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

“You shouldn’t have listened to that, sir.”

“Perhaps not. But I did listen, and I don’t forget it. Now I want to know what it is they did.”

Mrs. Bread gave a soft moan. “And you have enticed me up into this strange place to tell you?”

“Don’t be alarmed,” said Newman. “I won’t say a word that shall be disagreeable to you. Tell me as it suits you, and when it suits you. Only remember that it was Mr. Valentin’s last wish that you should.”

“Did he say that?”

“He said it with his last breath—‘Tell Mrs. Bread I told you to ask her.’”

“Why didn’t he tell you himself?”

“It was too long a story for a dying man; he had no breath left in his body. He could only say that he wanted me to know—that, wronged as I was, it was my right to know.”

“But how will it help you, sir?” said Mrs. Bread.

“That’s for me to decide. Mr. Valentin believed it would, and that’s why he told me. Your name was almost the last word he spoke.”

Mrs. Bread was evidently awe-struck by this statement; she shook her clasped hands slowly up and down. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “if I take a great liberty. Is it the solemn truth you are speaking? I must ask you that; must I not, sir?”

“There’s no offense. It is the solemn truth; I solemnly swear it. Mr. Valentin himself would certainly have told me more if he had been able.”

“Oh, sir, if he knew more!”

“Don’t you suppose he did?”

“There’s no saying what he knew about anything,” said Mrs. Bread, with a mild head-shake. “He was so mightily clever. He could make you believe he knew things that he didn’t, and that he didn’t know others that he had better not have known.”

“I suspect he knew something about his brother that kept the marquis civil to him,” Newman propounded; “he made the marquis feel him. What he wanted now was to put me in his place; he wanted to give me a chance to make the marquis feel me.”

“Mercy on us!” cried the old waiting-woman, “how wicked we all are!”

“I don’t know,” said Newman; “some of us are wicked, certainly. I am very angry, I am very sore, and I am very bitter, but I don’t know that I am wicked. I have been cruelly injured. They have hurt me, and I want to hurt them. I don’t deny that; on the contrary, I tell you plainly that it is the use I want to make of your secret.”

Mrs. Bread seemed to hold her breath. “You want to publish them—you want to shame them?”

“I want to bring them down,—down, down, down! I want to turn the tables upon them—I want to mortify them as they mortified me. They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth! I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.”

This passionate sally, which Newman uttered with the greater fervor that it was the first time he had had a chance to say all this aloud, kindled two small sparks in Mrs. Bread’s fixed eyes. “I suppose you have a right to your anger, sir; but think of the dishonor you will draw down on Madame de Cintré.”

“Madame de Cintré is buried alive,” cried Newman. “What are honor or dishonor to her? The door of the tomb is at this moment closing behind her.”

“Yes, it’s most awful,” moaned Mrs. Bread.

“She has moved off, like her brother Valentin, to give me room to work. It’s as if it were done on purpose.”

“Surely,” said Mrs. Bread, apparently impressed by the ingenuity of this reflection. She was silent for some moments; then she added, “And would you bring my lady before the courts?”

“The courts care nothing for my lady,” Newman replied. “If she has committed a crime, she will be nothing for the courts but a wicked old woman.”

“And will they hang her, sir?”

“That depends upon what she has done.” And Newman eyed Mrs. Bread intently.

“It would break up the family most terribly, sir!”

“It’s time such a family should be broken up!” said Newman, with a laugh.

“And me at my age out of place, sir!” sighed Mrs. Bread.

“Oh, I will take care of you! You shall come and live with me. You shall be my housekeeper, or anything you like. I will pension you for life.”

“Dear, dear, sir, you think of everything.” And she seemed to fall a-brooding.

Newman watched her a while, and then he said suddenly. “Ah, Mrs. Bread, you are too fond of my lady!”

She looked at him as quickly. “I wouldn’t have you say that, sir. I don’t think it any part of my duty to be fond of my lady. I have served her faithfully this many a year; but if she were to die to-morrow, I believe, before Heaven I shouldn’t shed a tear for her.” Then, after a pause, “I have no reason to love her!” Mrs. Bread added. “The most she has done for me has been not to turn me out of the house.” Newman felt that decidedly his companion was more and more confidential—that if luxury is corrupting, Mrs. Bread’s conservative habits were already relaxed by the spiritual comfort of this preconcerted interview, in a remarkable locality, with a free-spoken millionaire. All his native shrewdness admonished him that his part was simply to let her take her time—let the charm of the occasion work. So he said nothing; he only looked at her kindly. Mrs. Bread sat nursing her lean elbows. “My lady once did me a great wrong,” she went on at last. “She has a terrible tongue when she is vexed. It was many a year ago, but I have never forgotten it. I have never mentioned it to a human creature; I have kept my grudge to myself. I dare say I have been wicked, but my grudge has grown old with me. It has grown good for nothing, too, I dare say; but it has lived along, as I have lived. It will die when I die,—not before!”

