# The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 25

XXV
He called on the immense, the comical Duchess and found her at home. An old gentleman with a high nose and a gold-headed cane was just taking leave; he made Newman a protracted obeisance as he retired, and our hero supposed him one of the high personages with whom he had shaken hands at Madame de Bellegarde's party. The Duchess, in her armchair, from which she did n't move, with a great flower-pot on one side of her, a pile of pink-covered novels on the other and a large piece of tapestry depending from her lap, presented an expansive and imposing front; but her aspect was in the highest degree gracious and there was nothing in her manner to check the effusion of his confidence. She talked to him of flowers and books, getting launched with marvellous promptitude; about the theatres, about the peculiar institutions of his native country, about the humidity of Paris, about the pretty complexions of the American ladies, about his impressions of France and his opinion of its female inhabitants. All this had a large free flow on the part of the Duchess, who, like many of her countrywomen, was a person of an affirmative rather than an interrogative cast, who uttered good things and put them herself into circulation, and who was apt to offer you a present of a convenient little opinion neatly enveloped in the gilt paper of a happy Gallicism. Newman had come ​to her with a grievance, but he found himself in an atmosphere in which apparently no cognisance was taken of such matters; an atmosphere into which the chill of discomfort had never penetrated and which seemed exclusively made up of mild, sweet, stale intellectual perfumes. The feeling with which he had watched Madame d'Outreville at the treacherous festival of the Bellegardes came back to him; she struck him as a wonderful old lady in some particularly "high" comedy, thoroughly well up in her part. He noticed before long that she asked him no question about their common friends; she made no allusion to the circumstances under which he had been presented to her. She neither feigned ignorance of a change in these circumstances nor pretended to condole with him upon it; but she smiled and discoursed and compared the tender-tinted wools of her tapestry as if the Bellegardes and their wickedness were not of this world. "She's fighting shy!" he said to himself; and, having drawn the inference, was curious to see, further, how, if this were a policy, she would carry it off. She did so in a masterly manner. There was not a gleam of disguised consciousness in the small, clear, demonstrative eyes which constituted her nearest claim to personal loveliness; there was not a symptom of apprehension he would trench on any ground she proposed to avoid. "Upon my word, she does it very well," he tacitly commented. "They all hold together bravely, and, whether any one else can trust them or not, they can certainly trust each other."
He fell at this juncture to admiring the Duchess for her fine manners. He felt, most accurately, that she ​was not a grain less urbane than she would have been if his marriage were still in prospect; but he was aware also that she led him on no single inch further. He had come, so reasoned this eminent lady—heaven knew why he had come after what had hap pened; and for the half-hour therefore she would be charmante. But she would never see him again. Finding no ready-made opportunity to tell his story, he pondered these things more dispassionately than might have been expected; he stretched his legs as usual and even chuckled a little quite appreciatively and noiselessly. And then as his hostess went on relating a mot with which her mother had, in extreme youth, snubbed the great Napoleon, it occurred to him that her evasion of a chapter of French history more interesting to himself might possibly be the result of an extreme consideration for his feelings. Perhaps it was delicacy rather than diplomacy. He was on the point of saying something himself, to make the chance he had determined to give her still better, when the servant announced another visitor. The Duchess on hearing the name—it was that of an Italian prince—gave a little imperceptible pout and said to him rapidly: "I beg you to remain; I desire this visit to be short." He wondered, at this, if they might n't then after all get round to the Bellegardes.
The Prince was a short stout man, with a head disproportionately large. He had a dusky complexion and bushy eyebrows, beneath which glowed a fixed and somewhat defiant stare; he seemed to be challenging you to hint that he might be hydrocephalic. ​The Duchess, judging from her charge to our own friend, regarded him as a bore; but this was not apparent from the unchecked abundance of her speech. She caused it to frisk hither and yon as to some old rococo music and then pull up on a mot after the fashion in which a stage-dancer whirls, for breath and with arms arranged, into ecstatic equilibrium; she characterised with great felicity the Italian intellect and the taste of the figs at Sorrento, predicted the ultimate future of the Italian kingdom (disgust with the brutal Sardinian rule and complete reversion, throughout the peninsula, to the mild sway of the Holy Father) and, finally, took up the heart-history of their friend cette pauvre Princesse, a lady unknown to Newman, who had notoriously so much heart. This record exposed itself to a considerable control from the Prince, who was evidently not related to the heroine in question otherwise than by an intimate familiarity with her annals; and having satisfied himself that Newman was in no laughing mood, either with regard to the size of his head or the authenticity of his facts, he entered into the controversy with an animation for which the Duchess, when she set him down as a bore, could not have been prepared. The often so oddly-directed passions of their friend led Newman's companions to a discussion of the côté passionel of the Florentine nobility in general; the Duchess had lately spent several weeks in the very bosom of that body and gathered much information on the subject. This was merged, in turn, in an examination of the Italian heart per se. The Duchess, who had arrived at highly original conclusions, ​thought it the least susceptible organ of its kind that she had ever encountered, related examples of its Machiavellian power to calculate its perils and profits, and at last declared that for her the race were half arithmetic and half ice. The Prince became flame and rhetoric to refute her, and his visit really proved charming.
