The American (45 page)

“Madame de Cintré, don’t, don’t!” he said, “I beseech you! On my knees, if you like, I’ll beseech you.”

She laid her hand upon his arm, with a tender, pitying, almost reassuring gesture. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You have wrong ideas. It’s nothing horrible. It is only peace and safety. It is to be out of the world, where such troubles as this come to the innocent, to the best. And for life—that’s the blessing of it! They can’t begin again.”

Newman dropped into a chair and sat looking at her with a long inarticulate murmur. That this superb woman, in whom he had seen all human grac and household force, should turn from him and all the brightness that he offered her—him and his future and his fortune and his fidelity—to muffle herself in ascetic rags and entomb herself in a cell, was a confounding combination of the inexorable and the grotesque. As the image deepened before him the grotesque seemed to expand and overspread it; it was a reduction to the absurd of the trial to which he was subjected. “You—you a nun!” he
exclaimed; “you with your beauty defaced—you behind locks and bars! Never, never, if I can prevent it!” And he sprang to his feet with a violent laugh.

“You can’t prevent it,” said Madame de Cintré, “and it ought—a little—to satisfy you. Do you suppose I will go on living in the world, still beside you, and yet not with you? It is all arranged. Good-bye, good-bye.”

This time he took her hand, took it in both his own. “Forever?” he said. Her lips made an inaudible movement and his own uttered a deep imprecation. She closed her eyes, as if with the pain of hearing it; then he drew her towards him and clasped her to his breast. He kissed her white face; for an instant she resisted and for a moment she submitted; then, with force, she disengaged herself and hurried away over the long shining floor. The next moment the door closed behind her.

Newman made his way out as he could.

T
here is a pretty public walk at Poitiers, laid out upon the crest of the high hill around which the little city clusters, planted with thick trees, and looking down upon the fertile fields in which the old English princes fought for their right and held it.
¹
Newman paced up and down this quiet promenade for the greater part of the next day, and let his eyes wander over the historic prospect; but he would have been sadly at a loss to tell you afterwards whether the latter was made up of coal-fields or of vineyards. He was wholly given up to his grievance, of which reflection by no means diminished the weight. He feared that Madame de Cintré was irretrievably lost; and yet, as he would have said himself, he didn’t see his way clear to giving her up. He found it impossible to turn his back upon Fleurières and its inhabitants; it seemed to him that some germ of hope or reparation must lurk there somewhere, if he could only stretch his arm out far enough to pluck it. It was as if he had his hand on a door-knob and were closing his clenched fist upon it: he had thumped, he had called, he had pressed the door with his powerful knee, and shaken it with all his strength, and dead damning silence had answered him. And yet something held him there—something hardened the grasp of his fingers. Newman’s satisfaction had been too intense, his whole
plan too deliberate and mature, his prospect of happiness too rich and comprehensive, for this fine moral fabric
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to crumble at a stroke. The very foundation seemed fatally injured, and yet he felt a stubborn desire still to try to save the edifice. He was filled with a sorer sense of wrong than he had ever known, or than he had supposed it possible he should know. To accept his injury and walk away without looking behind him was a stretch of good-nature of which he found himself incapable. He looked behind him intently and continually, and what he saw there did not assuage his resentment. He saw himself trustful, generous, liberal, patient, easy, pocketing frequent irritation and furnishing unlimited modesty. To have eaten humble pie, to have been snubbed and patronised and satirised, and have consented to take it as one of the conditions of the bargain—to have done this, and done it all for nothing, surely gave one a right to protest. And to be turned off because one was a commercial person! As if he had ever talked or dreamt of the commercial since his connection with the Bellegardes began—as if he had made the least circumstance of the commercial—as if he would not have consented to confound the commercial fifty times a day, if it might have increased by a hair’s breadth the chance of the Bellegardes’ not playing him a trick! Granted that being commercial was fair ground for having a trick played upon one, how little they knew about the class so designated and its enterprising way of not standing upon trifles! It was in the light of his injury that the weight of Newman’s past endurance seemed so heavy; his actual irritation had not been so great, merged as it was in his vision of the cloudless blue that overarched his immediate wooing. But now his sense of outrage was deep, rancorous, and ever present; he felt that he was a good fellow wronged. As for Madame de Cintré’s conduct, it struck him with a kind of awe, and the fact that he was powerless to understand it or feel the reality of its motives only
deepened the force with which he had attached himself to her. He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the form in which her religious feelings had moulded themselves would have seemed to him on his own part a rather pretentious affectation of Protestant zeal. If such superb white flowers as that could bloom in Catholic soil, the soil was not insalubrious. But it was one thing to be a Catholic, and another to turn nun—on your hands! There was something lugubriously comical in the way Newman’s thoroughly contemporaneous optimism was confronted with this dusky old-world expedient. To see a woman made for him and for motherhood to his children juggled away in this tragic travesty—it was a thing to rub one’s eyes over, a nightmare, an illusion, a hoax. But the hours passed away without disproving the thing, and leaving him only the after-sense of the vehemence with which he had embraced Madame de Cintré. He remembered her words and her looks; he turned them over and tried to shake the mystery out of them, and to infuse them with an endurable meaning. What had she meant by her feeling being a kind of religion? It was the religion simply of the family laws, the religion of which her implacable little mother was the high-priestess. Twist the thing about as her generosity would, the one certain fact was that they had used force against her. Her generosity had tried to screen them, but Newman’s heart rose into his throat at the thought that they should go scot-free.

