The American by Henry James (free e reader txt) 📕
"Ask him, then, if he would not like to learn French."
"To learn French?"
"To take lessons."
"To take lessons, my daughter? From thee?"
"From you!"
"From me, my child? How should I give lessons?"
"Pas de raisons! Ask him immediately!" said Mademoiselle Noemie, with soft brevity.
M. Nioche stood aghast, but under his daughter's eye he collected his wits, and, doing his best to assume an agreeable smile, he executed her commands. "Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful language?" he inquired, with an appealing quaver.
"To study French?" asked Newman, staring.
M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his shoulders. "A little conversation!"
"Conversation--that's it!" murmured Mademoiselle Noemie, who had caught the word. "The conversation of the best society."
"Our French conversation is famous, you know," M. Nioche ventured to continue. "It's a great talent."
"But
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During this speech, the longest that Newman had ever made, Madame de Cintré kept her gaze fixed upon him, and it expanded at the last into a sort of fascinated stare. When he ceased speaking she lowered her eyes and sat for some moments looking down and straight before her. Then she slowly rose to her feet, and a pair of exceptionally keen eyes would have perceived that she was trembling a little in the movement. She still looked extremely serious. “I am very much obliged to you for your offer,” she said. “It seems very strange, but I am glad you spoke without waiting any longer. It is better the subject should be dismissed. I appreciate all you say; you do me great honor. But I have decided not to marry.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” cried Newman, in a tone absolutely naïf from its pleading and caressing cadence. She had turned away, and it made her stop a moment with her back to him. “Think better of that. You are too young, too beautiful, too much made to be happy and to make others happy. If you are afraid of losing your freedom, I can assure you that this freedom here, this life you now lead, is a dreary bondage to what I will offer you. You shall do things that I don’t think you have ever thought of. I will take you anywhere in the wide world that you propose. Are you unhappy? You give me a feeling that you are unhappy. You have no right to be, or to be made so. Let me come in and put an end to it.”
Madame de Cintré stood there a moment longer, looking away from him. If she was touched by the way he spoke, the thing was conceivable. His voice, always very mild and interrogative, gradually became as soft and as tenderly argumentative as if he had been talking to a much-loved child. He stood watching her, and she presently turned round again, but this time she did not look at him, and she spoke in a quietness in which there was a visible trace of effort.
“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 has stepped across the frontier of friendship and, looking around 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.
CHAPTER X
Newman 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 moralized 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 a while, 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 humor 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 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.”
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