The American by Henry James (free e reader txt) 📕

remember what I say is at least very flattering. But in future,” added Mrs. Tristram, “pray forget all the wicked things and remember only the good ones. It will be easily done, and it will not fatigue your memory. But I forewarn you that if you trust my husband to pick out your rooms, you are in for something hideous.”

“Hideous, darling?” cried Tristram.

“To-day I must say nothing wicked; otherwise I should use stronger language.”

“What do you think she would say, Newman?” asked Tristram. “If she really tried, now? She can express displeasure, volubly, in two or three languages; that’s what it is to be intellectual. It gives her the start of me completely, for I can’t swear, for the life of me, except in English. When I get mad I have to fall back on our dear old mother tongue. There’s nothing like it, after all.”

Newman declared that he knew nothing about tables and chairs, and that he would accept, in the way of a lodging, with his eyes shut, anything that Tristram should offer him. This was partly veracity on our hero’s part, but it was also partly charity. He knew that to pry about and look at rooms, and make people open windows, and poke into sofas with his cane, and gossip with landladies, and ask who lived above and who below—he knew that this was of all pastimes the dearest to Tristram’s heart, and he felt the more disposed to put it in his way as he was conscious that, as regards his obliging friend, he had suffered the warmth of ancient good-fellowship somewhat to abate. Besides, he had no taste for upholstery; he had even no very exquisite sense of comfort or convenience. He had a relish for luxury and splendor, but it was satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort was to inhabit very large rooms, have a great many of them, and be conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical devices—half of which he should never have occasion to use. The apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person that everything was “handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was situated on the Boulevard Haussmann, on the first floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily, immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for three months in his drawing-room.

One day Mrs. Tristram told him that her beautiful friend, Madame de Cintré, had returned from the country; that she had met her three days before, coming out of the Church of St. Sulpice; she herself having journeyed to that distant quarter in quest of an obscure lace-mender, of whose skill she had heard high praise.

“And how were those eyes?” Newman asked.

“Those eyes were red with weeping, if you please!” said Mrs. Tristram. “She had been to confession.”

“It doesn’t tally with your account of her,” said Newman, “that she should have sins to confess.”

“They were not sins; they were sufferings.”

“How do you know that?”

“She asked me to come and see her; I went this morning.”

“And what does she suffer from?”

“I didn’t ask her. With her, somehow, one is very discreet. But I guessed, easily enough. She suffers from her wicked old mother and her Grand Turk of a brother. They persecute her. But I can almost forgive them, because, as I told you, she is a saint, and a persecution is all that she needs to bring out her saintliness and make her perfect.”

“That’s a comfortable theory for her. I hope you will never impart it to the old folks. Why does she let them bully her? Is she not her own mistress?”

“Legally, yes, I suppose; but morally, no. In France you must never say nay to your mother, whatever she requires of you. She may be the most abominable old woman in the world, and make your life a purgatory; but, after all, she is ma mère, and you have no right to judge her. You have simply to obey. The thing has a fine side to it. Madame de Cintré bows her head and folds her wings.”

“Can’t she at least make her brother leave off?”

“Her brother is the chef de la famille, as they say; he is the head of the clan. With those people the family is everything; you must act, not for your own pleasure, but for the advantage of the family.”

“I wonder what my family would like me to do!” exclaimed Tristram.

“I wish you had one!” said his wife.

“But what do they want to get out of that poor lady?” Newman asked.

“Another marriage. They are not rich, and they want to bring more money into the family.”

“There’s your chance, my boy!” said Tristram.

“And Madame de Cintré objects,” Newman continued.

“She has been sold once; she naturally objects to being sold again. It appears that the first time they made rather a poor bargain; M. de Cintré left a scanty property.”

“And to whom do they want to marry her now?”

“I thought it best not to ask; but you may be sure it is to some horrid old nabob, or to some dissipated little duke.”

“There’s Mrs. Tristram, as large as life!” cried her husband. “Observe the richness of her imagination. She has not a single question—it’s vulgar to ask questions—and yet she knows everything. She has the history of Madame de Cintré’s marriage at her fingers’ ends. She has seen the lovely Claire on her knees, with loosened tresses and streaming eyes, and the rest of them standing over her with spikes and goads and red-hot irons, ready to come down on her if she refuses the tipsy duke. The simple truth is that they made a fuss about her milliner’s bill or refused her an opera-box.”

Newman looked from Tristram to his wife with a certain mistrust in each direction. “Do you really mean,” he asked of Mrs. Tristram, “that your friend is being forced into an unhappy marriage?”

