The American by Henry James (free e reader txt) đź“•
"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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At this M. Nioche decided to change his attitude. He stooped and picked up the pug, lifted it to his face and wiped his eyes on its little soft back. “I’m afraid to speak to you,” he presently said, looking over the puppy’s shoulder. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice me. I should have moved away, but I was afraid that if I moved you would notice me. So I sat very still.”
“I suspect you have a bad conscience, sir,” said Newman.
The old man put down the little dog and held it carefully in his lap. Then he shook his head, with his eyes still fixed upon his interlocutor. “No, Mr. Newman, I have a good conscience,” he murmured.
“Then why should you want to slink away from me?”
“Because—because you don’t understand my position.”
“Oh, I think you once explained it to me,” said Newman. “But it seems improved.”
“Improved!” exclaimed M. Nioche, under his breath. “Do you call this improvement?” And he glanced at the treasures in his arms.
“Why, you are on your travels,” Newman rejoined. “A visit to London in the season is certainly a sign of prosperity.”
M. Nioche, in answer to this cruel piece of irony, lifted the puppy up to his face again, peering at Newman with his small blank eye-holes. There was something almost imbecile in the movement, and Newman hardly knew whether he was taking refuge in a convenient affectation of unreason, or whether he had in fact paid for his dishonor by the loss of his wits. In the latter case, just now, he felt little more tenderly to the foolish old man than in the former. Responsible or not, he was equally an accomplice of his detestably mischievous daughter. Newman was going to leave him abruptly, when a ray of entreaty appeared to disengage itself from the old man’s misty gaze. “Are you going away?” he asked.
“Do you want me to stay?” said Newman.
“I should have left you—from consideration. But my dignity suffers at your leaving me—that way.”
“Have you got anything particular to say to me?”
M. Nioche looked around him to see that no one was listening, and then he said, very softly but distinctly, “I have not forgiven her!”
Newman gave a short laugh, but the old man seemed for the moment not to perceive it; he was gazing away, absently, at some metaphysical image of his implacability. “It doesn’t much matter whether you forgive her or not,” said Newman. “There are other people who won’t, I assure you.”
“What has she done?” M. Nioche softly questioned, turning round again. “I don’t know what she does, you know.”
“She has done a devilish mischief; it doesn’t matter what,” said Newman. “She’s a nuisance; she ought to be stopped.”
M. Nioche stealthily put out his hand and laid it very gently upon Newman’s arm. “Stopped, yes,” he whispered. “That’s it. Stopped short. She is running away—she must be stopped.” Then he paused a moment and looked round him. “I mean to stop her,” he went on. “I am only waiting for my chance.”
“I see,” said Newman, laughing briefly again. “She is running away and you are running after her. You have run a long distance!”
But M. Nioche stared insistently: “I shall stop her!” he softly repeated.
He had hardly spoken when the crowd in front of them separated, as if by the impulse to make way for an important personage. Presently, through the opening, advanced Mademoiselle Nioche, attended by the gentleman whom Newman had lately observed. His face being now presented to our hero, the latter recognized the irregular features, the hardly more regular complexion, and the amiable expression of Lord Deepmere. Noémie, on finding herself suddenly confronted with Newman, who, like M. Nioche, had risen from his seat, faltered for a barely perceptible instant. She gave him a little nod, as if she had seen him yesterday, and then, with a good-natured smile, “Tiens, how we keep meeting!” she said. She looked consummately pretty, and the front of her dress was a wonderful work of art. She went up to her father, stretching out her hands for the little dog, which he submissively placed in them, and she began to kiss it and murmur over it: “To think of leaving him all alone,—what a wicked, abominable creature he must believe me! He has been very unwell,” she added, turning and affecting to explain to Newman, with a spark of infernal impudence, fine as a needlepoint, in her eye. “I don’t think the English climate agrees with him.”
“It seems to agree wonderfully well with his mistress,” said Newman.
“Do you mean me? I have never been better, thank you,” Miss Noémie declared. “But with milord”—and she gave a brilliant glance at her late companion—“how can one help being well?” She seated herself in the chair from which her father had risen, and began to arrange the little dog’s rosette.
