The American (17 page)

Newman had spoken with cheerful seriousness, but Madame de Bellegarde’s tone made him go on, after a meditative pause, with a certain light grimness of jocularity. “No, I lost money on wash-tubs, but I came out pretty square on leather.”

“I have made up my mind, after all,” said Madame de Bellegarde, “that the great point is—how do you call it?—to come out square. I am on my knees to money; I don’t deny it. If you have it, I ask no questions. For that I am a real democrat—like you, monsieur. Madame de Cintré is very proud; but I find that one gets much more pleasure in this sad life if one doesn’t look too close.”

“Just Heaven, dear madam, how you go at it,” said Count Valentin, lowering his voice.

“He’s a man one can speak to, I suppose, since my sister receives him,” the lady answered. “Besides, it’s very true; those are my ideas.”

“Ah, you call them ideas,” murmured the young man.

“But Mrs. Tristram told me you had been in the army—in your war,” said Madame de Cintré.

“Yes, but that is not business!” said Newman.

“Very true!” said M. de Bellegarde. “Otherwise perhaps I should not be penniless.”

“Is it true,” asked Newman in a moment, “that you are so proud? I had already heard it.”

Madame de Cintré smiled. “Do you find me so?”

“Oh,” said Newman, “I am no judge. If you are proud with me, you will have to tell me. Otherwise I shall not know it.”

Madame de Cintré began to laugh. “That would be pride in a sad position!” she said.

“It would be partly,” Newman went on, “because I shouldn’t want to know it. I want you to treat me well.”

Madame de Cintré, whose laugh had ceased, looked at him with her head half averted, as if she feared what he was going to say.

“Mrs. Tristram told you the literal truth,” he went on; “I want very much to know you. I didn’t come here simply to call to-day; I came in the hope that you might ask me to come again.”

“Oh, pray come often,” said Madame de Cintré.

“But will you be at home?” Newman insisted. Even to himself he seemed a trifle “pushing,” but he was, in truth, a trifle excited.

“I hope so!” said Madame de Cintré.

Newman got up. “Well, we shall see,” he said, smoothing his hat with his coat-cuff.

“Brother,” said Madame de Cintré, “invite Mr. Newman to come again.”

The Count Valentin looked at our hero from head to foot with his peculiar smile, in which impudence and urbanity seemed perplexingly commingled. “Are you a brave man?” he asked, eyeing him askance.

“Well, I hope so,” said Newman.

“I rather suspect so. In that case, come again.”

“Ah, what an invitation!” murmured Madame de Cintré, with something painful in her smile.

“Oh, I want Mr. Newman to come—particularly,” said the young man. “It will give me great pleasure. I shall be desolate if I miss one of his visits. But I maintain he must be brave. A stout heart, sir!” And he offered Newman his hand.

“I shall not come to see you; I shall come to see Madame de Cintré,” said Newman.

“You will need all the more courage.”

“Ah, Valentin!” said Madame de Cintré, appealingly.

“Decidedly,” cried Madame de Bellegarde, “I am the only person here capable of saying something polite! Come to see me; you will need no courage,” she said.

Newman gave a laugh which was not altogether an assent, and took his leave. Madame de Cintré did not take up her sister’s challenge to be gracious, but she looked with a certain troubled air at the retreating guest.

O
ne evening, very late, about a week after his visit to Madame de Cintré, Newman’s servant brought him a card. It was that of young M. de Bellegarde. When, a few moments later, he went to receive his visitor, he found him standing in the middle of his great gilded parlour and eyeing it from cornice to carpet. M. de Bellegarde’s face, it seemed to Newman, expressed a sense of lively entertainment. “What the devil is he laughing at now?” our hero asked himself. But he put the question without acrimony, for he felt that Madame de Cintré’s brother was a good fellow, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of good-fellowship they were destined to understand each other. Only, if there was anything to laugh at, he wished to have a glimpse of it too.

“To begin with,” said the young man, as he extended his hand, “have I come too late?”

“Too late for what?” asked Newman.

“To smoke a cigar with you.”

“You would have to come early to do that,” said Newman. “I don’t smoke.”

“Ah, you are a strong man!”

“But I keep cigars,” Newman added. “Sit down.”

“Surely, I may not smoke here,” said M. de Bellegarde.

“What is the matter? Is the room too small?”

“It is too large. It is like smoking in a ball-room, or a church.”

“That is what you were laughing at just now?” Newman asked; “the size of my room?”

“It is not size only,” replied M. de Bellegarde, “but splendour, and harmony, and beauty of detail. It was the smile of admiration.”

Newman looked at him a moment, and then, “So it
is
very ugly?” he inquired.

“Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent.”

“That is the same thing, I suppose,” said Newman. “Make yourself comfortable. Your coming to see me, I take it, is an act of friendship. You were not obliged to. Therefore, if anything around here amuses you, it will be all in a pleasant way. Laugh as loud as you please; I like to see my visitors cheerful. Only, I must make this request: that you explain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don’t want to lose anything, myself.”

