The American (54 page)

One afternoon he had walked into Hyde Park, and was slowly threading his way through the human maze which edges the Drive. The stream of carriages was no less dense, and Newman, as usual, marvelled at the strange dingy figures which he saw taking the air in some of the stateliest vehicles. They reminded him of what he had read of eastern and southern countries, in which grotesque idols and fetiches were sometimes taken out of their temples and carried abroad in golden chariots to be displ yed to the multitude. He saw a great many pretty cheeks beneath high-plumed hats as he squeezed
his way through serried waves of crumpled muslin; and sitting on little chairs at the base of the great serious English trees, he observed a number of quiet-eyed maidens, who seemed only to remind him afresh that the magic of beauty had gone out of the world with Madame de Cintré: to say nothing of other damsels, whose eyes were not quiet, and who struck him still more as a satire on possible consolation. He had been walking for some time, when, directly in front of him, borne back by the summer breeze, he heard a few words uttered in that bright Parisian idiom from which his ears had begun to alienate themselves. The voice in which the words were spoken made them seem even more like a thing with which he had once been familiar, and as he bent his eyes it lent an identity to the commonplace elegance of the back hair and shoulders of a young lady walking in the same direction as himself. Mademoiselle Nioche, apparently, had come to seek a more rapid advancement in London, and another glance led Newman to suppose that she had found it. A gentleman was strolling beside her, lending a most attentive ear to her conversation and too entranced to open his lips. Newman did not hear his voice, but perceived that he presented the dorsal expression of a well-dressed Englishman. Mademoiselle Nioche was attracting attention: the ladies who passed her turned round to survey the Parisian perfection of her toilet. A great cataract of flounces rolled down from the young lady’s waist to Newman’s feet; he had to step aside to avoid treading upon them. He stepped aside, indeed, with a decision of movement which the occasion scarcely demanded; for even this imperfect glimpse of Miss Noémie had excited his displeasure. She seemed an odious blot upon the face of nature; he wanted to put her out of his sight. He thought of Valentin de Bellegarde, still green in the earth of his burial—his young life clipped by this flourishing impudence. The perfume of the young lady’s finery sickened him; he turned his
head and tried to deflect his course; but the pressure of the crowd kept him near her a few minutes longer, so that he heard what she was saying.

“Ah, I’m sure he will miss me,” she murmured. “It was very cruel in me to leave him; I am afraid you will think me a very heartless creature. He might perfectly well have come with us. I don’t think he is very well,” she added; “it seemed to me to-day that he was not very gay.”

Newman wondered whom she was talking about, but just then an opening among his neighbours enabled him to turn away, and he said to himself that she was probably paying a tribute to British propriety and playing at tender solicitude about her papa. Was that miserable old man still treading the path of vice in her train? Was he still giving her the benefit of his experience of affairs, and had he crossed the sea to serve as her interpreter? Newman walked some distance farther, and then began to retrace his steps, taking care not to traverse again the orbit of Mademoiselle Nioche. At last he looked for a chair under the trees, but he had some difficulty in finding an empty one. He was about to give up the search when he saw a gentleman rise from the seat he had been occupying, leaving Newman to take it without looking at his neighbours. He sat there for some time without heeding them; his attention was lost in the irritation and bitterness produced by his recent glimpse of Miss Noémie’s iniquitous vitality. But at the end of a quarter of an hour, dropping his eyes, he perceived a small pug-dog squatted upon the path near his feet—a diminutive but very perfect specimen of its interesting species. The pug was sniffing at the fashionable world, as it passed him, with his little black muzzle, and was kept from extending his investigation by a large blue ribbon attached to his collar with an enormous rosette, and held in the hand of a person seated next to Newman. To this person Newman transferred his attention, and
immediately perceived that he was the object of all that of his neighbour, who was staring up at him from a pair of little fixed white eyes. These eyes Newman instantly recognised; he had been sitting for the last quarter of an hour beside M. Nioche. He had vaguely felt that someone was staring at him. M. Nioche continued to stare; he appeared afraid to move, even to the extent of evading Newman’s glance.