Lord Deepmere carried off such embarrassment as might be incidental to this unexpected encounter with the inferior grace of a male and a Briton. He blushed a good deal, and greeted the object of his late momentary aspiration to rivalry in the favor of a person other than the mistress of the invalid pug with an awkward nod and a rapid ejaculation—an ejaculation to which Newman, who often found it hard to understand the speech of English people, was able to attach no meaning. Then the young man stood there, with his hand on his hip, and with a conscious grin, staring askance at Miss Noémie. Suddenly an idea seemed to strike him, and he said, turning to Newman, “Oh, you know her?”
“Yes,” said Newman, “I know her. I don’t believe you do.”
“Oh dear, yes, I do!” said Lord Deepmere, with another grin. “I knew her in Paris—by my poor cousin Bellegarde, you know. He knew her, poor fellow, didn’t he? It was she, you know, who was at the bottom of his affair. Awfully sad, wasn’t it?” continued the young man, talking off his embarrassment as his simple nature permitted. “They got up some story about its being for the Pope; about the other man having said something against the Pope’s morals. They always do that, you know. They put it on the Pope because Bellegarde was once in the Zouaves. But it was about her morals—she was the Pope!” Lord Deepmere pursued, directing an eye illumined by this pleasantry toward Mademoiselle Nioche, who was bending gracefully over her lap-dog, apparently absorbed in conversation with it. “I dare say you think it rather odd that I should—ah—keep up the acquaintance,” the young man resumed; “but she couldn’t help it, you know, and Bellegarde was only my twentieth cousin. I dare say you think it’s rather cheeky, my showing with her in Hyde Park, but you see she isn’t known yet, and she’s in such very good form——” And Lord Deepmere’s conclusion was lost in the attesting glance which he again directed toward the young lady.
Newman turned away; he was having more of her than he relished. M. Nioche had stepped aside on his daughter’s approach, and he stood there, within a very small compass, looking down hard at the ground. It had never yet, as between him and Newman, been so apposite to place on record the fact that he had not forgiven his daughter. As Newman was moving away he looked up and drew near to him, and Newman, seeing the old man had something particular to say, bent his head for an instant.
“You will see it some day in the papers,” murmured M. Nioche.
Our hero departed to hide his smile, and to this day, though the newspapers form his principal reading, his eyes have not been arrested by any paragraph forming a sequel to this announcement.
CHAPTER XXVI
In that uninitiated observation of the great spectacle of English life upon which I have touched, it might be supposed that Newman passed a great many dull days. But the dullness of his days pleased him; his melancholy, which was settling into a secondary stage, like a healing wound, had in it a certain acrid, palatable sweetness. He had company in his thoughts, and for the present he wanted no other. He had no desire to make acquaintances, and he left untouched a couple of notes of introduction which had been sent him by Tom Tristram. He thought a great deal of Madame de Cintré—sometimes with a dogged tranquillity which might have seemed, for a quarter of an hour at a time, a near neighbor to forgetfulness. He lived over again the happiest hours he had known—that silver chain of numbered days in which his afternoon visits, tending sensibly to the ideal result, had subtilized his good humor to a sort of spiritual intoxication. He came back to reality, after such reveries, with a somewhat muffled shock; he had begun to feel the need of accepting the unchangeable. At other times the reality became an infamy again and the unchangeable an imposture, and he gave himself up to his angry restlessness till he was weary. But on the whole he fell into a rather reflective mood. Without in the least intending it or knowing it, he attempted to read the moral of his strange misadventure. He asked himself, in his quieter hours, whether perhaps, after all, he was more commercial than was pleasant. We know that it was in obedience to a strong reaction against questions exclusively commercial that he had come out to pick up æsthetic entertainment in Europe; it may therefore be understood that he was able to conceive that a man might be too commercial. He was very willing to grant it, but the concession, as to his own case, was not made with any very oppressive sense of shame. If he had been too commercial, he was ready to forget it, for in being so he had done no man any wrong that might not be as easily forgotten. He reflected with sober placidity that at least there were no monuments of his “meanness” scattered about the world. If there was any reason in the nature of things why his connection with business should have cast a shadow upon a connection—even a connection broken—with a woman justly proud, he was willing to sponge it out of his life forever. The thing seemed a possibility; he could not feel it, doubtless, as keenly as some people, and it hardly seemed worth while to flap his wings very hard to rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to, here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there sometimes played a shadowy imagery. He had a fancy of carrying out his life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintré had been left to him—of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked. In this, certainly, there was no sacrifice;
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