M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity. He laid his hand on Newman’s sleeve and seemed on the point of saying something, but he suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair, and puffed at his cigar. At last, however, breaking silence, “Certainly,” he said, “my coming to see you is an act of friendship. Nevertheless I was in a measure obliged to do so. My sister asked me to come, and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was near you, and I observed lights in what I supposed were your rooms. It was not a ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show I was not performing a mere ceremony.”

“Well, here I am as large as life,” said Newman, extending his legs.

“I don’t know what you mean,” the young man went on, “by giving me unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is better to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that we may laugh together—or separately—that I have, I may say, sought
your acquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me!” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness of the man of the world, and, in spite of his excellent English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity. Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met him on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a “How-d’ye-do, Mosseer?” But there was something in his physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race.
¹
He was below the middle height, and robust and agile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and if you greeted him with a “How well you are looking!” he started and turned pale. In your
well
he read a grosser monosyllable.
²
He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a moustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance.
³
He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his clear bright eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he smiled. The great point in his face was that it was intensely alive—frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. The look of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul: at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud silver sound. There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was not economising his consciousness. He was not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre, and he
was keeping open house. When he smiled, it was like the movement of a person who in emptying a cup turns it upside down: he gave you the last drop of his jollity. He inspired Newman with something of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and clever tricks—make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the back of their mouths.

“My sister told me,” M. de Bellegarde continued, “that I ought to come and remove the impression that I had taken such great pains to produce upon you; the impression that I am a lunatic. Did it strike you that I behaved very oddly the other day?”

“Rather so,” said Newman.

“So my sister tells me.” And M. de Bellegarde watched his host for a moment through his smoke-wreaths. “If that is the case, I think we had better let it stand. I didn’t try to make you think I was a lunatic, at all; on the contrary, I wanted to produce a favourable impression. But if, after all, I made a fool of myself, it was the intention of Providence. I should injure myself by protesting too much, for I should seem to set up a claim for wisdom which, in the sequel of our acquaintance, I could by no means justify. Set me down as a lunatic with intervals of sanity.”

“Oh, I guess you know what you are about,” said Newman.

“When I am sane, I am very sane; that I admit,” M. de Bellegarde answered. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I should like to ask you a few questions. You allow me?”

“Give me a specimen,” said Newman.

“You live here all alone?”

“Absolutely. With whom should I live?”

“For the moment,” said M. de Bellegarde with a smile, “I am asking questions, not answering them. You have come to Paris for your pleasure?”

Newman was silent awhile. Then, at last, “Everyone asks me that!” he said with his mild slowness. “It sounds so awfully foolish.”

“But at any rate you had a reason.”

“Oh, I came for my pleasure!” said Newman. “Though it is foolish, it is true.”

“And you are enjoying it?”

Like any other good American, Newman thought it as well not to truckle to the foreigner. “Oh, so-so,” he answered.

M. de Bellegarde puffed his cigar again in silence. “For myself,” he said at last, “I am entirely at your service. Anything I can do for you I shall be very happy to do. Call upon me at your convenience. Is there anyone you desire to know—anything you wish to see? It is a pity you should not enjoy Paris.”

“Oh, I do enjoy it!” said Newman, good-naturedly. “I’m much obliged to you.”

“Honestly speaking,” M. de Bellegarde went on, “there is something absurd to me in hearing myself make you these offers. They represent a great deal of goodwill, but they represent little else. You are a successful man and I am a failure, and it’s a turning of the tables to talk as if I could lend you a hand.”

“In what way are you a failure?” asked Newman.

“Oh, I’m not a tragical failure!” cried the young man with a laugh. “I have not fallen from a height, and my fiasco has made no noise. You, evidently, are a success. You have made a fortune, you have built up an edifice, you are a financial, commercial power, you can travel about the world until you have found a soft spot, and lie down in it with the consciousness of having earned your rest. Is not that true? Well, imagine the exact reverse of all that, and you have me. I have done nothing—I can do nothing!”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story. Some day I will tell you.
Meanwhile, I’m right, eh? You are a success? You have made a fortune? It’s none of my business, but, in short, you are rich?”

“That’s another thing that it sounds foolish to say,” said Newman. “Hang it, no man is rich!”

“I have heard philosophers affirm,” laughed M. de Bellegarde, “that no man was poor; but your formula strikes me as an improvement. As a general thing, I confess, I don’t like successful people, and I find clever men who have made great fortunes very offensive. They tread on my toes; they make me uncomfortable. But as soon as I saw you, I said to myself, ‘Ah, there is a man with whom I shall get on. He has the good-nature of success and none of the
morgue
;
⁴
he has not our confoundedly irritable French vanity.’ In short, I took a fancy to you. We are very different, I’m sure; I don’t believe there is a subject on which we think or feel alike. But I rather think we shall get on, for there is such a thing, you know, as being too different to quarrel.”

“Oh, I never quarrel,” said Newman.

“Never? Sometimes it’s a duty—or at least it’s a pleasure. Oh, I have had two or three delicious quarrels in my day!” and M. de Bellegarde’s handsome smile assumed, at the memory of these incidents, an almost voluptuous intensity.