“Dear me!” said Newman; “are you here, too” And he looked at his neighbour’s helplessness more grimly than he knew. M. Nioche had a new hat and a pair of kid gloves; his clothes, too, seemed to belong to a more recent antiquity than of yore. Over his arm was suspended a lady’s mantilla—a light and brilliant tissue, fringed with white lace—which had apparently been committed to his keeping; and the little dog’s blue ribbon was wound tightly round his hand. There was no expression of recognition in his face—or of anything indeed save a sort of feeble fascinated dread. Newman looked at the pug and the lace mantilla, and then he met the old man’s eyes again. “You know me, I see,” he pursued. “You might have spoken to me before.” M. Nioche still said nothing, but it seemed to Newman that his eyes began faintly to water. “I didn’t expect,” our hero went on, “to meet you so far from—from the Café de la Patrie.” The old man remained silent, but decidedly Newman had touched the source of tears. His neighbour sat staring, and Newman added: “What’s the matter, M. Nioche? You used to talk—to talk very prettily. Don’t you remember you even gave lessons in conversation?”

At this M. Nioche decided to change his attitude. He stooped and picked up the pug, lifted it to his face and wiped his eyes on its little soft back. “I am afraid to speak to you,” he presently said, looking over the puppy’s shoulder. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice me. I should have moved away, but I was afraid that if I moved you would notice me. So I sat very still.”

“I suspect you have a bad conscience, sir,” said Newman.

The old man put down the little dog and held it carefully in his lap. Then he shook his head, with his eyes still fixed upon his interlocutor. “No, Mr. Newman, I have a good conscience,” he murmured.

“Then why should you want to slink away from me?”

“Because—because you don’t understand my position.”

“Oh, I think you once explained it to me,” said Newman. “But it seems improved.”

“Improved!” exclaimed M. Nioche, under his breath. “Do you call this improvement?” And he glanced at the treasures in his arms.

“Why, you are on your travels,” Newman rejoined. “A visit to London in the season is certainly a sign of prosperity.”

M. Nioche, in answer to this cruel piece of irony, lifted the puppy up to his face again, peering at Newman with his small blank eye-holes. There was something almost imbecile in the movement, and Newman hardly knew whether he was taking refuge in a convenient affectation of unreason, or whether he had in fact paid for his dishonour by the loss of his wits. In the latter case, just now, he felt little more tenderly to the foolish old man than in the former. Responsible or not, he was equally an accomplice of his detestably mischievous daughter. Newman was going to leave him abruptly, when a ray of entreaty appeared to disengage itself from the old man’s misty gaze. “Are you going away?” he asked.

“Do you want me to stay?” said Newman.

“I should have left you—from consideration. But my dignity suffers at your leaving me—that way.”

“Have you got anything particular to say to me?”

M. Nioche looked round him to see that no one was listening, and then he said, very softly but distinctly, “I have
not
forgiven her!”

Newman gave a short laugh, but the old man seemed for the moment not to perceive it; he was gazing away, absently, at some metaphysical image of his implacability. “It doesn’t much matter whether you forgive her or not,” said Newman. “There are other people who won’t, I assure you.”

“What has she done?” M. Nioche softly questioned, turning round again. “I don’t know what she does, you know.”

“She has done a devilish mischief; it doesn’t matter what,” said Newman. “She’s a nuisance; she ought to be stopped.”

M. Nioche stealthily put out his hand and laid it very gently upon Newman’s arm. “Stopped, yes,” he whispered. “That’s it. Stopped short. She is running away—she must be stopped.” Then he paused a moment and looked round him. “I mean to stop her,” he went on. “I am only waiting for my chance.”

