The Ambassadors (59 page)

"And not trouble you any more, no doubt—not thrust on you even
the wonder and the beauty of what I've done; only let you regard
our business as over, and well over, and see you depart in a peace
that matches my own? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt," she nervously
repeated—"all the more that I don't really pretend I believe you
couldn't, for yourself, NOT have done what you have. I don't
pretend you feel yourself victimised, for this evidently is the way
you live, and it's what—we're agreed—is the best way. Yes, as you
say," she continued after a moment, "I ought to be easy and rest on
my work. Well then here am I doing so. I AM easy. You'll have it
for your last impression. When is it you say you go?" she asked
with a quick change.

He took some time to reply—his last impression was more and more
so mixed a one. It produced in him a vague disappointment, a drop
that was deeper even than the fall of his elation the previous
night. The good of what he had done, if he had done so much, wasn't
there to enliven him quite to the point that would have been ideal
for a grand gay finale. Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to
deal with them was to walk on water. What was at bottom the matter
with her, embroider as she might and disclaim as she might—what was
at bottom the matter with her was simply Chad himself. It was of
Chad she was after all renewedly afraid; the strange strength of
her passion was the very strength of her fear; she clung to HIM,
Lambert Strether, as to a source of safety she had tested, and,
generous graceful truthful as she might try to be, exquisite as she
was, she dreaded the term of his being within reach. With this
sharpest perception yet, it was like a chill in the air to him, it
was almost appalling, that a creature so fine could be, by
mysterious forces, a creature so exploited. For at the end of all
things they WERE mysterious: she had but made Chad what he was—so
why could she think she had made him infinite? She had made him
better, she had made him best, she had made him anything one would;
but it came to our friend with supreme queerness that he was none
the less only Chad. Strether had the sense that HE, a little, had
made him too; his high appreciation had as it were, consecrated her
work The work, however admirable, was nevertheless of the strict
human order, and in short it was marvellous that the companion of
mere earthly joys, of comforts, aberrations (however one classed
them) within the common experience should be so transcendently
prized. It might have made Strether hot or shy, as such secrets of
others brought home sometimes do make us; but he was held there by
something so hard that it was fairly grim. This was not the
discomposure of last night; that had quite passed—such
discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was to see a man
ineffably adored. There it was again—it took women, it took women;
if to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that the
water rose? And it had never surely risen higher than round this
woman. He presently found himself taking a long look from her, and
the next thing he knew he had uttered all his thought. "You're
afraid for your life!"

It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm
came into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide
overflowed at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly
comes from a child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and
covered her face with her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner.
"It's how you see me, it's how you see me"—she caught her breath
with it—"and it's as I AM, and as I must take myself, and of course
it's no matter." Her emotion was at first so incoherent that he
could only stand there at a loss, stand with his sense of having
upset her, though of having done it by the truth. He had to listen
to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to attenuate,
feeling her doubly woeful amid all her dim diffused elegance;
consenting to it as he had consented to the rest, and even
conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of such a fine
free range of bliss and bale. He couldn't say it was NOT no matter;
for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway—quite as if
what he thought of her had nothing to do with it. It was actually
moreover as if he didn't think of her at all, as if he could think
of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she
represented, and the possibilities she betrayed. She was older for
him to-night, visibly less exempt from the touch of time; but she
was as much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest
apparition, it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and
yet he could see her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as
a maidservant crying for her young man. The only thing was that she
judged herself as the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which
wisdom too, the dishonour of which judgement, seemed but to sink
her lower. Her collapse, however, no doubt, was briefer and she had
in a manner recovered herself before he intervened. "Of course I'm
afraid for my life. But that's nothing. It isn't that."

He was silent a little longer, as if thinking what it might be.
"There's something I have in mind that I can still do."

But she threw off at last, with a sharp sad headshake, drying
her eyes, what he could still do. "I don't care for that. Of
course, as I've said, you're acting, in your wonderful way, for
yourself; and what's for yourself is no more my business—though I
may reach out unholy hands so clumsily to touch it—than if it were
something in Timbuctoo. It's only that you don't snub me, as you've
had fifty chances to do—it's only your beautiful patience that
makes one forget one's manners. In spite of your patience, all the
same," she went on, "you'd do anything rather than be with us here,
even if that were possible. You'd do everything for us but be mixed
up with us—which is a statement you can easily answer to the
advantage of your own manners. You can say 'What's the use of
talking of things that at the best are impossible?' What IS of
course the use? It's only my little madness. You'd talk if you were
tormented. And I don't mean now about HIM. Oh for him—!"
Positively, strangely, bitterly, as it seemed to Strether, she gave
"him," for the moment, away. "You don't care what I think of you;
but I happen to care what you think of me. And what you MIGHT," she
added. "What you perhaps even did."

He gained time. "What I did—?"

"Did think before. Before this. DIDn't you think—?"

But he had already stopped her. "I didn't think anything. I
never think a step further than I'm obliged to."

"That's perfectly false, I believe," she returned—"except that
you may, no doubt, often pull up when things become TOO ugly; or
even, I'll say, to save you a protest, too beautiful. At any rate,
even so far as it's true, we've thrust on you appearances that
you've had to take in and that have therefore made your obligation.
Ugly or beautiful—it doesn't matter what we call them—you were
getting on without them, and that's where we're detestable. We bore
you—that's where we are. And we may well—for what we've cost you.
All you can do NOW is not to think at all. And I who should have
liked to seem to you—well, sublime!"

