The American (22 page)

“There are a great many reasons why I should not marry,” she said, “more than I can explain to you. As for my happiness, I am very happy. Your offer seems strange to me, for more reasons also than I can say. Of course you have a perfect right to make it. But I cannot accept it—it is impossible. Please never speak of this matter again. If you cannot promise me this, I must ask you not to come back.”

“Why is it impossible?” Newman demanded. “You may think it is, at first, without its really being so. I didn’t expect you to be pleased at first, but I do believe that if you will think of it a good while, you may be satisfied.”

“I don’t know you,” said Madame de Cintré. “Think how little I know you.”

“Very little, of course, and therefore I don’t ask for your ultimatum on the spot. I only ask you not to say No, and to let me hope. I will wait as long as you desire. Meanwhile you can see more of me and know me better, look at me as a possible husband—as a candidate—and make up your mind.”

Something was going on, rapidly, in Madame de Cintré’s thoughts; she was weighing a question there, beneath Newman’s eyes, weighing it and deciding it. “From the moment I don’t very respectfully beg you to leave the house and never return,” she said, “I listen to you, I seem to give you hope. I
have
listened to you—against my judgment. It is because you are eloquent. If I had been told this morning that I should consent to consider you as a possible husband, I should have thought my informant a little crazy. I
am
listening to you, you see!” And she threw her hands out for a moment and let them drop with a gesture in which there was just the slightest expression of appealing weakness.

“Well, as far as saying goes, I have said everything,” said Newman. “I believe in you, without restriction, and I think all the good of you that it is possible to think of a human creature. I firmly believe that in marrying me you will be
safe.
As I said just now,” he went on with a smile, “I have no bad ways. I can
do
so much for you. And if you are afraid that I am not what you have been accustomed to, not refined and delicate and punctilious, you may easily carry that too far. I
am
delicate! You shall see!”

Madame de Cintré walked some distance away, and paused before a great plant, an azalea, which was flourishing in a porcelain tub before her window. She plucked off one of the flowers and, twisting it in her fingers, retraced her steps. Then she sat down in silence, and her attitude seemed to be a consent that Newman should say more.

“Why should you say it is impossible you should marry?” he continued. The only thing that could make it really impossible would be your being already married. Is it because you have been unhappy in marriage? That is all the more reason. Is it because your family exert a pressure upon you, interfere with you, annoy you? That is still another reason; you ought to be perfectly
free, and marriage will make you so. I don’t say anything against your family—understand that!” added Newman, with an eagerness which might have made a perspicacious observer smile. “Whatever way you feel toward them is the right way, and anything that you should wish me to do to make myself agreeable to them I will do as well as I know how. Depend upon that!”

Madame de Cintré rose again and came toward the fireplace, near which Newman was standing. The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed out of her face, and it was illuminated with something which, this time at least, Newman need not have been perplexed whether to attribute to habit or to intention, to art or to nature. She had the air of a woman who had stepped across the frontier of friendship and, looking round her, finds the region vast. A certain checked and controlled exaltation seemed mingled with the usual level radiance of her glance. “I will not refuse to see you again,” she said, “because much of what you have said has given me pleasure. But I will see you only on this condition: that you say nothing more in the same way for a long time.”

“For how long?”

“For six months. It must be a solemn promise.”

“Very well; I promise.”

“Good-bye, then,” she said, and extended her hand.

He held it a moment, as if he were going to say something more. But he only looked at her; then he took his departure.

That evening, on the Boulevard, he met Valentin de Bellegarde. After they had exchanged greetings, Newman told him that he had seen Madame de Cintré a few hours before.

“I know it,” said Bellegarde. “I dined in the Rue de l’Université.” And then, for some moments, both men were silent. Newman wished to ask Bellegarde what visible impression his visit had made, and the Count Valentin had a question of his own. Bellegarde spoke first.

“It’s none of my business, but what the deuce did you say to my sister?”

“I am willing to tell you,” said Newman, “that I made her an offer of marriage.”

“Already!” And the young man gave a whistle. “‘Time is money!’ Is that what you say in America? And Madame de Cintré?” he added, with an interrogative inflection.

“She did not accept my offer.”

“She couldn’t, you know, in that way.”

“But I’m to see her again,” said Newman.

“Oh the strangeness of woman!” exclaimed Bellegarde. Then he stopped, and held Newman off at arms’-length. “I look at you with respect!” he exclaimed. “You have achieved what we call a personal success! Immediately, now, I must present you to my brother.”

“Whenever you please!” said Newman.

N
ewman continued to see his friends the Tristrams with a good deal of frequency, though, if you had listened to Mrs. Tristram’s account of the matter, you would have supposed that they had been cynically repudiated for the sake of grander acquaintance. “We were all very well so long as we had no rivals—we were better than nothing. But now that you have become the fashion, and have your pick every day of three invitations to dinner, we are tossed into the corner. I am sure it is very good of you to come and see us once a month; I wonder you don’t send us your cards in an envelope. When you do, pray have them with black edges; it will be for the death of my last illusion.” It was in this incisive strain that Mrs. Tristram moralised over Newman’s so-called neglect, which was in reality a most exemplary constancy. Of course she was joking, but there was always something ironical in her jokes, as there was always something jocular in her gravity.