“And what is your grudge?” Newman asked.

Mrs. Bread dropped her eyes and hesitated. “If I were a foreigner, sir, I should make less of telling you; it comes harder to a decent Englishwoman. But I sometimes think I have picked up too many foreign ways. What I was telling you belongs to a time when I was much younger and very different looking to what I am now. I had a very high color, sir, if you can believe it, indeed I was a very smart lass. My lady was younger, too, and the late marquis was youngest of all—I mean in the way he went on, sir; he had a very high spirit; he was a magnificent man. He was fond of his pleasure, like most foreigners, and it must be owned that he sometimes went rather below him to take it. My lady was often jealous, and, if you’ll believe it, sir, she did me the honor to be jealous of me. One day I had a red ribbon in my cap, and my lady flew out at me and ordered me to take it off. She accused me of putting it on to make the marquis look at me. I don’t know that I was impertinent, but I spoke up like an honest girl and didn’t count my words. A red ribbon indeed! As if it was my ribbons the marquis looked at! My lady knew afterwards that I was perfectly respectable, but she never said a word to show that she believed it. But the marquis did!” Mrs. Bread presently added, “I took off my red ribbon and put it away in a drawer, where I have kept it to this day. It’s faded now, it’s a very pale pink; but there it lies. My grudge has faded, too; the red has all gone out of it; but it lies here yet.” And Mrs. Bread stroked her black satin bodice.

Newman listened with interest to this decent narrative, which seemed to have opened up the deeps of memory to his companion. Then, as she remained silent, and seemed to be losing herself in retrospective meditation upon her perfect respectability, he ventured upon a short cut to his goal. “So Madame de Bellegarde was jealous; I see. And M. de Bellegarde admired pretty women, without distinction of class. I suppose one mustn’t be hard upon him, for they probably didn’t all behave so properly as you. But years afterwards it could hardly have been jealousy that turned Madame de Bellegarde into a criminal.”

Mrs. Bread gave a weary sigh. “We are using dreadful words, sir, but I don’t care now. I see you have your idea, and I have no will of my own. My will was the will of my children, as I called them; but I have lost my children now. They are dead—I may say it of both of them; and what should I care for the living? What is anyone in the house to me now—what am I to them? My lady objects to me—she has objected to me these thirty years. I should have been glad to be something to young Madame de Bellegarde, though I never was nurse to the present marquis. When he was a baby I was too young; they wouldn’t trust me with him. But his wife told her own maid, Mamselle Clarisse, the opinion she had of me. Perhaps you would like to hear it, sir.”

“Oh, immensely,” said Newman.

“She said that if I would sit in her children’s schoolroom I should do very well for a penwiper! When things have come to that I don’t think I need stand upon ceremony.”

“Decidedly not,” said Newman. “Go on, Mrs. Bread.”

Mrs. Bread, however, relapsed again into troubled dumbness, and all Newman could do was to fold his arms and wait. But at last she appeared to have set her memories in order. “It was when the late marquis was an old man and his eldest son had been two years married. It was when the time came on for marrying Mademoiselle Claire; that’s the way they talk of it here, you know, sir. The marquis’s health was bad; he was very much broken down. My lady had picked out M. de Cintré, for no good reason that I could see. But there are reasons, I very well know, that are beyond me, and you must be high in the world to understand them. Old M. de Cintré was very high, and my lady thought him almost as good as herself; that’s saying a good deal. Mr. Urbain took sides with his mother, as he always did. The trouble, I believe, was that my lady would give very little money, and all the other gentlemen asked more. It was only M. de Cintré that was satisfied. The Lord willed it he should have that one soft spot; it was the only one he had. He may have been very grand in his birth, and he certainly was very grand in his bows and speeches; but that was all the grandeur he had. I think he was like what I have heard of comedians; not that I have ever seen one. But I know he painted his face. He might paint it all he would; he could never make me like it! The marquis couldn’t abide him, and declared that sooner than take such a husband as that Mademoiselle Claire should take none at all. He and my lady had a great scene; it came even to our ears in the servants’ hall. It was not their first quarrel, if the truth must be told. They were not a loving couple, but they didn’t