The American

Madame de Bellegarde was silent again, and then she broke her silence. Her self-possession continued to be extraordinary. “I needn’t ask you who has been your accomplice. Mrs. Bread told me that you had purchased her services.”

“Don’t accuse Mrs. Bread of venality,” said Newman. “She has kept your secret all these years. She has given you a long respite. It was beneath her eyes your husband wrote that paper; he put it into her hands with a solemn injunction that she was to make it public. She was too good-hearted to make use of it.”

The old lady appeared for an instant to hesitate, and then, “She was my husband’s mistress,” she said, softly. This was the only concession to self-defense that she condescended to make.

“I doubt that,” said Newman.

Madame de Bellegarde got up from her bench. “It was not to your opinions I undertook to listen, and if you have nothing left but them to tell me I think this remarkable interview may terminate.” And turning to the marquis she took his arm again. “My son,” she said, “say something!”

M. de Bellegarde looked down at his mother, passing his hand over his forehead, and then, tenderly, caressingly, “What shall I say?” he asked.

“There is only one thing to say,” said the Marquise. “That it was really not worth while to have interrupted our walk.”

But the marquis thought he could improve this. “Your paper’s a forgery,” he said to Newman.

Newman shook his head a little, with a tranquil smile. “M. de Bellegarde,” he said, “your mother does better. She has done better all along, from the first of my knowing you. You’re a mighty plucky woman, madam,” he continued. “It’s a great pity you have made me your enemy. I should have been one of your greatest admirers.”

“Mon pauvre ami,” said Madame de Bellegarde to her son in French, and as if she had not heard these words, “you must take me immediately to my carriage.”

Newman stepped back and let them leave him; he watched them a moment and saw Madame Urbain, with her little girl, come out of a by-path to meet them. The old lady stooped and kissed her grandchild. “Damn it, she is plucky!” said Newman, and he walked home with a slight sense of being balked. She was so inexpressively defiant! But on reflection he decided that what he had witnessed was no real sense of security, still less a real innocence. It was only a very superior style of brazen assurance. “Wait till she reads the paper!” he said to himself; and he concluded that he should hear from her soon.

He heard sooner than he expected. The next morning, before midday, when he was about to give orders for his breakfast to be served, M. de Bellegarde’s card was brought to him. “She has read the paper and she has passed a bad night,” said Newman. He instantly admitted his visitor, who came in with the air of the ambassador of a great power meeting the delegate of a barbarous tribe whom an absurd accident had enabled for the moment to be abominably annoying. The ambassador, at all events, had passed a bad night, and his faultlessly careful toilet only threw into relief the frigid rancor in his eyes and the mottled tones of his refined complexion. He stood before Newman a moment, breathing quickly and softly, and shaking his forefinger curtly as his host pointed to a chair.

“What I have come to say is soon said,” he declared “and can only be said without ceremony.”

“I am good for as much or for as little as you desire,” said Newman.

The marquis looked round the room a moment, and then, “On what terms will you part with your scrap of paper?”

“On none!” And while Newman, with his head on one side and his hands behind him sounded the marquis’s turbid gaze with his own, he added, “Certainly, that is not worth sitting down about.”

M. de Bellegarde meditated a moment, as if he had not heard Newman’s refusal. “My mother and I, last evening,” he said, “talked over your story. You will be surprised to learn that we think your little document is—a”—and he held back his word a moment—“is genuine.”

“You forget that with you I am used to surprises!” exclaimed Newman, with a laugh.

“The very smallest amount of respect that we owe to my father’s memory,” the marquis continued, “makes us desire that he should not be held up to the world as the author of so—so infernal an attack upon the reputation of a wife whose only fault was that she had been submissive to accumulated injury.”

“Oh, I see,” said Newman. “It’s for your father’s sake.” And he laughed the laugh in which he indulged when he was most amused—a noiseless laugh, with his lips closed.

But M. de Bellegarde’s gravity held good. “There are a few of my father’s particular friends for whom the knowledge of so—so unfortunate an—inspiration—would be a real grief. Even say we firmly established by medical evidence the presumption of a mind disordered by fever, il en resterait quelque chose. At the best it would look ill in him. Very ill!”

