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

said of you yet is that you are the loveliest of women.” And he seated himself before her again abruptly.

She flushed a little, but even her flush was pale. “That is because you think I will come back. But I will not come back. It is in that hope you have come here, I know; I am very sorry for you. I would do almost anything for you. To say that, after what I have done, seems simply impudent; but what can I say that will not seem impudent? To wrong you and apologize—that is easy enough. I should not have wronged you.” She stopped a moment, looking at him, and motioned him to let her go on. “I ought never to have listened to you at first; that was the wrong. No good could come of it. I felt it, and yet I listened; that was your fault. I liked you too much; I believed in you.”

“And don’t you believe in me now?”

“More than ever. But now it doesn’t matter. I have given you up.”

Newman gave a powerful thump with his clenched fist upon his knee. “Why, why, why?” he cried. “Give me a reason—a decent reason. You are not a child—you are not a minor, nor an idiot. You are not obliged to drop me because your mother told you to. Such a reason isn’t worthy of you.”

“I know that; it’s not worthy of me. But it’s the only one I have to give. After all,” said Madame de Cintré, throwing out her hands, “think me an idiot and forget me! That will be the simplest way.”

Newman got up and walked away with a crushing sense that his cause was lost, and yet with an equal inability to give up fighting. He went to one of the great windows, and looked out at the stiffly embanked river and the formal gardens which lay beyond it. When he turned round, Madame de Cintré had risen; she stood there silent and passive. “You are not frank,” said Newman; “you are not honest. Instead of saying that you are imbecile, you should say that other people are wicked. Your mother and your brother have been false and cruel; they have been so to me, and I am sure they have been so to you. Why do you try to shield them? Why do you sacrifice me to them? I’m not false; I’m not cruel. You don’t know what you give up; I can tell you that—you don’t. They bully you and plot about you; and I—I”—And he paused, holding out his hands. She turned away and began to leave him. “You told me the other day that you were afraid of your mother,” he said, following her. “What did you mean?”

Madame de Cintré shook her head. “I remember; I was sorry afterwards.”

“You were sorry when she came down and put on the thumbscrews. In God’s name what is it she does to you?”

“Nothing. Nothing that you can understand. And now that I have given you up, I must not complain of her to you.”

“That’s no reasoning!” cried Newman. “Complain of her, on the contrary. Tell me all about it, frankly and trustfully, as you ought, and we will talk it over so satisfactorily that you won’t give me up.”

Madame de Cintré looked down some moments, fixedly; and then, raising her eyes, she said, “One good at least has come of this: I have made you judge me more fairly. You thought of me in a way that did me great honor; I don’t know why you had taken it into your head. But it left me no loophole for escape—no chance to be the common, weak creature I am. It was not my fault; I warned you from the first. But I ought to have warned you more. I ought to have convinced you that I was doomed to disappoint you. But I was, in a way, too proud. You see what my superiority amounts to, I hope!” she went on, raising her voice with a tremor which even then and there Newman thought beautiful. “I am too proud to be honest, I am not too proud to be faithless. I am timid and cold and selfish. I am afraid of being uncomfortable.”

“And you call marrying me uncomfortable!” said Newman staring.

Madame de Cintré blushed a little and seemed to say that if begging his pardon in words was impudent, she might at least thus mutely express her perfect comprehension of his finding her conduct odious. “It is not marrying you; it is doing all that would go with it. It’s the rupture, the defiance, the insisting upon being happy in my own way. What right have I to be happy when—when”—And she paused.

“When what?” said Newman.

“When others have been most unhappy!”

“What others?” Newman asked. “What have you to do with any others but me? Besides you said just now that you wanted happiness, and that you should find it by obeying your mother. You contradict yourself.”

“Yes, I contradict myself; that shows you that I am not even intelligent.”

“You are laughing at me!” cried Newman. “You are mocking me!”

She looked at him intently, and an observer might have said that she was asking herself whether she might not most quickly end their common pain by confessing that she was mocking him. “No; I am not,” she presently said.

“Granting that you are not intelligent,” he went on, “that you are weak, that you are common, that you are nothing that I have believed you were—what I ask of you is not heroic effort, it is a very common effort. There is a great deal on my side to make it easy. The simple truth is that you don’t care enough about me to make it.”

“I am cold,” said Madame de Cintré, “I am as cold as that flowing river.”

