The American (23 page)

“She never laughs. If she does not like you, don’t hope to purchase favour by being amusing. Take warning by me!

This conversation took place in the evening, and half an hour later Valentin ushered his companion into an apartment of the house of the Rue de l’Université into which he had not yet penetrated, the salon of the dowager Marquise de Bellegarde. It was a vast high room, with elaborate and ponderous mouldings, painted a whitish gray, along the upper portion of the walls and the ceiling; with a great deal of faded and carefully-repaired tapestry in the doorways and chair-backs; a Turkey carpet
⁵
in light colours, still soft and deep, in spite of great antiquity, on the floor; and portraits of each of Madame de Bellegarde’s children, at the age of ten, suspended against an old screen of red silk. The room was illumined, exactly enough for conversation, by half-a-dozen candles, placed in odd corners, at a great distance apart. In a deep armchair, near the fire, sat an old lady in black; at the other end of the room another person was seated at the piano, playing a very expressive waltz. In this latter person Newman recognised the young Marquise de Bellegarde.

Valentin presented his friend, and Newman walked
up to the old lady by the fire and shook hands with her. He received a rapid impression of a white, delicate, aged face, with a high forehead, a small mouth, and a pair of cold blue eyes which had kept much of the freshness of youth. Madame de Bellegarde looked hard at him, and returned his hand-shake with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of St. Dunstan’s. Her daughter-in-law stopped playing and gave him an agreeable smile. Newman sat down and looked about him, while Valentin went and kissed the hand of the young marquise.

“I ought to have seen you before,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You have paid several visits to my daughter.”

“Oh yes,” said Newman, smiling; “Madame de Cintré and I are old friends by this time.”

“You have gone fast,” said Madame de Bellegarde.

“Not so fast as I should like,” said Newman bravely.

“Oh, you are very ambitious,” answered the old lady.

“Yes, I confess I am,” said Newman, smiling.

Madame de Bellegarde looked at him with her cold fine eyes, and he returned her gaze, reflecting that she was a possible adversary and trying to take her measure. Their eyes remained in contact for some moments. Then Madame de Bellegarde looked away, and without smiling: “I am very ambitious, too,” she said.

Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable, inscrutable little woman. She resembled her daughter, and yet she was utterly unlike her. The colouring in Madame de Cintré was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary. But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an “Oh dear, no!” which probably had been thought to give
the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling
⁶
as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty.
⁷
Madame de Cintré’s face had, to Newman’s eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother’s white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines. “She is a woman of conventions and proprieties,” he said to himself as he looked at her; “her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it! She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees ‘This is genteel,’ or ‘This is improper,’ written on a milestone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose.” Madame de Bellegarde wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin, and she was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl.

“You are an American?” she said presently. “I have seen several Americans.”

“There are several in Paris,” said Newman jocosely.

“Oh, really?” said Madame de Bellegarde. “It was in England I saw these, or somewhere else; not in Paris. I think it must have been in the Pyrenees, many years ago. I am told your ladies are very pretty. One of these ladies was very pretty! such a wonderful complexion! She presented me a note of introduction from some one—I forget whom—and she sent with it a note of her own. I kept her letter a long time afterwards, it was so strangely expressed. I used to know some of the phrases by heart. But I have forgotten them now, it is so many years ago. Since then I have seen no more Americans. I think my daughter-in-law has; she is a great gad-about, she sees everyone.”

At this the younger lady came rustling forward,
pinching in a very slender waist, and casting idly preoccupied glances over the front of her dress, which was apparently designed for a ball. She was, in a singular way, at once ugly and pretty; she had protuberant eyes, and lips that were strangely red. She reminded Newman of his friend, Mademoiselle Nioche; this was what that much-obstructed young lady would have liked to be. Valentin de Bellegarde walked behind her at a distance, hopping about to keep off the far-spreading train of her dress.