Newman was naturally out of the fray; he sat with his head a little on one side, watching the interlocutors. The Duchess, as she talked, frequently looked at him with a smile, as if to intimate, in the charming manner of her nation, that it lay only with him to say something very much to the point. But he said nothing at all, and at last his thoughts began to wander. A singular feeling came over him—a sudden sense of the folly of his errand. What under the sun had he after all to say to the Duchess? Wherein would it profit him to denounce the Bellegardes to her for traitors and the Marquise into the bargain for a murderess? He seemed morally to have turned a high somersault and to find things looking differently in consequence. He felt, as by the effect of some colder current of the air, his will stiffen in another direction and the mantle of his reserve draw closer. What in the world had he been thinking of when he fancied Madame d'Outreville could help him and that it would conduce to his comfort to make her think ill of the Bellegardes? What did her opinion of the Bellegardes matter to him? It was only a shade more important than the opinion the Bellegardes entertained of herself. The Duchess help him, that cold, stout, soft, artificial woman help him?—she ​who in the last twenty minutes had built up between them a wall of polite conversation in which she evidently flattered herself he would never find a gate? Had it come to this—that he was asking favours of false gods and appealing for sympathy where he had no sympathy to give? He rested his arms on his knees and sat for some minutes staring into his hat. As he did so his ears tingled—was he to have brayed like that animal whose ears are longest? Whether or no the Duchess would hear his story he would n't tell it. Was he to sit there another half-hour for the sake of exposing the Bellegardes? The Bellegardes be deeply damned! He got up abruptly and advanced to shake hands with his hostess.
"You can't stay longer?" she graciously asked.
"If you 'll pardon me, no."
She hesitated, and then, "I had an idea you had something particular to say to me," she returned.
Newman met her eyes; he felt a little dizzy, for the moment he was conscious of the high—or at least the higher—air in which he performed gymnastic revolutions. The little Italian prince came to his help. "Ah, madame, who has not that?" he richly sighed.
"Don't teach Mr. Newman to say fadaises," said the Duchess. "It's his merit that he doesn't know how."
"Yes, I don't know how to say fadaises," Newman admitted, "and I don't want to say anything unpleasant."
"I'm sure you're very considerate," Madame d'Outreville smiled; and she gave him a little nod for all good-bye, with which he took his departure.
​Once in the street he stood for some time on the pavement, wondering if after all he had not been most an ass not to offer to the great lady's inhalation his nosegay of strange flowers. And then he decided, he quite had the sense of discovering, that he should simply hate to talk of the Bellegardes with any one. The thing he most wanted to do, it suddenly appeared, was to banish them from his mind and never think of them again. Indecision had, however, not hitherto been one of his weaknesses, and in this case it was not of long duration. For three days he applied all his thought to not thinking—thinking, that is, of the Marquise and her son. He dined with Mrs. Tristram and, on her mentioning their name, requested her almost austerely to desist. This gave Tom Tristram a much-coveted opportunity to offer condolences.
He leaned forward, laying his hand on Newman's arm, compressing his lips and shaking his head. "The fact is, my dear fellow, you see you ought never to have gone into it. It was not your doing, I know—it was all my wife. If you want to come down on her I'll stand off: I give you leave to hit her as hard as you like. You know she has never had a flick of the whip from me in her life, and I do think she wants to be a bit touched up. Why did n't you listen to me? You know I did n't believe in the thing. I thought it at the best a high jump in which you might bruise a shin. I don't profess to have been a tremendous homme à femmes, as they say here, but I 've instincts about the sex that, hang it, I've honestly come by. I've never mistrusted a woman in my life that she ​has not turned out badly. I was not at all deceived in Lizzie for instance; I always had my doubts about her. Whatever you may think of my present situation I must at least admit that I got into it with my eyes open. Now suppose you had got into something like this box with your grand cold Countess. You may depend upon it she 'd have turned out a stiff one. And upon my word I don't see where you could have found your comfort. Not from the Marquis, my dear Newman; he was n't a man you could go and talk things over with in an easy and natural way. Did he ever seem to want to have you on the premises? Did he ever try to see you alone? Did he ever ask you to come and smoke a cigar with him of an evening or step in, when you had been calling on the ladies, and take something? I don't think you 'd have got much out of him. And as for that daughter of a hundred earls his mother, she struck one as an uncommonly strong dose. They have a great expression here, you know; they call any damned thing 'sympathetic'—that is when it is n't it ought to be. Now Madame de Bellegarde's about as sympathetic as that mustard-pot. They're a d—d stony-faced, cold-blooded lot anyway; I felt it awfully at that ball of theirs. I felt as if I were walking up and down the Armoury in the Tower of London—every one cased in ancestral steel, every one perched up in a panoply. My dear boy, don't think me a vulgar brute for hinting it, but, you may depend upon it, all they wanted was your money. I know something about that; I can tell when people want one's money. Why they stopped wanting yours I don't know; I suppose ​because they could get some one else's without working so hard for it. It is n't worth finding out. It may be it was not with your Countess, Lizzie's and yours, that the idea of chucking you originated; very likely the old woman put her up to it. I suspect she and her mother are really as thick as thieves, eh? You're well out of it, at any rate, old man; make up your mind to that. If I express myself strongly it's all because I love you so much; and from that point of view I may say I should as soon have thought of making up to that piece of pale peculiarity as I should have thought of wooing the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde."
