The American (34 page)

“Je suis triste,”
said Valentin, with Gallic simplicity.

“You are sad, eh? Is it about the lady you said the other night that you adored and that you couldn’t marry?”

“Did I really say that? It seemed to me afterwards that the words had escaped me. Before Claire it was bad taste. But I felt gloomy as I spoke, and I feel gloomy still. Why did you ever introduce me to that girl?”

“Oh, it’s Noémie, is it? Lord deliver us! You don’t mean to say you are lovesick about her?”

“Lovesick, no; it’s not a grand passion. But the cold-blooded little demon sticks in my thoughts; she has bitten me with those even little teeth of hers; I feel as if I might turn rabid and do something crazy in consequence. It’s very low; it’s disgustingly low. She’s the most mercenary little jade
¹⁷
in Europe. Yet she really affects my peace of mind; she is always running in my head. It’s a striking contrast to your noble and virtuous attachment—a vile
contrast! It is rather pitiful that it should be the best I am able to do for myself at my present respectable age. I am a nice young man, eh,
en somme?
¹⁸
You can’t warrant
¹⁹
my future, as you do your own.”

“Drop that girl, short,” said Newman; “don’t go near her again, and your future will do. Come over to America and I will get you a place in a bank.”

“It is easy to say drop her,” said Valentin, with a light laugh. “You can’t drop a pretty woman like that. One must be polite, even with Noémie. Besides, I’ll not have her suppose I am afraid of her.”

“So, between politeness and vanity, you will get deeper into the mud? Keep them both for something better. Remember, too, that I didn’t want to introduce you to her; you insisted. I had a sort of uneasy feeling about it.”

“Oh, I don’t reproach you,” said Valentin. “Heaven forbid! I wouldn’t for the world have missed knowing her. She is really extraordinary. The way she has already spread her wings is amazing. I don’t know when a woman has amused me more. But excuse me,” he added in an instant; “she doesn’t amuse you, at second hand, and the subject is an impure one. Let us talk of something else.” Valentin introduced another topic, but within five minutes Newman observed that, by a bold transition, he had reverted to Mademoiselle Nioche, and was giving pictures of her manners and quoting specimens of her
mots.
²⁰
These were very witty, and, for a young woman who six months before had been painting the most artless madonnas, startlingly cynical. But at last, abruptly, he stopped, became thoughtful, and for some time afterwards said nothing. When he rose to go it was evident that his thoughts were still running upon Mademoiselle Nioche. “Yes, she’s a frightful little monster!” he said.

T
he next ten days were the happiest that Newman had ever known. He saw Madame de Cintré every day, and never saw either old Madame de Bellegarde or the elder of his prospective brothers-in-law. Madame de Cintré at last seemed to think it becoming to apologise for their never being present. “They are much taken up,” she said, “with doing the honours of Paris to Lord Deepmere.” There was a smile in her gravity as she made this declaration, and it deepened as she added: “He is our seventh cousin, you know, and blood is thicker than water. And then, he is so interesting!” And with this she laughed.

Newman met young Madame de Bellegarde two or three times, always roaming about with graceful vagueness, as if in search of an unattainable ideal of amusement. She always reminded him of a painted perfume-bottle with a crack in it; but he had grown to have a kindly feeling for her, based on the fact of her owing conjugal allegiance to Urbain de Bellegarde. He pitied M. de Bellegarde’s wife, especially since she was a silly, thirstily-smiling little brunette, with a suggestion of an unregulated heart. The small marquise sometimes looked at him with an intensity too marked not to be innocent, for coquetry is more finely shaded. She apparentl, wanted to ask him something or tell him something; he
wondered what it was. But he was shy of giving her an opportunity, because, if her communication bore upon the aridity of her matrimonial lot, he was at a loss to see how he could help her. He had a fancy, however, of her coming up to him some day and saying (after looking round behind her) with a little passionate hiss: “I know you detest my husband; let me have the pleasure of assuring you for once you are right. Pity a poor woman who is married to a clock-image in
papier-mâché!”
¹
Possessing, however, in default of a competent knowledge of the principles of etiquette, a very downright sense of the “meanness” of certain actions, it seemed to him to belong to his position to keep on his guard; he was not going to put it into the power of these people to say that in their house he had done anything unpleasant. As it was, Madame de Bellegarde used to give him news of the dress she meant to wear at his wedding, and which had not yet, in her creative imagination, in spite of many interviews with the tailor, resolved itself into its composite totality. “I told you pale blue bows on the sleeves, at the elbows,” she said. “But to-day I don’t see my blue bows at all. I don’t know what has become of them. Today I see pink—a tender pink. And then I pass through strange dull phases in which neither blue nor pink says anything to me. And yet I must have the bows.”

“Have them green or yellow,” said Newman.

“Malheureux!”
²
the little marquise would cry. “Green bows would break your marriage
³
—your children would be illegitimate!”

Madame de Cintré was calmly happy before the world, and Newman had the felicity of fancying that before him, when the world was absent, she was almost agitatedly happy. She said very tender things. “I take no pleasure in you. You never give me a chance to scold you, to correct you. I bargained for that; I expected to enjoy it. But you won’t do anything dreadful; you are dismally inoffensive. It is very stupid; there is no
excitement for me; I might as well be marrying someone else.”

“I am afraid it’s the worst I can do,” Newman would say in answer to this. “Kindly overlook the deficiency.” He assured her that he, at least, would never scold her; she was perfectly satisfactory. “If you only knew,” he said, “how exactly you are what I coveted! And I am beginning to understand why I coveted it; the having it makes all the difference that I expected. Never was a man so pleased with his good fortune. You have been holding your head for a week past just as I wanted my wife to hold hers. You say just the things I want her to say. You walk about the room just as I want her to walk. You have just the taste in dress that I want her to have. In short, you come up to the mark; and, I can tell you, my mark was high.”