“I see,” said Newman, laughing briefly again. “She is running away and you are running after her. You have run a long distance!”

But M. Nioche stared insistently: “I shall stop her!” he softly repeated.

He had hardly spoken when the crowd in front of them separated, as if by the impulse to make way for an important personage. Presently, through the opening, advanced Mademoiselle Nioche, attended by the gentleman whom Newman had lately observed. His face being now presented to our hero, the latter recognised the irregular features, the hardly more regular complexion, and the amiable expression of Lord Deepmere. Noémie, on finding herself suddenly confronted with Newman, who, like M. Nioche, had risen from his seat, faltered for a barely perceptible instant. She gave him a little nod, as if she had seen him yesterday, and then, with a good-natured smile,
“Tiens
,
¹⁵
how we keep meeting!” she said. She looked consummately pretty, and the front of her dress was a wonderful work of art. She went up
to her father, stretching out her hands for the little dog, which he submissively placed in them, and she began to kiss it and murmur over it: “To think of leaving him all alone—what a wicked, abominable creature he must believe me! He has been very unwell,” she added, turning and affecting to explain to Newman, with a spark of infernal impudence, fine as a needle-point, in her eye. “I don’t think the English climate agrees with him.”

“It seems to agree wonderfully well with his mistress,’ said Newman.

“Do you mean me? I have never been better, thank you,” Miss Noémie declared. “But with
milord
,” and she gave a brilliant glance at her late companion, “how can one help being well?” She seated herself in the chair from which her father had risen, and began to arrange the little dog’s rosette.

Lord Deepmere carried off such embarrassment as might be incidental to this unexpected encounter with the inferior grace of a male and a Briton. He blushed a good deal, and greeted the object of his late momentary aspiration to rivalry in the favour of a person other than the mistress of the invalid pug with an awkward nod and a rapid ejaculation—an ejaculation to which Newman, who often found it hard to understand the speech of English people, was able to attach no meaning. Then the young man stood there, with his hand on his hip, and with a conscious grin, staring askance at Miss Noémie. Suddenly an idea seemed to strike him, and he said, turning to Newman, “Oh, you know her?”

“Yes,” said Newman, “I know her. I don’t believe you do.”

“Oh dear, yes, I do!” said Lord Deepmere, with another grin. “I knew her in Paris—by my poor cousin Bellegarde, you know. He knew her, poor fellow, didn’t he? It was she, you know, who was at the bottom of his affair. Awfully sad, wasn’t it?” continued the young man, talking off his embarrassment as his simple nature
permitted. “They got up some story about its being for the Pope; about the other man having said something against the Pope’s morals. They always do that, you know. They put it on the Pope because Bellegarde was once in the Zouaves. But it was about
her
morals—
she
was the Pope!” Lord Deepmere pursued, directing an eye illumined by this pleasantry toward Mademoiselle Nioche, who was bending gracefully over her lap-dog, apparently absorbed in conversation with it. “I daresay you think it rather odd that I should—ah—keep up the acquaintance,” the young man resumed; “but she couldn’t help it, you know, and Bellegarde was only my twentieth cousin. I daresay you think it’s ather cheeky, my showing with her in Hyde Park, out you see she isn’t known yet, and she’s in such very good form—–” And Lord Deepmere’s conclusion was lost in the attesting glance which he again directed toward the young lady.

Newman turned away; he was having more of her than he relished. M. Nioche had stepped aside on his daughter’s approach, and he stood there, within a very small compass, looking down hard at the ground. It had never yet, as between him and Newman, been so apposite to place on record the fact that he had not forgiven his daughter. As Newman was moving away he looked up and drew near to him, and Newman, seeing the old man had something particular to say, bent his head for an instant.

“You will see it some day in the papers,” murmured M. Nioche.

Our hero departed to hide his smile, and to this day, though the newspapers form his principal reading, his eyes have not been arrested by any paragraph forming a sequel to this announcement.