Newman sat gazing at Tristram during this harangue with a lack-lustre eye; never yet had he seemed to himself to have outgrown so completely the phase of equal comradeship with Tom Tristram. Mrs. Tristram's glance at her husband had more of a spark; she turned to Newman with a slightly lurid smile. "You must at least do justice," she said, "to the felicity with which he repairs the indiscretions of a too zealous wife."
But even without the lash of his friend's loud tongue Newman would have waked again into his bitterest consciousness. He could keep it at bay only when he could cease to miss what he had lost, and each day, for the present, but added a ton of weight to that quantity. In vain Mrs. Tristram begged him to se faire, as she put it, une raison; she assured him the sight of his countenance made her wretched.
"How can I help it?" he demanded with a trembling voice—"how can I help it when the sight of ​everything makes me so? I feel exactly like a stunned widower—and a widower who has not even the consolation of going to stand beside the grave of his wife, one who has not the right to wear so much mourning as a weed on his hat. I feel," he added in a moment, "as if my wife had been murdered and her assassins were still at large."
Mrs. Tristram made no immediate rejoinder, but at last she said with a smile which, in so far as it was a forced one, was less successfully simulated than such smiles, on her lips, usually were: "Are you very sure that you 'd have been happy?"
He stared, then shook his head. "That's weak; that won't do."
"Well," she persisted as with an idea, "I don't believe it would have really done."
He gave a sound of irritation. "Say then it would have damnably failed. Failure for failure I should have preferred that one to this."
She took it in her musing way. "I should have been curious to see; it would have been very strange."
"Was it from curiosity that you urged me to put myself forward?"
​"So you had n't faith," he said resentfully.
"Yes, I had faith—faith that it would take place, and that you 'd be happy. Otherwise I should have been, among my speculations, a very heartless creature. But," she continued, laying her hand on his arm and hazarding a grave smile, "it was the highest flight ever taken by a tolerably rich imagination!"
Shortly after this she recommended him to leave Paris and travel for three months. Change of scene would do him good and he would forget his misfortune sooner in absence from the objects that had witnessed it. "I really feel," he concurred, "as if to leave you, at least, would do me good—and cost me very little effort. You're growing cynical; you shock me and pain me."
"Very well," she said, good-naturedly or cynically, as may appear most credible. "I shall certainly see you again."
He was ready enough to get quite away; the brilliant streets he had walked through in his happier hours and which then seemed to wear a higher brilliancy in honour of his happiness, were now in the secret of his defeat and looked down on it in shining mockery. He would go somewhere, he cared little where; and he made his preparations. Then one morning at haphazard he drove to the train that would transport him to Calais and deposit him there for despatch to the shores of Britain. As he rolled along he asked himself what had become of his revenge, and he was able to think of it as provisionally pigeonholed in a very safe place. It would keep till called for.
​He arrived in London in the midst of what is called "the season," and it seemed to him at first that he might here put himself in the way of being diverted from his heavy-heartedness. He knew no one in all England, but the spectacle of the vaster and duskier Babylon roused him somewhat from his apathy. Anything that was enormous usually found favour with him, and the multitudinous English energies and industries stirred in his spirit a dull vivacity of contemplation. It is on record that the weather, at that moment, was of the finest insular quality; he took long walks and explored London in every direction; he sat by the hour in Kensington Gardens and beside the adjoining Drive, watching the people and the horses and the carriages; the rosy English beauties, the wonderful English dandies and the splendid flunkies. He went to the opera and found it better than in Paris; he went to the theatre and found a surprising charm in listening to dialogue the finest points of which came within the range of his comprehension. He made several excursions into the country, recommended by the waiter at his hotel, with whom, on this and similar points, he had established confidential relations. He watched the deer in Windsor Forest and admired the Thames from Richmond Hill; he ate whitebait and brown bread-and-butter at Greenwich; he strolled in the grassy shadow of the cathedral of Canterbury. He also visited the Tower of London and Madame Tussaud's exhibition. One day he thought he would go to Sheffield, and then, thinking again, gave it up. Why the devil should he go to Sheffield? He had a feeling that the ​link which bound him to a possible interest in the manufacture of cutlery was broken. He had no desire for an "inside view" of any successful enterprise whatever, and he would n't have given the smallest sum for the privilege of talking over the details of the most splendid business with the most original of managers.