These observations seemed to make Madame de Cintré rather grave. At last she said: “Depend upon it, I don’t come up to the mark; your mark is too high. I am not all that you suppose; I am a much smaller affair. She is a magnificent woman, your ideal. Pray, how did she come to such perfection?”

“She was never anything else,” Newman said.

“I really believe,” Madame de Cintré went on, “that she is better than my own ideal. Do you know that is a very handsome compliment? Well, sir, I will make her my own!”

Mrs. Tristram came to see her dear Claire after Newman had announced his engagement, and she told our hero the next day that his good fortune was simply absurd. “For the ridiculous part of it is,” she said, “that you are evidently going to be as happy as if you were marrying Miss Smith or Miss Thompson. I call it a brilliant match for you, but you get brilliancy without paying any tax upon it. Those things are usually a compromise, but here you have everything, and nothing crowds anything else out. You will be brilliantly happy
as well.” Newman thanked her for her pleasant encouraging way of saying things; no woman could encourage or discourage better. Tristram’s way of saying things was different; he had been taken by his wife to call upon Madame de Cintré, and he gave an account of the expedition.

“You don’t catch me giving an opinion on your countess this time,” he said; “I put my foot in it once. That’s a d—–d underhand thing to do, by the way—coming round to sound a fellow upon the woman you are going to marry. You deserve anything you get. Then of course you rush and tell her, and she takes care to make it pleasant for the poor spiteful wretch the first time he calls. I will do you the justice to say, however, that you don’t seem to have told Madame de Cintré; or, if you have, she’s uncommonly magnanimous. She was very nice; she was tremendously polite. She and Lizzie sat on the sofa, pressing each other’s hands and calling each other
chère belle
, and Madame de Cintré sent me with every third word a magnificent smile, as if to give me to understand that I too was a handsome dear. She quite made up for past neglect, I assure you; she was very pleasant and sociable. Only in an evil hour it came into her head to say that she must present us to her mother—her mother wished to know your friends. I didn’t want to know her mother, and I was on the point of telling Lizzie to go in alone and let me wait for her outside. But Lizzie, with her usual infernal ingenuity, guessed my purpose and reduced me by a glance of her eye. So they marched off arm-in-arm, and I followed as I could. We found the old lady in her armchair, twiddling her aristocratic thumbs. She looked at Lizzie from head to foot; but at that game Lizzie, to do her justice, was a match for her. My wife told her we were great friends of Mr. Newman. The marquise stared a moment, and then said: ‘Oh, Mr. Newman! My daughter has made up her mind to marry a Mr. Newman.’ Then Madame
de Cintré began to fondle Lizzie again, and said it was this dear lady that had planned the match and brought them together. ‘Oh, ‘tis you I have to thank for my American son-in-law,’ the old lady said to Mrs. Tristram. ‘It was a very clever thought of yours. Be sure of my gratitude.’ And then she began to look at me, and presently said: ‘Pray, are you engaged in some species of manufacture?’ I wanted to say that I manufactured broomsticks for old witches to ride on, but Lizzie got in ahead of me. ‘My husband, Madame la Marquise,’ she said, ‘belongs to that unfortunate class of persons who have no profession and no business, and do very little good in the world.’ To get her poke at the old woman she didn’t care where she shoved me. ‘Dear me,’ said the marquise, ‘we all have our duties.’ ‘I am sorry mine compel me to take leave of you,’ said Lizzie. And we bundled out again. But you have a mother-in-law, in all the force of the term.”

“Oh,” said Newman, “my mother-in-law desires nothing better than to let me alone.”

Betimes, on the evening of the 27th, he went to Madame de Bellegarde’s ball. The old house in the Rue de l’Université looked strangely brilliant. In the circle of light projected from the outer gate a detachment of the populace stood watching the carriages roll in; the court was illumined with flaring torches and the portico carpeted with crimson. When Newman arrived there were but a few people present. The marquise and her two daughters were at the top of the staircase, where the sallow old nymph in the angle peeped out from a bower of plants. Madame de Bellegarde, in purple and fine laces, looked like an old lady painted by Vandyke; Madame de Cintré was dressed in white. The old lady greeted Newman with majestic formality, and, looking round her, called several of the persons who were standing near. They were elderly gentlemen, of what Valentin de Bellegarde had designated as the high-nosed category;
two or three of them wore cordons and stars. They approached with measured alertness, and the marquise said that she wished to present them to Mr. Newman, who was going to marry her daughter. Then she introduced successively three dukes, three counts, and a baron. These gentlemen bowed and smiled most agreeably, and Newman indulged in a series of impartial hand shakes, accompanied by a “Happy to make your acquaintance, sir.” He looked at Madame de Cintré, but she was not looking at him. If his personal self-consciousness had been of a nature to make him constantly refer to her, as the critic before whom, in company, he played his part, he might have found it a flattering proof of her confidence that he never caught her eyes resting upon him. It is a reflection Newman did not make, but we may nevertheless risk it, that in spite of this circumstance she probably saw every movement of his little finger. Young Madame de Bellegarde was dressed in an audacious toilet of crimson crape, bestrewn with huge silver moons—thin crescents and full discs.

“You don’t say anything about my dress,” she said to Newman.

“I feel,” he answered, “as if I were looking at you through a telescope. It is very strange.”

“If it is strange it matches the occasion. But I am not a heavenly body.”

“I never saw the sky at midnight that particular shade of crimson,” said Newman.

“That is my originality; anyone could have chosen blue. My sister-in-law would have chosen a lovely shade of blue, with a dozen little delicate moons. But I think crimson is much more amusing. And I give my idea, which is moonshine.”

“Moonshine and bloodshed,” said Newman.