The American (10 page)

“She is perfect! I won’t say more than that. When you are praising a person to another who is to know her, it is bad policy to go into details. I won’t exaggerate. I simply recommend her. Among all women I have known she stands alone; she is of a different clay.”

“I should like to see her,” said Newman, simply.

“I will try to manage it. The only way will be to invite her to dinner. I have never invited her before, and I don’t know that she will come. Her old feudal countess
of a mother rules the family with an iron hand, and allows her to have no friends but of her own choosing, and to visit only in a certain sacred circle. But I can at least ask her.”

At this moment Mrs. Tristram was interrupted; a servant stepped out upon the balcony and announced that there were visitors in the drawing-room. When Newman’s hostess had gone in to receive her friends, Tom Tristram approached his guest.

“Don’t put your foot into
this
, my boy,” he said, puffing the last whiffs of his cigar. “There’s nothing in it!”

Newman looked askance at him, inquisitive. “You tell another story, eh?”

“I say simply that Madame de Cintré is a great white doll of a woman, who cultivates quiet haughtiness.”

“Ah, she’s haughty, eh?”

“She looks at you as if you were so much thin air, and cares for you about as much.”

“She is very proud, eh!”

“Proud? As proud as I’m humble.”

“And not good-looking?”

Tristram shrugged his shoulders: “It’s a kind of beauty you must be intellectual to understand. But I must go in and amuse the company.”

Some time elapsed before Newman followed his friends into the drawing-room. When he at last made his appearance there he remained but a short time, and during this period sat perfectly silent, listening to a lady to whom Mrs. Tristram had straightway introduced him and who chattered, without a pause, with the full force of an extraordinarily high-pitched voice. Newman gazed and attended. Presently he came to bid good-night to Mrs. Tristram.

“Who is that lady?” he asked.

“Miss Dora Finch. How do you like her?”

“She’s too noisy.”

“She is thought so bright! Certainly, you are fastidious,” said Mrs. Tristram.

Newman stood a moment, hesitating. Then at last, “Don’t forget about your friend,” he said; “Madame What’s-her-name? the proud beauty. Ask her to dinner, and give me good notice.” And with this he departed.

Some days later he came back; it was in the afternoon. He found Mrs. Tristram in her drawing-room; with her was a visitor, a woman young and pretty, dressed in white. The two ladies had risen and the visitor was apparently taking her leave. As Newman approached, he received from Mrs. Tristram a glance of the most vivid significance, which he was not immediately able to interpret.

“This is a good friend of ours,” she said, turning to her companion, “Mr. Christopher Newman. I have spoken of you to him and he has an extreme desire to make your acquaintance. If you had consented to come and dine, I should have offered him an opportunity.”

The stranger turned her face toward Newman, with a smile. He was not embarrassed, for his unconscious
sang-froid
¹⁹
was boundless; but as he became aware that this was the proud and beautiful Madame de Cintré, the loveliest woman in the world, the promised perfection, the proposed ideal, he made an instinctive movement to gather his wits together. Through the slight preoccupation that it produced he had a sense of a long, fair face, and of two eyes that were both brilliant and mild.

“I should have been most happy,” said Madame de Cintré. “Unfortunately, as I have been telling Mrs. Tristram, I go on Monday to the country.”

Newman had made a solemn bow. “I am very sorry,” he said.

“Paris is getting too warm,” Madame de Cintré added, taking her friend’s hand again in farewell.

Mrs. Tristram seemed to have formed a sudden and somewhat venturesome resolution, and she smiled more
intensely, as women do when they take such resolutions. “I want Mr. Newman to know you,” she said, dropping her head on one side and looking at Madame de Cintré’s bonnet ribbons.

Christopher Newman stood gravely silent, while his native penetration admonished him. Mrs. Tristram was determined to force her friend to address him a word of encouragement which should be more than one of the common formulas of politeness; and if she was prompted by charity, it was by the charity that begins at home. Madame de Cintré was her dearest Claire, and her especial admiration; but Madame de Cintré had found it impossible to dine with her, and Madame de Cintré should for once be forced gently to render tribute to Mrs. Tristram.

“It would give me great pleasure,” she said, looking at Mrs. Tristram.

“That’s a great deal,” cried the latter, “for Madame de Cintré to say!”

“I am very much obliged to you,” said Newman. “Mrs. Tristram can speak better for me than I can speak for myself.”

Madame de Cintré looked at him again, with the same soft brightness. “Are you to be long in Paris?” she asked.

“We shall keep him,” said Mrs. Tristram.

“But you are keeping
me!”
and Madame de Cintré shook her friend’s hand.

“A moment longer,” said Mrs. Tristram.

Madame de Cintré looked at Newman again; this time without her smile. Her eyes lingered a moment, “Will you come and see me?” she asked.

Mrs. Tristram kissed her. Newman expressed his thanks, and she took her leave. Her hostess went with her to the door, and left Newman alone a moment. Presently she returned, rubbing her hands. “It was a fortunate chance,” she said. “She had come to decline my invitation. You triumphed on the spot, making her ask you, at the end of three minutes, to her house.”

“It was you who triumphed,” said Newman. “You must not be too hard upon her.”

Mrs. Tristram stared. “What do you mean?”

“She did not strike me as so proud. I should say she was shy.”

“You are very discriminating. And what do you think of her face?”

“It’s handsome!” said Newman.

“I should think it was! Of course you will go and see her.”

“To-morrow!” cried Newman.

“No, not to-morrow; the next day. That will be Sunday; she leaves Paris on Monday. If you don’t see her, it will at least be a beginning.” And she gave him Madame de Cintré’s address.

