The Ambassadors (25 page)

She stood there quite pink, a little frightened, prettier and
prettier and not a bit like her mother. There was in this last
particular no resemblance but that of youth to youth; and here was
in fact suddenly Strether's sharpest impression. It went wondering,
dazed, embarrassed, back to the woman he had just been talking
with; it was a revelation in the light of which he already saw she
would become more interesting. So slim and fresh and fair, she had
yet put forth this perfection; so that for really believing it of
her, for seeing her to any such developed degree as a mother,
comparison would be urgent. Well, what was it now but fairly thrust
upon him? "Mamma wishes me to tell you before we go," the girl
said, "that she hopes very much you'll come to see us very soon.
She has something important to say to you."

"She quite reproaches herself," Chad helpfully explained: "you
were interesting her so much when she accidentally suffered you to
be interrupted."

"Ah don't mention it!" Strether murmured, looking kindly from
one to the other and wondering at many things.

"And I'm to ask you for myself," Jeanne continued with her hands
clasped together as if in some small learnt prayer—"I'm to ask you
for myself if you won't positively come."

"Leave it to me, dear—I'll take care of it!" Chad genially
declared in answer to this, while Strether himself almost held his
breath. What was in the girl was indeed too soft, too unknown for
direct dealing; so that one could only gaze at it as at a picture,
quite staying one's own hand. But with Chad he was now on
ground—Chad he could meet; so pleasant a confidence in that and in
everything did the young man freely exhale. There was the whole of
a story in his tone to his companion, and he spoke indeed as if
already of the family. It made Strether guess the more quickly what
it might be about which Madame de Vionnet was so urgent. Having
seen him then she had found him easy; she wished to have it out
with him that some way for the young people must be discovered,
some way that would not impose as a condition the transplantation
of her daughter. He already saw himself discussing with this lady
the attractions of Woollett as a residence for Chad's companion.
Was that youth going now to trust her with the affair—so that it
would be after all with one of his "lady-friends" that his mother's
missionary should be condemned to deal? It was quite as if for an
instant the two men looked at each other on this question. But
there was no mistaking at last Chad's pride in the display of such
a connexion. This was what had made him so carry himself while,
three minutes before, he was bringing it into view; what had caused
his friend, first catching sight of him, to be so struck with his
air. It was, in a word, just when he thus finally felt Chad putting
things straight off on him that he envied him, as he had mentioned
to little Bilham, most. The whole exhibition however was but a
matter of three or four minutes, and the author of it had soon
explained that, as Madame de Vionnet was immediately going "on,"
this could be for Jeanne but a snatch. They would all meet again
soon, and Strether was meanwhile to stay and amuse himself—"I'll
pick you up again in plenty of time." He took the girl off as he
had brought her, and Strether, with the faint sweet foreignness of
her "Au revoir, monsieur!" in his ears as a note almost
unprecedented, watched them recede side by side and felt how, once
more, her companion's relation to her got an accent from it. They
disappeared among the others and apparently into the house;
whereupon our friend turned round to give out to little Bilham the
conviction of which he was full. But there was no little Bilham any
more; little Bilham had within the few moments, for reasons of his
own, proceeded further: a circumstance by which, in its order,
Strether was also sensibly affected.

Chad was not in fact on this occasion to keep his promise of
coming back; but Miss Gostrey had soon presented herself with an
explanation of his failure. There had been reasons at the last for
his going off with ces dames; and he had asked her with much
instance to come out and take charge of their friend. She did so,
Strether felt as she took her place beside him, in a manner that
left nothing to desire. He had dropped back on his bench, alone
again for a time, and the more conscious for little Bilham's
defection of his unexpressed thought; in respect to which however
this next converser was a still more capacious vessel. "It's the
child!" he had exclaimed to her almost as soon as she appeared; and
though her direct response was for some time delayed he could feel
in her meanwhile the working of this truth. It might have been
simply, as she waited, that they were now in presence altogether of
truth spreading like a flood and not for the moment to be offered
her in the mere cupful; inasmuch as who should ces dames prove to
be but persons about whom—once thus face to face with them—she
found she might from the first have told him almost everything?
This would have freely come had he taken the simple precaution of
giving her their name. There could be no better example—and she
appeared to note it with high amusement—than the way, making things
out already so much for himself, he was at last throwing
precautions to the winds. They were neither more nor less, she and
the child's mother, than old school-friends—friends who had
scarcely met for years but whom this unlooked-for chance had
brought together with a rush. It was a relief, Miss Gostrey hinted,
to feel herself no longer groping; she was unaccustomed to grope
and as a general thing, he might well have seen, made straight
enough for her clue. With the one she had now picked up in her
hands there need be at least no waste of wonder. "She's coming to
see me—that's for YOU," Strether's counsellor continued; "but I
don't require it to know where I am."

The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether,
characteristically, was even by this time in the immensity of
space. "By which you mean that you know where SHE is?"

She just hesitated. "I mean that if she comes to see me I
shall—now that I've pulled myself round a bit after the shock—not
be at home."

Strether hung poised. "You call it—your recognition—a
shock?"

She gave one of her rare flickers of impatience. "It was a
surprise, an emotion. Don't be so literal. I wash my hands of
her."

Poor Strether's face lengthened. "She's impossible—?"

"She's even more charming than I remembered her."

"Then what's the matter?"

She had to think how to put it. "Well, I'M impossible. It's
impossible. Everything's impossible."