The twenty-four hours wore themselves away, and the next morning Newman sprang to his feet with the resolution to return to Fleurières and demand another interview with Madame de Bellegarde and her son. He lost no time in putting it into practice. As he rolled swiftly over the excellent road in the little calèche
³
furnished him at the inn at Poitiers, he drew forth, as it were, from the very safe place in his mind to which he
had consigned it, the last information given him by poor Valentin. Valentin had told him he could do something with it, and Newman thought it would be well to have it at hand. This was of course not the first time, lately, that Newman had given it his attention. It was information in the rough—it was dark and puzzling; but Newman was neither helpless nor afraid. Valentin had evidently meant to put him in possession of a powerful instrument, though he could not be said to have placed the handle very securely within his grasp. But if he had not really told him the secret, he had at least given him the clew to it—a clew of which that queer old Mrs. Bread held the other end. Mrs. Bread had always looked to Newman as if she knew secrets; and as he apparently enjoyed her esteem, he suspected she might be induced to share her knowledge with him. So long as there was only Mrs. Bread to deal with, he felt easy. As to what there was to find out, he had only one fear—that it might not be bad enough. Then, when the image of the marquise and her son rose before him again, standing side by side, the old woman’s hand in Urbain’s arm, and the same cold unsociable fixedness in the eyes of each, he cried out to himself that the fear was groundless. There was blood in the secret at the very least! He arrived at Fleurières almost in a state of elation; he had satisfied himself, logically, that in the presence of his threat of exposure they would, as he mentally phrased it, rattle down like unwound buckets.
⁴
He remembered indeed that he must first catch his hare—first ascertain what there was to expose; but after that, why shouldn’t his happiness be as good as new again? Mother and son would drop their lovely victim in terror, and take to hiding, and Madame de Cintré, left to herself, would surely come back to him. Give her a chance and she would rise to the surface, return to the light. How could she fail to perceive that his house would be much the most comfortable sort of convent?

Newman, as he had done before, left his conveyance at the inn and walked the short remaining distance to the château. When he reached the gate, however, a singular feeling took possession of him—a feeling which, strange as it may seem, had its source in its unfathomable good-nature. He stood there awhile, looking through the bars of the large time-stained face of the edifice, and wondering to what crime it was that the dark old house, with its flowery name, had given convenient occasion. It had given occasion, first and last, to tyrannies and sufferings enough, Newman said to himself; it was an evil-looking place to live in. Then, suddenly, came the reflection: What a horrible rubbish-heap of iniquity to fumble in! The attitude of inquisitor turned its ignoble face, and with the same movement Newman declared that the Bellegardes should have another chance. He would appeal once more directly to their sense of fairness, and not to their fear; and if they should be accessible to reason, he need know nothing worse about them than what he already knew. That was bad enough.

The gate-keeper let him in through the same stiff crevice as before, and he passed through the court and over the little rustic bridge on the moat. The door was opened before he had reached it, and, as if to put his clemency to rout with the suggestion of a richer opportunity, Mrs. Bread stood there awaiting him. Her face, as usual, looked as hopelessly blank as the tide-smoothed sea-sand, and her black garments seemed of an intenser sable. Newman had already learned that her strange inexpressiveness could be a vehicle for emotion, and he was not surprised at the muffled vivacity with which she whispered: “I thought you would try again, sir. I was looking out for you.”

“I am glad to see you,” said Newman; “I think you are my friend.”

Mrs. Bread looked at him opaquely. “I wish you well, sir; but it’s vain wishing now.”

“You know, then, how they have treated me?”

“Oh sir,” said Mrs. Bread dryly, “I know everything.”

Newman hesitated a moment. “Everything?”

Mrs. Bread gave him a glance somewhat more lucent. “I know at least too much, sir.”

“One can never know too much. I congratulate you. I have come to see Madame de Bellegarde and her son,” Newman added. “Are they at home? If they are not, I will wait.”

“My lady is always at home,” Mrs. Bread replied, “and the marquis is mostly with her.”

“Please then tell them—one or the other, or both—that I am here and that I desire to see them.”

Mrs. Bread hesitated. “May I take a great liberty, sir?”

“You have never taken a liberty but you have justified it,” said Newman, with diplomatic urbanity.

Mrs. Bread dropped her wrinkled eyelids as if she were curtsying; but the curtsy stopped there; the occasion was too grave. “You have come to plead with them again, sir? Perhaps you don’t know this—that Madame de Cintré returned this morning to Paris.”

“Ah, she’s gone!” And Newman, groaning, smote the pavement with his stick.

“She has gone straight to the convent—the Carmelites they call it. I see you know, sir. My lady and the marquis take it very ill. It was only last night she told them.”

“Ah, she had kept it back, then?” cried Newman. “Good, good! And they are very fierce?”

“They are not pleased,” said Mrs. Bread. “But they may well dislike it. They tell me it’s most dreadful, sir; of all the nuns in Christendom the Carmelites are the worst. You may say they are really not human, sir; they make you give up everything—forever. And to think of
her
there! If I was one that cried, sir, I could cry.”

Newman looked at her an instant. “We mustn’t cry,
Mrs. Bread; we must act. Go and call them!” And he made a movement to enter farther.

But Mrs. Bread gently checked him. “May I take another liberty? I am told you were with my dearest Mr. Valentin, in his last hours. If you would tell me a word about him! The poor count was my own boy, sir; for the first year of his life he was hardly out of my arms; I taught him to speak. And the count spoke so well, sir! He always spoke well to his poor old Bread. When he grew up and took his pleasure he always had a kind word for me. And to die in that wild way! They have a story that he fought with a wine merchant. I can’t believe that, sir! And was he in great pain?”