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

were on a bench against the wall. It was like a committee at the Corps Législatif. We were called up, one after the other, to testify. We spoke of you very handsomely. Madame de Bellegarde said that if she had not been told who you were, she would have taken you for a duke—an American duke, the Duke of California. I said that I could warrant you grateful for the smallest favors—modest, humble, unassuming. I was sure that you would know your own place, always, and never give us occasion to remind you of certain differences. After all, you couldn’t help it if you were not a duke. There were none in your country; but if there had been, it was certain that, smart and active as you are, you would have got the pick of the titles. At this point I was ordered to sit down, but I think I made an impression in your favor.”

M. de Bellegarde looked at his brother with dangerous coldness, and gave a smile as thin as the edge of a knife. Then he removed a spark of cigar-ash from the sleeve of his coat; he fixed his eyes for a while on the cornice of the room, and at last he inserted one of his white hands into the breast of his waistcoat. “I must apologize to you for the deplorable levity of my brother,” he said, “and I must notify you that this is probably not the last time that his want of tact will cause you serious embarrassment.”

“No, I confess I have no tact,” said Valentin. “Is your embarrassment really painful, Newman? The marquis will put you right again; his own touch is deliciously delicate.”

“Valentin, I am sorry to say,” the marquis continued, “has never possessed the tone, the manner, that belongs to a young man in his position. It has been a great affliction to his mother, who is very fond of the old traditions. But you must remember that he speaks for no one but himself.”

“Oh, I don’t mind him, sir,” said Newman, good-humoredly. “I know what he amounts to.”

“In the good old times,” said Valentin, “marquises and counts used to have their appointed fools and jesters, to crack jokes for them. Nowadays we see a great strapping democrat keeping a count about him to play the fool. It’s a good situation, but I certainly am very degenerate.”

M. de Bellegarde fixed his eyes for some time on the floor. “My mother informed me,” he said presently, “of the announcement that you made to her the other evening.”

“That I desired to marry your sister?” said Newman.

“That you wished to arrange a marriage,” said the marquis, slowly, “with my sister, the Comtesse de Cintré. The proposal was serious, and required, on my mother’s part, a great deal of reflection. She naturally took me into her counsels, and I gave my most zealous attention to the subject. There was a great deal to be considered; more than you appear to imagine. We have viewed the question on all its faces, we have weighed one thing against another. Our conclusion has been that we favor your suit. My mother has desired me to inform you of our decision. She will have the honor of saying a few words to you on the subject herself. Meanwhile, by us, the heads of the family, you are accepted.”

Newman got up and came nearer to the marquis. “You will do nothing to hinder me, and all you can to help me, eh?”

“I will recommend my sister to accept you.”

Newman passed his hand over his face, and pressed it for a moment upon his eyes. This promise had a great sound, and yet the pleasure he took in it was embittered by his having to stand there so and receive his passport from M. de Bellegarde. The idea of having this gentleman mixed up with his wooing and wedding was more and more disagreeable to him. But Newman had resolved to go through the mill, as he imagined it, and he would not cry out at the first turn of the wheel. He was silent a while, and then he said, with a certain dryness which Valentin told him afterwards had a very grand air, “I am much obliged to you.”

“I take note of the promise,” said Valentin, “I register the vow.”

M. de Bellegarde began to gaze at the cornice again; he apparently had something more to say. “I must do my mother the justice,” he resumed, “I must do myself the justice, to say that our decision was not easy. Such an arrangement was not what we had expected. The idea that my sister should marry a gentleman—ah—in business was something of a novelty.”

“So I told you, you know,” said Valentin raising his finger at Newman.

“The novelty has not quite worn away, I confess,” the marquis went on; “perhaps it never will, entirely. But possibly that is not altogether to be regretted,” and he gave his thin smile again. “It may be that the time has come when we should make some concession to novelty. There had been no novelties in our house for a great many years. I made the observation to my mother, and she did me the honor to admit that it was worthy of attention.”

“My dear brother,” interrupted Valentin, “is not your memory just here leading you the least bit astray? Our mother is, I may say, distinguished for her small respect of abstract reasoning. Are you very sure that she replied to your striking proposition in the gracious manner you describe? You know how terribly incisive she is sometimes. Didn’t she, rather, do you the honor to say, ‘A fiddlestick for your phrases! There are better reasons than that?’”

“Other reasons were discussed,” said the marquis, without looking at Valentin, but with an audible tremor in his voice; “some of them possibly were better. We are conservative, Mr. Newman, but we are not also bigots. We judged the matter liberally. We have no doubt that everything will be comfortable.”