“Don’t try medical evidence,” said Newman. “Don’t touch the doctors and they won’t touch you. I don’t mind your knowing that I have not written to them.”

Newman fancied that he saw signs in M. de Bellegarde’s discolored mask that this information was extremely pertinent. But it may have been merely fancy; for the marquis remained majestically argumentative. “For instance, Madame d’Outreville,” he said, “of whom you spoke yesterday. I can imagine nothing that would shock her more.”

“Oh, I am quite prepared to shock Madame d’Outreville, you know. That’s on the cards. I expect to shock a great many people.”

M. de Bellegarde examined for a moment the stitching on the back of one of his gloves. Then, without looking up, “We don’t offer you money,” he said. “That we supposed to be useless.”

Newman, turning away, took a few turns about the room and then came back. “What do you offer me? By what I can make out, the generosity is all to be on my side.”

The marquis dropped his arms at his side and held his head a little higher. “What we offer you is a chance—a chance that a gentleman should appreciate. A chance to abstain from inflicting a terrible blot upon the memory of a man who certainly had his faults, but who, personally, had done you no wrong.”

“There are two things to say to that,” said Newman. “The first is, as regards appreciating your ‘chance,’ that you don’t consider me a gentleman. That’s your great point you know. It’s a poor rule that won’t work both ways. The second is that—well, in a word, you are talking great nonsense!”

Newman, who in the midst of his bitterness had, as I have said, kept well before his eyes a certain ideal of saying nothing rude, was immediately somewhat regretfully conscious of the sharpness of these words. But he speedily observed that the marquis took them more quietly than might have been expected. M. de Bellegarde, like the stately ambassador that he was, continued the policy of ignoring what was disagreeable in his adversary’s replies. He gazed at the gilded arabesques on the opposite wall, and then presently transferred his glance to Newman, as if he too were a large grotesque in a rather vulgar system of chamber-decoration. “I suppose you know that as regards yourself it won’t do at all.”

“How do you mean it won’t do?”

“Why, of course you damn yourself. But I suppose that’s in your programme. You propose to throw mud at us; you believe, you hope, that some of it may stick. We know, of course, it can’t,” explained the marquis in a tone of conscious lucidity; “but you take the chance, and are willing at any rate to show that you yourself have dirty hands.”

“That’s a good comparison; at least half of it is,” said Newman. “I take the chance of something sticking. But as regards my hands, they are clean. I have taken the matter up with my finger-tips.”

M. de Bellegarde looked a moment into his hat. “All our friends are quite with us,” he said. “They would have done exactly as we have done.”

“I shall believe that when I hear them say it. Meanwhile I shall think better of human nature.”

The marquis looked into his hat again. “Madame de Cintré was extremely fond of her father. If she knew of the existence of the few written words of which you propose to make this scandalous use, she would demand of you proudly for his sake to give it up to her, and she would destroy it without reading it.”

“Very possibly,” Newman rejoined. “But she will not know. I was in that convent yesterday and I know what she is doing. Lord deliver us! You can guess whether it made me feel forgiving!”

M. de Bellegarde appeared to have nothing more to suggest; but he continued to stand there, rigid and elegant, as a man who believed that his mere personal presence had an argumentative value. Newman watched him, and, without yielding an inch on the main issue, felt an incongruously good-natured impulse to help him to retreat in good order.

“Your visit’s a failure, you see,” he said. “You offer too little.”

“Propose something yourself,” said the marquis.

“Give me back Madame de Cintré in the same state in which you took her from me.”

M. de Bellegarde threw back his head and his pale face flushed. “Never!” he said.

“You can’t!”

“We wouldn’t if we could! In the sentiment which led us to deprecate her marriage nothing is changed.”

“‘Deprecate’ is good!” cried Newman. “It was hardly worth while to come here only to tell me that you are not ashamed of yourselves. I could have guessed that!”

The marquis slowly walked toward the door, and Newman, following, opened it for him. “What you propose to do will be very disagreeable,” M. de Bellegarde said. “That is very evident. But it will be nothing more.”

