die; but, as Newman reflected, with a good deal of dumb irritation, he seemed disposed to delegate to others the application of his learning on this latter point. M. de Grosjoyaux was of quite another complexion, and appeared to regard his friend’s theological unction as the sign of an inaccessibly superior mind. He was evidently doing his utmost, with a kind of jovial tenderness, to make life agreeable to Valentin to the last, and help him as little as possible to miss the Boulevard des Italiens; but what chiefly occupied his mind was the mystery of a bungling brewer’s son making so neat a shot. He himself could snuff a candle, & c., and yet he confessed that he could not have done better than this. He hastened to add that on the present occasion he would have made a point of not doing so well. It was not an occasion for that sort of murderous work,
que diable!
¹¹
He would have picked out some quiet fleshy spot and just tapped it with a harmless ball. M. Stanislas Kapp had been deplorably heavy-handed; but really, when the world had come to that pass that one granted a meeting to a brewer’s son!…. This was M. de Grosjoyaux’s nearest approach to a generalisation. He kept looking through the window, over the shoulder of M. Ledoux, at a slender tree which stood at the end of a lane, opposite to the inn, and seemed to be measuring its distance from his extended arm and secretly wishing that, since the subject had been introduced, propriety did not forbid a little speculative pistol-practice.

Newman was in no humour to enjoy good company. He could neither eat nor talk; his soul was sore with grief and anger, and the weight of his double sorrow
was intolerable. He sat with his eyes fixed upon his plate, counting the minutes, wishing at one moment that Valentin would see him and leave him free to go in quest of Madame de Cintré and his lost happiness, and mentally calling himself a vile brute the next, for the impatient egotism of the wish. He was very poor company, himself, and even his acute preoccupation and his general lack of the habit of pondering the impression he produced did not prevent him from reflecting, that his companions must be puzzled to see how poor Bellegarde came to take such a fancy to this taciturn Yankee that he must needs have him at his death-bed. After breakfast he strolled forth alone into the village and looked at the fountain, the geese, the open barn doors, the brown, bent old women, showing their hugely darned stocking-heels at the ends of their slowly-clicking sabots,
¹²
and the beautiful view of snowy Alp and purple Jura at either end of the little street. The day was brilliant; early spring was in the air and sunshine, and the winter’s damp was trickling out of the cottage eaves. It was birth and brightness for all nature, even for chirping chickens and waddling goslings, and it was to be death and burial for poor, foolish, generous, delightful Bellegarde. Newman walked as far as the village church, and went into the small graveyard beside it, where he sat down and looked at the awkward tablets which were planted around. They were all sordid and hideous, and Newman could feel nothing but the hardness and coldness of death. He got up and came back to the inn, where he found M. Ledoux having coffee and a cigarette at a little green table which he had caused to be carried into the small garden. Newman, learning that the doctor was still sitting with Valentin, asked M. Ledoux if he might not be allowed to relieve him; he had a great desire to be useful to his poor friend. This was easily arranged; the doctor was very glad to go to bed. He was a youthful and rather jaunty practitioner, but he had a clever face, and the ribbon
of the Legion of Honour in his button-hole; Newman listened attentively to the instructions he gave him before retiring, and took mechanically from his hand a small volume which the surgeon recommended as a help to wakefulness, and which turned out to be an old copy of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
¹³