“I think it extremely probable. Those people are very capable of that sort of thing.”

“It is like something in a play,” said Newman; “that dark old house over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it, and might be done again.”

“They have a still darker old house in the country Madame de Cintré tells me, and there, during the summer this scheme must have been hatched.”

“Must have been; mind that!” said Tristram.

“After all,” suggested Newman, after a silence, “she may be in trouble about something else.”

“If it is something else, then it is something worse,” said Mrs. Tristram, with rich decision.

Newman was silent a while, and seemed lost in meditation. “Is it possible,” he asked at last, “that they do that sort of thing over here? that helpless women are bullied into marrying men they hate?”

“Helpless women, all over the world, have a hard time of it,” said Mrs. Tristram. “There is plenty of bullying everywhere.”

“A great deal of that kind of thing goes on in New York,” said Tristram. “Girls are bullied or coaxed or bribed, or all three together, into marrying nasty fellows. There is no end of that always going on in the Fifth Avenue, and other bad things besides. The Mysteries of the Fifth Avenue! Someone ought to show them up.”

“I don’t believe it!” said Newman, very gravely. “I don’t believe that, in America, girls are ever subjected to compulsion. I don’t believe there have been a dozen cases of it since the country began.”

“Listen to the voice of the spread eagle!” cried Tristram.

“The spread eagle ought to use his wings,” said Mrs. Tristram. “Fly to the rescue of Madame de Cintré!”

“To her rescue?”

“Pounce down, seize her in your talons, and carry her off. Marry her yourself.”

Newman, for some moments, answered nothing; but presently, “I should suppose she had heard enough of marrying,” he said. “The kindest way to treat her would be to admire her, and yet never to speak of it. But that sort of thing is infamous,” he added; “it makes me feel savage to hear of it.”

He heard of it, however, more than once afterward. Mrs. Tristram again saw Madame de Cintré, and again found her looking very sad. But on these occasions there had been no tears; her beautiful eyes were clear and still. “She is cold, calm, and hopeless,” Mrs. Tristram declared, and she added that on her mentioning that her friend Mr. Newman was again in Paris and was faithful in his desire to make Madame de Cintré’s acquaintance, this lovely woman had found a smile in her despair, and declared that she was sorry to have missed his visit in the spring and that she hoped he had not lost courage. “I told her something about you,” said Mrs. Tristram.

“That’s a comfort,” said Newman, placidly. “I like people to know about me.”

A few days after this, one dusky autumn afternoon, he went again to the Rue de l’Université. The early evening had closed in as he applied for admittance at the stoutly guarded Hôtel de Bellegarde. He was told that Madame de Cintré was at home; he crossed the court, entered the farther door, and was conducted through a vestibule, vast, dim, and cold, up a broad stone staircase with an ancient iron balustrade, to an apartment on the second floor. Announced and ushered in, he found himself in a sort of paneled boudoir, at one end of which a lady and gentleman were seated before the fire. The gentleman was smoking a cigarette; there was no light in the room save that of a couple of candles and the glow from the hearth. Both persons rose to welcome Newman, who, in the firelight, recognized Madame de Cintré. She gave him her hand with a smile which seemed in itself an illumination, and, pointing to her companion, said softly, “My brother.” The gentleman offered Newman a frank, friendly greeting, and our hero then perceived him to be the young man who had spoken to him in the court of the hotel on his former visit and who had struck him as a good fellow.

“Mrs. Tristram has spoken to me a great deal of you,” said Madame de Cintré gently, as she resumed her former place.

Newman, after he had seated himself, began to consider what, in truth, was his errand. He had an unusual, unexpected sense of having wandered into a strange corner of the world. He was not given, as a general thing, to anticipating danger, or forecasting disaster, and he had had no social tremors on this particular occasion. He was not timid and he was not impudent. He felt too kindly toward himself to be the one, and too good-naturedly toward the rest of the world to be the other. But his native shrewdness sometimes placed his ease of temper at its mercy; with every disposition to take things simply, it was obliged to perceive that some things were not so simple as others. He felt as one does in missing a step, in an ascent, where one expected to find it. This strange, pretty woman, sitting in fire-side talk with her brother, in the gray depths of her inhospitable-looking house—what had he to say to her? She seemed enveloped in a sort of fantastic privacy; on what grounds had he pulled away the curtain? For a moment he felt as if he had plunged into some medium as deep as the ocean, and as if he must exert himself to keep from sinking. Meanwhile he was looking