“As I understand it,” Newman answered, “that will be quite enough!”

M. de Bellegarde stood for a moment looking on the ground, as if he were ransacking his ingenuity to see what else he could do to save his father’s reputation. Then, with a little cold sigh, he seemed to signify that he regretfully surrendered the late marquis to the penalty of his turpitude. He gave a hardly perceptible shrug, took his neat umbrella from the servant in the vestibule, and, with his gentlemanly walk, passed out. Newman stood listening till he heard the door close; then he slowly exclaimed, “Well, I ought to begin to be satisfied now!”

CHAPTER XXV

Newman called upon the comical duchess and found her at home. An old gentleman with a high nose and a gold-headed cane was just taking leave of her; he made Newman a protracted obeisance as he retired, and our hero supposed that he was one of the mysterious grandees with whom he had shaken hands at Madame de Bellegarde’s ball. The duchess, in her armchair, from which she did not move, with a great flower-pot on one side of her, a pile of pink-covered novels on the other, and a large piece of tapestry depending from her lap, presented an expansive and imposing front; but her aspect was in the highest degree gracious, and there was nothing in her manner to check the effusion of his confidence. She talked to him about flowers and books, getting launched with marvelous promptitude; about the theatres, about the peculiar institutions of his native country, about the humidity of Paris about the pretty complexions of the American ladies, about his impressions of France and his opinion of its female inhabitants. All this was a brilliant monologue on the part of the duchess, who, like many of her country-women, was a person of an affirmative rather than an interrogative cast of mind, who made mots and put them herself into circulation, and who was apt to offer you a present of a convenient little opinion, neatly enveloped in the gilt paper of a happy Gallicism. Newman had come to her with a grievance, but he found himself in an atmosphere in which apparently no cognizance was taken of grievance; an atmosphere into which the chill of discomfort had never penetrated, and which seemed exclusively made up of mild, sweet, stale intellectual perfumes. The feeling with which he had watched Madame d’Outreville at the treacherous festival of the Bellegardes came back to him; she struck him as a wonderful old lady in a comedy, particularly well up in her part. He observed before long that she asked him no questions about their common friends; she made no allusion to the circumstances under which he had been presented to her. She neither feigned ignorance of a change in these circumstances nor pretended to condole with him upon it; but she smiled and discoursed and compared the tender-tinted wools of her tapestry, as if the Bellegardes and their wickedness were not of this world. “She is fighting shy!” said Newman to himself; and, having made the observation, he was prompted to observe, farther, how the duchess would carry off her indifference. She did so in a masterly manner. There was not a gleam of disguised consciousness in those small, clear, demonstrative eyes which constituted her nearest claim to personal loveliness, there was not a symptom of apprehension that Newman would trench upon the ground she proposed to avoid. “Upon my word, she does it very well,” he tacitly commented. “They all hold together bravely, and, whether anyone else can trust them or not, they can certainly trust each other.”

Newman, at this juncture, fell to admiring the duchess for her fine manners. He felt, most accurately, that she was not a grain less urbane than she would have been if his marriage were still in prospect; but he felt also that she was not a particle more urbane. He had come, so reasoned the duchess—Heaven knew why he had come, after what had happened; and for the half hour, therefore, she would be charmante. But she would never see him again. Finding no ready-made opportunity to tell his story, Newman pondered these things more dispassionately than might have been expected; he stretched his legs, as usual, and even chuckled a little, appreciatively and noiselessly. And then as the duchess went on relating a mot with which her mother had snubbed the great Napoleon, it occurred to Newman that her evasion of a chapter of French history more interesting to himself might possibly be the result of an extreme consideration for his feelings. Perhaps it was delicacy on the duchess’s part—not policy. He was on the point of saying something himself, to make the chance which he had determined to give her still better, when the servant announced another visitor. The duchess, on hearing the name—it was that of an Italian prince—gave a little imperceptible pout, and said to Newman, rapidly: “I beg you to remain; I desire this visit to be short.” Newman said to himself, at this, that Madame d’Outreville intended, after all, that they should discuss the Bellegardes together.