Newman gave a great rap on the floor with his stick, and a long, grim laugh. “Good, good!” he cried. “You go altogether too far—you overshoot the mark. There isn’t a woman in the world as bad as you would make yourself out. I see your game; it’s what I said. You are blackening yourself to whiten others. You don’t want to give me up, at all; you like me—you like me. I know you do; you have shown it, and I have felt it. After that, you may be as cold as you please! They have bullied you, I say; they have tortured you. It’s an outrage, and I insist upon saving you from the extravagance of your own generosity. Would you chop off your hand if your mother requested it?”

Madame de Cintré looked a little frightened. “I spoke of my mother too blindly, the other day. I am my own mistress, by law and by her approval. She can do nothing to me; she has done nothing. She has never alluded to those hard words I used about her.”

“She has made you feel them, I’ll promise you!” said Newman.

“It’s my conscience that makes me feel them.”

“Your conscience seems to me to be rather mixed!” exclaimed Newman, passionately.

“It has been in great trouble, but now it is very clear,” said Madame de Cintré. “I don’t give you up for any worldly advantage or for any worldly happiness.”

“Oh, you don’t give me up for Lord Deepmere, I know,” said Newman. “I won’t pretend, even to provoke you, that I think that. But that’s what your mother and your brother wanted, and your mother, at that villainous ball of hers—I liked it at the time, but the very thought of it now makes me rabid—tried to push him on to make up to you.”

“Who told you this?” said Madame de Cintré softly.

“Not Valentin. I observed it. I guessed it. I didn’t know at the time that I was observing it, but it stuck in my memory. And afterwards, you recollect, I saw Lord Deepmere with you in the conservatory. You said then that you would tell me at another time what he had said to you.”

“That was before—before this,” said Madame de Cintré.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Newman; “and, besides, I think I know. He’s an honest little Englishman. He came and told you what your mother was up to—that she wanted him to supplant me; not being a commercial person. If he would make you an offer she would undertake to bring you over and give me the slip. Lord Deepmere isn’t very intellectual, so she had to spell it out to him. He said he admired you ‘no end,’ and that he wanted you to know it; but he didn’t like being mixed up with that sort of underhand work, and he came to you and told tales. That was about the amount of it, wasn’t it? And then you said you were perfectly happy.”

“I don’t see why we should talk of Lord Deepmere,” said Madame de Cintré. “It was not for that you came here. And about my mother, it doesn’t matter what you suspect and what you know. When once my mind has been made up, as it is now, I should not discuss these things. Discussing anything, now, is very idle. We must try and live each as we can. I believe you will be happy again; even, sometimes, when you think of me. When you do so, think this—that it was not easy, and that I did the best I could. I have things to reckon with that you don’t know. I mean I have feelings. I must do as they force me—I must, I must. They would haunt me otherwise,” she cried, with vehemence; “they would kill me!”

“I know what your feelings are: they are superstitions! They are the feeling that, after all, though I am a good fellow, I have been in business; the feeling that your mother’s looks are law and your brother’s words are gospel; that you all hang together, and that it’s a part of the everlasting proprieties that they should have a hand in everything you do. It makes my blood boil. That is cold; you are right. And what I feel here,” and Newman struck his heart and became more poetical than he knew, “is a glowing fire!”

A spectator less preoccupied than Madame de Cintré’s distracted wooer would have felt sure from the first that her appealing calm of manner was the result of violent effort, in spite of which the tide of agitation was rapidly rising. On these last words of Newman’s it overflowed, though at first she spoke low, for fear of her voice betraying her. “No. I was not right—I am not cold! I believe that if I am doing what seems so bad, it is not mere weakness and falseness. Mr. Newman, it’s like a religion. I can’t tell you—I can’t! It’s cruel of you to insist. I don’t see why I shouldn’t ask you to believe me—and pity me. It’s like a religion. There’s a curse upon the house; I don’t know what—I don’t know why—don’t ask me. We must all bear it. I have been too selfish; I wanted to escape from it. You offered me a great chance—besides my liking you. It seemed good to change completely, to break, to go away. And then I admired you. But I can’t—it has overtaken and come back to me.” Her self-control had now completely abandoned her, and her words were broken with long sobs. “Why do such dreadful things happen to us—why is my brother Valentin killed, like a beast in the midst of his youth and his gaiety and his brightness and all that we loved him for? Why are there things I can’t ask about—that I am afraid to know? Why are there places I can’t look at, sounds I can’t hear? Why is it given to me to choose, to decide, in a case so hard and so terrible as this? I am not meant for that—I am not made for boldness and defiance. I was