“I know no better proof that I have treated you very well,” Newman had said, “than the fact that you make so free with my character. Familiarity breeds contempt; I have made myself too cheap. If I had a little proper pride I would stay away awhile, and when you asked me to dinner say I was going to the Princess Borealska’s. But I have not any pride where my pleasure is concerned, and to keep you in the humour to see me—if you must
see me only to call me bad names—I will agree to anything you choose; I will admit that I am the biggest snob in Paris.” Newman, in fact, had declined an invitation personally given by the Princess Borealska, an inquiring
¹
Polish lady to whom he had been presented, on the ground that on that particular day he always dined at Mrs. Tristram’s; and it was only a tenderly perverse theory of his hostess of the Avenue d’Iéna that he was faithless to his early friendships. She needed the theory to explain a certain moral irritation by which she was often visited; though, if this explanation was unsound, a deeper analyst than I must give the right one. Having launched our hero upon the current which was bearing him so rapidly along, she appeared but half-pleased at its swiftness. She had succeeded too well; she had played her game too cleverly, and she wished to mix up the cards. Newman had told her, in due season, that her friend was “satisfactory.” The epithet was not romantic, but Mrs. Tristram had no difficulty in perceiving that, in essentials, the feeling which lay beneath it was. Indeed, the mild expansive brevity with which it was uttered, and a certain look, at once appealing and inscrutable, that issued from Newman’s half-closed eyes as he leaned his head against the back of his chair, seemed to her the most eloquent attestation of a mature sentiment that she had ever encountered. Newman was, according to the French phrase, only abounding in her own sense,
²
but his temperate raptures exerted a singular effect upon that ardour which she herself had so freely manifested a few months before. She now seemed inclined to take a purely critical view of Madame de Cintré, and wished to have it understood that she did not in the least answer for her being a compendium of all the virtues. “No woman was ever so good as that woman seems,” she said. “Remember what Shakespeare calls Desdemona: ‘a supersubtle Venetian.’
³
Madame de Cintré is a supersubtle Parisian. She is a charming woman, and she has five
hundred merits; but you had better keep that in mind.” Was Mrs. Tristram simply finding out that she was jealous of her dear friend on the other side of the Seine, and that in undertaking to provide Newman with an ideal wife she had counted too much on her own disinterestedness? We may be permitted to doubt it. The inconsistent little lady of the Avenue d’Iéna had an insuperable need of changing her place, intellectually. She had a lively imagination, and she was capable, at certain times, of imagining the direct reverse of her most cherished beliefs, with a vividness more intense than that of conviction. She got tired of thinking aright; but there was no serious harm in it, as she got equally tired of thinking wrong. In the midst of her mysterious perversities she had admirable flashes of justice. One of these occurred when Newman related to her that he had made a formal proposal to Madame de Cintré. He repeated in a few words what he had said, and in a great many what she had answered. Mrs. Tristram listened with extreme interest.

“But after all,” said Newman, “there is nothing to congratulate me upon. It is not a triumph.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Tristram; “it is a great triumph. It is a great triumph that she did not silence you at the first word, and request you never to speak to her again.”

“I don’t see that,” observed Newman.

“Of course you don’t; heaven forbid you should! When I told you to go your own way and do what came into your head, I had no idea you would go over the ground so fast. I never dreamed you would offer yourself after five or six morning-calls. As yet, what had you done to make her like you? You had simply sat—not very straight—and stared at her. But she does like you.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“No, that is proved. What will come of it remains to be seen. That you should propose to marry her, without
more ado, could never have come into her head. You can form very little idea of what passed through her mind as you spoke; if she ever really marries you, the affair will be characterised by the usual justice of all human things towards women. You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said, ‘Why not?’ to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto. When I think of it—when I think of Claire de Cintré and all that she represents, there seems to me something very fine in it When I recommended you to try your fortune with her I of course thought well of you, and in spite of your sins I think so still. But I confess I don’t see quite what you are and what you have done, to make such a woman do this sort of thing for you.”

“Oh, there is something very fine in it!” said Newman, with a laugh, repeating her words. He took an extreme satisfaction in hearing that there was something fine in it. He had not the least doubt of it himself, but he had already begun to value the world’s admiration of Madame de Cintré, as adding to the prospective glory of possession.

It was immediately after this conversation that Valentin de Bellegarde came to conduct his friend to the Rue de l’Université to present him to the other members of his family. “You are already introduced,” he said, “and you have begun to be talked about. My sister has mentioned your successive visits to my mother, and it was an accident that my mother was present at none of them. I have spoken of you as an American of immense wealth, and the best fellow in the world, who is looking for something very superior in the way of a wife.”

“Do you suppose,” asked Newman, “that Madame de Cintré has related to your mother the last conversation I had with her?”

“I am very certain that she has not; she will keep her own counsel. Meanwhile you must make your way with the rest of the family. Thus much is known about you; you have made a great fortune in trade; you are a little eccentric; and you frankly admire our dear Claire. My sister-in-law, whom you remember seeing in Madame de Cintré’s sitting-room, took, it appears, a fancy to you; she has described you as having
beaucoup de cachet.
⁴
My mother, therefore, is curious to see you.”

“She expects to laugh at me, eh?” said Newman.