He walked across the Seine, late in the summer afternoon, and made his way through those gray and silent streets of the Faubourg St. Germain, whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls of Eastern seraglios.
²⁰
Newman thought it a queer way for rich people to live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid façade, diffusing its brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality. The house to which he had been directed had a dark, dusty, painted portal, which swung open in answer to his ring. It admitted him into a wide, gravelled court, surrounded on three sides with closed windows, and with a doorway facing the street, approached by three steps and surmounted by a tin canopy. The place was all in the shade; it answered to Newman’s conception of a convent. The portress could not tell him whether Madame de Cintré was visible;
²¹
he would please to apply at the farther door. He crossed the court; a gentleman was sitting, bareheaded, on the steps of the portico, playing with a beautiful pointer. He rose as Newman approached, and, as he laid his hand upon the bell, said with a smile, in English, that he was afraid Newman would be kept waiting; the servants were
scattered; he himself had been ringing; he didn’t know what the deuce was in them. He was a young man; his English was excellent, and his smile very frank. Newman pronounced the name of Madame de Cintré.

“I think,” said the young man, “that my sister is visible. Come in, and if you will give me your card I will carry it to her myself.”

Newman had been accompanied on his present errand by a slight sentiment, I will not say of defiance—a readiness for aggression or defence, as they might prove needful—but of reflective good-humoured suspicion. He took from his pocket, while he stood on the portico, a card upon which, under his name, he had written the words “San Francisco,” and while he presented it he looked warily at his interlocutor. His glance was singularly reassuring; he liked the young man’s face; it strongly resembled that of Madame de Cintré. He was evidently her brother. The young man, on his side, had made a rapid inspection of Newman’s person. He had taken the card and was about to enter the house with it when another figure appeared on the threshold—an older man, of a fine presence, wearing evening dress. He looked hard at Newman, and Newman looked at him. “Madame de Cintré,” the younger man repeated, as an introduction of the visitor. The other took the card from his hand, read it in a rapid glance, looked again at Newman from head to foot, hesitated a moment, and then said, gravely, but urbanely, “Madame de Cintré is not at home.”

The younger man made a gesture, and then turning to Newman: “I am very sorry, sir,” he said.

Newman gave him a friendly nod, to show that he bore him no malice, and retraced his steps. At the porter’s lodge he stopped; the two men were still standing on the portico.

“Who is the gentleman with the dog?” he asked of the old woman who reappeared. He had begun to learn French.

“That is Monsieur le Comte.”

“And the other?”

“That is Monsieur le Marquis.”

“A marquis?” said Christopher in English, which the old woman fortunately did not understand. “Oh, then he’s not the butler!”

E
arly one morning, before Christopher Newman was dressed, a little old man was ushered into his apartment, followed by a youth in a blouse,
¹
bearing a picture in a brilliant frame. Newman, among the distractions of Paris, had forgotten M. Nioche and his accomplished daughter; but this was an effective reminder.

“I am afraid you had given me up, sir,” said the old man, after many apologies and salutations. “We have made you wait so many days. You accused us, perhaps, of inconstancy, of bad faith. But behold me at last! And behold also the pretty ‘Madonna.’ Place it on a chair, my friend, in a good light, so that monsieur may admire it.” And M. Nioche, addressing his companion, helped him to dispose the work of art.

It had been endued with a layer of varnish an inch thick, and its frame, of an elaborate pattern, was at least a foot wide. It glittered and twinkled in the morning light, and looked, to Newman’s eyes, wonderfully splendid and precious. It seemed to him a very happy purchase, and he felt rich in the possession of it. He stood looking at it complacently, while he proceeded with his toilet, and M. Nioche, who had dismissed his own attendant, hovered near, smiling and rubbing his hands.

“It has wonderful
finesse
“
²
he murmured, caressingly. “And here and there are marvellous touches; you
probably perceive them, sir. It attracted great attention on the Boulevard,
³
as we came along. And then a gradation of tones! That’s what it is to know how to paint. I don’t say it because I am her father, sir; but as one man of taste addressing another I cannot help observing that you have there an exquisite work. It is hard to produce such things and to have to part with them. If our means only allowed us the luxury of keeping it! I really may say, sir"—and M. Nioche gave a little feebly insinuating laugh—"I really may say that I envy you! You see,” he added in a moment, “we have taken the liberty of offering you a frame. It increases by a trifle the value of the work, and it will save you the annoyance—so great for a person of your delicacy—of going about to bargain at the shops.”

The language spoken by M. Nioche was a singular compound, which I shrink from the attempt to reproduce in its integrity. He had apparently once possessed a certain knowledge of English, and his accent was oddly tinged with the cockney ism of the British metropolis.
⁴
But his learning had grown rusty with disuse, and his vocabulary was defective and capricious. He had repaired it with large patches of French, with words anglicised by a process of his own, and with native idioms literally translated. The result, in the form in which he in all humility presented it, would be scarcely comprehensible to the reader, so that I have ventured to trim and sift it. Newman only half understood it, but it amused him, and the old man’s decent forlornness appealed to his democratic instincts. The assumption of a fatality in misery always irritated his strong good-nature—it was almost the only thing that did so; and he felt the impulse to wipe it out, as it were, with the sponge of his own prosperity. The papa of Mademoiselle Noémie, however, had apparently on this occasion been vigorously indoctrinated, and he showed a certain tremulous eagerness to cultivate unexpected opportunities.

“How much do I owe you, then, with the frame?” asked Newman.

“It will make in all three thousand francs,” said the old man, smiling agreeably, but folding his hands in instinctive suppliance.

“Can you give me a receipt?”