He looked at her an instant. "I see where you're coming out.
Everything's possible." Their eyes had on it in fact an exchange of
some duration; after which he pursued: "Isn't it that beautiful
child?" Then as she still said nothing: "Why don't you mean to
receive her?"

Her answer in an instant rang clear. "Because I wish to keep out
of the business."

It provoked in him a weak wail. "You're going to abandon me
NOW?"

"No, I'm only going to abandon HER. She'll want me to help her
with you. And I won't."

"You'll only help me with her? Well then—!" Most of the persons
previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the
house, and they had the gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows
were long, the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their
own in the noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees
in the other gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the
old hotels; it was as if our friends had waited for the full charm
to come out. Strether's impressions were still present; it was as
if something had happened that "nailed" them, made them more
intense; but he was to ask himself soon afterwards, that evening,
what really HAD happened—conscious as he could after all remain
that for a gentleman taken, and taken the first time, into the
"great world," the world of ambassadors and duchesses, the items
made a meagre total. It was nothing new to him, however, as we
know, that a man might have—at all events such a man as he—an
amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so
that, though it was doubtless no great adventure to sit on there
with Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the
picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible—as well as the
communication itself, not a note of which failed to
reverberate—only gave the moments more of the taste of history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother had been
three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good
girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then,
though interruptedly and above all with a long recent drop, other
glimpses of her. Twenty-three years put them both on, no doubt; and
Madame de Vionnet—though she had married straight after
school—couldn't be today an hour less than thirty-eight. This made
her ten years older than Chad—though ten years, also, if Strether
liked, older than she looked; the least, at any rate, that a
prospective mother-in-law could be expected to do with. She would
be of all mothers-in-law the most charming; unless indeed, through
some perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly belie
herself in that relation. There was none surely in which, as Maria
remembered her, she mustn't be charming; and this frankly in spite
of the stigma of failure in the tie where failure always most
showed. It was no test there—when indeed WAS it a test there?—for
Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute. She had lived for years apart
from him—which was of course always a horrid position; but Miss
Gostrey's impression of the matter had been that she could scarce
have made a better thing of it had she done it on purpose to show
she was amiable. She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to
say; which was luckily not the case for her husband. He was so
impossible that she had the advantage of all her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet—it
being also history that the lady in question was a Countess—should
now, under Miss Gostrey's sharp touch, rise before him as a high
distinguished polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a
mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl
so freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of
hand by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark
personal motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this
company was, as a matter of course, governed by such considerations
as put divorce out of the question. "Ces gens-la don't divorce, you
know, any more than they emigrate or abjure—they think it impious
and vulgar"; a fact in the light of which they seemed but the more
richly special. It was all special; it was all, for Strether's
imagination, more or less rich. The girl at the Genevese school, an
isolated interesting attaching creature, then both sensitive and
violent, audacious but always forgiven, was the daughter of a
French father and an English mother who, early left a widow, had
married again—tried afresh with a foreigner; in her career with
whom she had apparently given her child no example of comfort. All
these people—the people of the English mother's side—had been of
condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities
that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what
they really quite rhymed to. It was in any case her belief that the
mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been without
conscience, had only thought of ridding herself most quickly of a
possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her impression, a
Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter,
leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as
well as an assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her
more or less of a prey later on. She had been in particular, at
school, dazzlingly, though quite booklessly, clever; as polyglot as
a little Jewess (which she wasn't, oh no!) and chattering French,
English, German, Italian, anything one would, in a way that made a
clean sweep, if not of prizes and parchments, at least of every
"part," whether memorised or improvised, in the curtained costumed
school repertory, and in especial of all mysteries of race and
vagueness of reference, all swagger about "home," among their
variegated mates.

It would doubtless be difficult to-day, as between French and
English, to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on
knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who
don't keep you explaining—minds with doors as numerous as the
many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter's. You might
confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian
sins. Therefore—! But Strether's narrator covered her implication
with a laugh; a laugh by which his betrayal of a sense of the lurid
in the picture was also perhaps sufficiently protected. He had a
moment of wondering, while his friend went on, what sins might be
especially Roumelian. She went on at all events to the mention of
her having met the young thing—again by some Swiss lake—in her
first married state, which had appeared for the few intermediate
years not at least violently disturbed. She had been lovely at that
moment, delightful to HER, full of responsive emotion, of amused
recognitions and amusing reminders, and then once more, much later,
after a long interval, equally but differently charming—touching
and rather mystifying for the five minutes of an encounter at a
railway-station en province, during which it had come out that her
life was all changed. Miss Gostrey had understood enough to see,
essentially, what had happened, and yet had beautifully dreamed
that she was herself faultless. There were doubtless depths in her,
but she was all right; Strether would see if she wasn't. She was
another person however—that had been promptly marked—from the small
child of nature at the Geneva school, a little person quite made
over (as foreign women WERE, compared with American) by marriage.
Her situation too had evidently cleared itself up; there would have
been—all that was possible—a judicial separation. She had settled
in Paris, brought up her daughter, steered her boat. It was no very
pleasant boat—especially there—to be in; but Marie de Vionnet would
have headed straight. She would have friends, certainly—and very
good ones. There she was at all events—and it was very interesting.
Her knowing Mr. Chad didn't in the least prove she hadn't friends;
what it proved was what good ones HE had. "I saw that," said Miss
Gostrey, "that night at the Francais; it came out for me in three
minutes. I saw HER—or somebody like her. And so," she immediately
added, "did you."