Newman had stood listening to these remarks with his arms folded and his eyes fastened upon M. de Bellegarde, “Comfortable?” he said, with a sort of grim flatness of intonation. “Why shouldn’t we be comfortable? If you are not, it will be your own fault; I have everything to make me so.”

“My brother means that with the lapse of time you may get used to the change”—and Valentin paused, to light another cigarette.

“What change?” asked Newman in the same tone.

“Urbain,” said Valentin, very gravely, “I am afraid that Mr. Newman does not quite realize the change. We ought to insist upon that.”

“My brother goes too far,” said M. de Bellegarde. “It is his fatal want of tact again. It is my mother’s wish, and mine, that no such allusions should be made. Pray never make them yourself. We prefer to assume that the person accepted as the possible husband of my sister is one of ourselves, and that he should have no explanations to make. With a little discretion on both sides, everything, I think, will be easy. That is exactly what I wished to say—that we quite understand what we have undertaken, and that you may depend upon our adhering to our resolution.”

Valentin shook his hands in the air and then buried his face in them. “I have less tact than I might have, no doubt; but oh, my brother, if you knew what you yourself were saying!” And he went off into a long laugh.

M. de Bellegarde’s face flushed a little, but he held his head higher, as if to repudiate this concession to vulgar perturbability. “I am sure you understand me,” he said to Newman.

“Oh no, I don’t understand you at all,” said Newman. “But you needn’t mind that. I don’t care. In fact, I think I had better not understand you. I might not like it. That wouldn’t suit me at all, you know. I want to marry your sister, that’s all; to do it as quickly as possible, and to find fault with nothing. I don’t care how I do it. I am not marrying you, you know, sir. I have got my leave, and that is all I want.”

“You had better receive the last word from my mother,” said the marquis.

“Very good; I will go and get it,” said Newman; and he prepared to return to the drawing-room.

M. de Bellegarde made a motion for him to pass first, and when Newman had gone out he shut himself into the room with Valentin. Newman had been a trifle bewildered by the audacious irony of the younger brother, and he had not needed its aid to point the moral of M. de Bellegarde’s transcendent patronage. He had wit enough to appreciate the force of that civility which consists in calling your attention to the impertinences it spares you. But he had felt warmly the delicate sympathy with himself that underlay Valentin’s fraternal irreverence, and he was most unwilling that his friend should pay a tax upon it. He paused a moment in the corridor, after he had gone a few steps, expecting to hear the resonance of M. de Bellegarde’s displeasure; but he detected only a perfect stillness. The stillness itself seemed a trifle portentous; he reflected however that he had no right to stand listening, and he made his way back to the salon. In his absence several persons had come in. They were scattered about the room in groups, two or three of them having passed into a small boudoir, next to the drawing-room, which had now been lighted and opened. Old Madame de Bellegarde was in her place by the fire, talking to a very old gentleman in a wig and a profuse white neck cloth of the fashion of 1820. Madame de Cintré was bending a listening head to the historic confidences of an old lady who was presumably the wife of the old gentleman in the neckcloth, an old lady in a red satin dress and an ermine cape, who wore across her forehead a band with a topaz set in it. Young Madame de Bellegarde, when Newman came in, left some people among whom she was sitting, and took the place that she had occupied before dinner. Then she gave a little push to the puff that stood near her, and by a glance at Newman seemed to indicate that she had placed it in position for him. He went and took possession of it; the marquis’s wife amused and puzzled him.

“I know your secret,” she said, in her bad but charming English; “you need make no mystery of it. You wish to marry my sister-in-law. C’est un beau choix. A man like you ought to marry a tall, thin woman. You must know that I have spoken in your favor; you owe me a famous taper!”

“You have spoken to Madame de Cintré?” said Newman.

“Oh no, not that. You may think it strange, but my sister-in-law and I are not so intimate as that. No; I spoke to my husband and my mother-in-law; I said I was sure we could do what we chose with you.”

“I am much obliged to you,” said Newman, laughing; “but you can’t.”

“I know that very well; I didn’t believe a word of it. But I wanted you to come into the house; I thought we should be friends.”

“I am very sure of it,” said Newman.

“Don’t be too sure. If you like Madame de Cintré so much, perhaps you will not like me. We are as different as blue and pink. But you and I have something in common. I have come into this family by marriage; you want to come into it in the same way.”

“Oh no, I don’t!” interrupted Newman. “I only want to take Madame de Cintré out of it.”

“Well, to cast your nets you have to go into the water. Our positions are alike; we shall be able to compare notes. What do you think of my