“You ought to show more of your shoulders behind,” he said, very gravely. “You might as well wear a standing ruff
⁸
as such a dress as that.”

The young woman turned her back to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and glanced behind her, to verify Valentin’s assertion. The mirror descended low, and yet it reflected nothing but a large unclad flesh surface. The young marquise put her hands behind her and gave a downward pull to the waist of her dress. “Like that, you mean?” she asked.

“That is a little better,” said Bellegarde, in the same tone, “but it leaves a good deal to be desired.”

“Oh, I never go to extremes,” said his sister-in-law. And then, turning to Madame de Bellegarde: “What were you calling me just now, madame?”

“I called you a gad-about,” said the old lady. “But I might call you something else, too.”

“A gad-about? What an ugly word! What does it mean?”

“A very beautiful person,” Newman ventured to say, seeing that it was in French.
⁹

“That is a pretty compliment but a bad translation,” said the young marquise. And then, looking at him a moment: “Do you dance?”

“Not a step.”

“You are very wrong,” she said simply. And with another look at her back in the mirror she turned away. “Do you like Paris?” asked the old lady, who was
apparently wondering what was the proper way to talk to an American.

“Yes, rather,” said Newman. And then he added, with a friendly intonation: “Don’t you?”

“I can’t say I know it. I know my house—I know my friends—I don’t know Paris.”

“Oh, you lose a great deal,” said Newman sympathetically.

Madame de Bellegarde stared; it was presumably the first time she had been condoled with on her losses.

“I am content with what I have,” she said, with dignity.

Newman’s eyes, at this moment, were wandering round the room, which struck him as rather sad and shabby; passing from the high casements, with their small thickly-framed panes, to the sallow tints of two or three portraits in pastel, of the last century, which hung between them. He ought obviously to have answered that the contentment of his hostess was quite natural—she had a great deal; but the idea did not occur to him during the pause of some moments which followed.

“Well, my dear mother,” said Valentin, coming and leaning against the chimney-piece, “what do you think of my dear friend Newman? Is he not the excellent fellow I told you?”

“My acquaintance with Mr. Newman has not gone very far,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “I can as yet only appreciate his great politeness.”

“My mother is a great judge of these matters,” said Valentin to Newman. “If you have satisfied her, it is a triumph.”

“I hope I shall satisfy you, some day,” said Newman, looking at the old lady. “I have done nothing yet.”

“You must not listen to my son; he will bring you into trouble. He is a sad scatterbrain.”

“Oh, I like him—I like him,” said Newman genially.

“He amuses you, eh?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“Do you hear that, Valentin?” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You amuse Mr. Newman.”

“Perhaps we shall all come to that!” Valentin exclaimed.

“You must see my other son,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “He is much better than this one. But he will not amuse you.”

“I don’t know—I don’t know!” murmured Valentin reflectively. “But we shall very soon see. Here comes
Monsieur mon frère.
“
¹⁰

The door had just opened to give ingress to a gentleman who stepped forward and whose face Newman remembered. He had been the author of our hero’s discomfiture the first time he tried to present himself to Madame de Cintré. Valentin de Bellegarde went to meet his brother, looked at him a moment, and then, taking him by the arm, led him up to Newman.

“This is my excellent friend Mr. Newman,” he said very blandly. “You must know him.”

“I am delighted to know Mr. Newman,” said the marquis, with a low bow, but without offering his hand.

“He is the old woman at second-hand,” Newman said to himself, as he returned M. de Bellegarde’s greeting. And this was the starting-point of a speculative theory, in his mind, that the late marquis had been a very amiable foreigner, with an inclination to take life easily and a sense that it was difficult for the husband of the stilted little lady by the fire to do so. But if he had taken little comfort in his wife he had taken much in his two younger children, who were after his own heart, while Madame de Bellegarde had paired with her eldest-born.