He could only after a moment re-echo Miss Barrace. "You're
wonderful!"

"I'm old and abject and hideous"—she went on as without hearing
him. "Abject above all. Or old above all. It's when one's old that
it's worst. I don't care what becomes of it—let what WILL; there it
is. It's a doom—I know it; you can't see it more than I do myself.
Things have to happen as they will." With which she came back again
to what, face to face with him, had so quite broken down. "Of
course you wouldn't, even if possible, and no matter what may
happen to you, be near us. But think of me, think of me—!" She
exhaled it into air.

He took refuge in repeating something he had already said and
that she had made nothing of. "There's something I believe I can
still do." And he put his hand out for good-bye.

She again made nothing of it; she went on with her insistence.
"That won't help you. There's nothing to help you."

"Well, it may help YOU," he said.

She shook her head. "There's not a grain of certainty in my
future—for the only certainty is that I shall be the loser in the
end."

She hadn't taken his hand, but she moved with him to the door.
"That's cheerful," he laughed, "for your benefactor!"

"What's cheerful for ME," she replied, "is that we might, you
and I, have been friends. That's it—that's it. You see how, as I
say, I want everything. I've wanted you too."

"Ah but you've HAD me!" he declared, at the door, with an
emphasis that made an end.

His purpose had been to see Chad the next day, and he had
prefigured seeing him by an early call; having in general never
stood on ceremony in respect to visits at the Boulevard
Malesherbes. It had been more often natural for him to go there
than for Chad to come to the small hotel, the attractions of which
were scant; yet it nevertheless, just now, at the eleventh hour,
did suggest itself to Strether to begin by giving the young man a
chance. It struck him that, in the inevitable course, Chad would be
"round," as Waymarsh used to say—Waymarsh who already, somehow,
seemed long ago. He hadn't come the day before, because it had been
arranged between them that Madame de Vionnet should see their
friend first; but now that this passage had taken place he would
present himself, and their friend wouldn't have long to wait.
Strether assumed, he became aware, on this reasoning, that the
interesting parties to the arrangement would have met betimes, and
that the more interesting of the two—as she was after all—would
have communicated to the other the issue of her appeal. Chad would
know without delay that his mother's messenger had been with her,
and, though it was perhaps not quite easy to see how she could
qualify what had occurred, he would at least have been sufficiently
advised to feel he could go on. The day, however, brought, early or
late, no word from him, and Strether felt, as a result of this,
that a change had practically come over their intercourse. It was
perhaps a premature judgement; or it only meant perhaps—how could
he tell?—that the wonderful pair he protected had taken up again
together the excursion he had accidentally checked. They might have
gone back to the country, and gone back but with a long breath
drawn; that indeed would best mark Chad's sense that reprobation
hadn't rewarded Madame de Vionnet's request for an interview. At
the end of the twenty-four hours, at the end of the forty-eight,
there was still no overture; so that Strether filled up the time,
as he had so often filled it before, by going to see Miss
Gostrey.

He proposed amusements to her; he felt expert now in proposing
amusements; and he had thus, for several days, an odd sense of
leading her about Paris, of driving her in the Bois, of showing her
the penny steamboats—those from which the breeze of the Seine was
to be best enjoyed—that might have belonged to a kindly uncle doing
the honours of the capital to an Intelligent niece from the
country. He found means even to take her to shops she didn't know,
or that she pretended she didn't; while she, on her side, was, like
the country maiden, all passive modest and grateful—going in fact
so far as to emulate rusticity in occasional fatigues and
bewilderments. Strether described these vague proceedings to
himself, described them even to her, as a happy interlude; the sign
of which was that the companions said for the time no further word
about the matter they had talked of to satiety. He proclaimed
satiety at the outset, and she quickly took the hint; as docile
both in this and in everything else as the intelligent obedient
niece. He told her as yet nothing of his late adventure—for as an
adventure it now ranked with him; he pushed the whole business
temporarily aside and found his interest in the fact of her
beautiful assent. She left questions unasked—she who for so long
had been all questions; she gave herself up to him with an
understanding of which mere mute gentleness might have seemed the
sufficient expression. She knew his sense of his situation had
taken still another step—of that he was quite aware; but she
conveyed that, whatever had thus happened for him, it was thrown
into the shade by what was happening for herself. This—though it
mightn't to a detached spirit have seemed much—was the major
interest, and she met it with a new directness of response,
measuring it from hour to hour with her grave hush of acceptance.
Touched as he had so often been by her before, he was, for his part
too, touched afresh; all the more that though he could be duly
aware of the principle of his own mood he couldn't be equally so of
the principle of hers. He knew, that is, in a manner—knew roughly
and resignedly—what he himself was hatching; whereas he had to take
the chance of what he called to himself Maria's calculations. It
was all he needed that she liked him enough for what they were
doing, and even should they do a good deal more would still like
him enough for that; the essential freshness of a relation so
simple was a cool bath to the soreness produced by other relations.
These others appeared to him now horribly complex; they bristled
with fine points, points all unimaginable beforehand, points that
pricked and drew blood; a fact that gave to an hour with his
present friend on a bateau-mouche, or in the afternoon shade of the
Champs Elysees, something of the innocent pleasure of handling
rounded ivory. His relation with Chad personally—from the moment he
had got his point of view—had been of the simplest; yet this also
struck him as bristling, after a third and a fourth blank day had
passed. It was as if at last however his care for such indications
had dropped; there came a fifth blank day and he ceased to enquire
or to heed.