“My brother has spoken to me of you,” said M. de Bellegarde; “and as you are also acquainted with my sister, it was time we should meet.” He turned to his mother and gallantly bent over her hand, touching it with his lips, and then he assumed an attitude before the
chimney-piece. With his long lean face, his high-bridged nose, and his small opaque eyes, he looked much like an Englishman. His whiskers were fair and glossy, and he had a large dimple, of unmistakable British origin, in the middle of his handsome chin. He was “distinguished” to the tips of his polished nails, and there was not a movement of his fine perpendicular person that was not noble and majestic. Newman had never yet been confronted with such an incarnation of the art of taking oneself seriously; he felt a sort of impulse to step backward, as you do to get a view of a great façade.

“Urbain,” said young Madame de Bellegarde, who had apparently been waiting for her husband to take her to her ball, “I call your attention to the fact that I am dressed.”

“That is a good idea,” murmured Valentin.

“I am at your orders, my dear friend,” said M. de Bellegarde. “Only, you must allow me first the pleasure of a little conversation with Mr. Newman.”

“Oh, if you are going to a party, don’t let me keep you,” objected Newman. “I am very sure we shall meet again. Indeed, if you would like to converse with me I will gladly name an hour.” He was eager to make it known that he would readily answer all questions and satisfy all exactions.

M. de Bellegarde stood in a well-balanced position before the fire, caressing one of his fair whiskers with one of his white hands, and looking at Newman, half askance, with eyes from which a particular ray of observation made its way through a general meaningless smile. “It is very kind of you to make such an offer,” he said. “If I am not mistaken, your occupations are such as to make your time precious. You are in—a—as we say,
dans les affaires.
”

“In business, you mean? Oh no, I have thrown business overboard for the present. I am ‘loafing,’ as
we
say. My time is quite my own.”

“Ah, you are taking a holiday,” rejoined M. de
Bellegarde. “‘Loafing.’ Yes, I have heard that expression.”

“Mr. Newman is American,” said Madame de Bellegarde.

“My brother is a great ethnologist,” said Valentin.

“An ethnologist?” said Newman. “Ah, you collect negroes’ skulls, and that sort of thing.”

The marquis looked hard at his brother, and began to caress his other whisker. Then, turning to Newman, with sustained urbanity: “You are travelling for your pleasure?” he asked.

“Oh, I am knocking about to pick up one thing and another. Of course I get a good deal of pleasure out of it.”

“What especially interests you?” inquired the marquis.

“Well, everything interests me,” said Newman. “I am not particular. Manufactures are what I care most about.”

“That has been your specialty?”

“I can’t say I have had any specialty. My specialty has been to make the largest possible fortune in the shortest possible time.” Newman made this last remark very deliberately; he wished to open the way, if it were necessary, to an authoritative statement of his means.

M. de Bellegarde laughed agreeably. “I hope you have succeeded,” he said.

“Yes, I have made a fortune in a reasonable time. I am not so old, you see.”

“Paris is a very good place to spend a fortune. I wish you great enjoyment of yours.” And M. de Bellegarde drew forth his gloves and began to put them on.

Newman for a few moments watched him sliding his white hands into the white kid, and as he did so his feelings took a singular turn. M. de Bellegarde’s good wishes seemed to descend out of the white expanse of his sublime serenity with the soft scattered movement of a shower of snow-flakes. Yet Newman was not irritated; he did not feel that he was being patronised; he was conscious of no especial impulse to introduce a discord
into so noble a harmony. Only he felt himself suddenly in personal contact with the forces with which his friend Valentin had told him that he would have to contend, and he became sensible of their intensity. He wished to make some answering manifestations, to stretch himself out at his own length, to sound a note at the uttermost end of
his
scale. It must be added that if this impulse was not vicious or malicious, it was by no means void of humorous expectancy. Newman was quite as ready to give play to that loosely-adjusted smile of his, if his hosts should happen to be shocked, as he was far from deliberately planning to shock them.