One afternoon he had walked into the Park and was slowly threading his way through the human maze which fringes the Drive. This stream was no less dense, and Newman, as usual, marvelled at the strange dowdy figures he saw taking the air in some of the most shining conveyances. They reminded him of what he had read of Eastern and Southern countries, in which grotesque idols and fetiches were sometimes drawn out of their temples and carried abroad in golden chariots to be seen of the people. He noted a great many pretty cheeks beneath high-plumed hats as he squeezed his way through serried waves of crumpled muslin; and, sitting on little chairs at the base of the dull, massive English trees, he observed a number of quiet-eyed maidens who seemed only to remind him afresh that the magic of beauty had gone out of the world with the woman wrenched from him: to say nothing of other damsels whose eyes were not quiet and who struck him still more as a satire on possible consolation. He had been walking for some time when, directly in front of him, borne toward him by the summer breeze, he heard a few words uttered in the bright Parisian idiom his ears had begun to forget. The voice in which the words were spoken was a peculiar recall, and as he bent his ​eyes it lent an identity to the commonplace elegance of the back view of a young lady walking in the same direction as himself. Mademoiselle Nioche, seeking her fortune, had apparently thought she might find it faster in London, and another glance led him to wonder if she might now have lighted on it. A gentleman strolled beside her, lending an attentive ear to her conversation and too beguiled to open his lips. Newman caught no sound of him, but had the impression of English shoulders, an English "fit," an English silence. Mademoiselle Nioche was attracting attention: the ladies who passed her turned round as with a sense of the Parisian finish. A great cataract of flounces rolled down from the young lady's waist to Newman's feet; he had to step aside to avoid treading on them. He stepped aside indeed with a decision of movement that the occasion scarcely demanded; for even this imperfect glimpse of Miss Noémie had sharpened again his constant soreness. She seemed an odious blot on the face of nature; he wanted to put her out of his sight. He thought of Valentin de Bellegarde still green in the earth of his burial, his young life giving way to this flourishing impudence. The fragrance of the girl's bravery quite sickened him; he turned his head and tried to keep his distance; but the pressure of the crowd held him near her a minute longer, so that he heard what she was saying.
"Ah, I'm sure he'll miss me," she murmured. "It was very cruel of me to leave him; I'm afraid you'll think I've very little heart. He might perfectly have remained with us. I don't think he's very well," ​she added; "it seemed to me to-day he was rather down."
Newman wondered whom she was talking about, but just then an opening among his neighbours enabled him to turn away, and he said to himself that she was probably paying a tribute to British propriety and feigning a tender solicitude about her parent. Was that miserable old man still treading the path of vice in her train? Was he still giving her the benefit of his experience of affairs, and had he crossed the sea to serve as her interpreter? Newman walked some distance further and then began to retrace his steps, taking care not to accompany again those of Mademoiselle Nioche. At last he looked for a chair under the trees, but he had some difficulty in finding an empty one. He was about to give up the search when he saw a gentleman rise from the seat he had been occupying, leaving our friend to take it without looking at his neighbours. Newman sat there for some time without heeding them; his attention was lost in the rage of his renewed vision of the little fatal fact of Noémie. But at the end of a quarter of an hour, dropping his eyes, he perceived a small pugdog squatted on the path near his feet—a diminutive but very perfect specimen of its interesting species. The pug was sniffing at the fashionable world, as it passed him, with his little black muzzle, and was kept from extending his investigation by a large blue ribbon attached to his collar with an enormous rosette and held in the hand of a person seated next Newman. To this person our hero transferred his attention, and immediately found himself ​the object of all that of his neighbour, who was staring up at him from a pair of little fixed white eyes. These eyes he instantly recognised; he had been sitting for the last quarter of an hour beside M. Nioche. He had vaguely felt himself in range of some feeble fire. M. Nioche continued to stare; he appeared afraid to move even to the extent of saving by flight what might have been left of his honour.
​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 would n't notice me. I should have moved away, but I was afraid that if I moved it would strike you. So I sat very still."
"I suspect you've a bad conscience, sir," Newman pronounced.
The old man put down the little dog and held it carefully in his lap. Then he shook his head, his eyes still watering and pleading. "No, Mr. Newman, I 've a good conscience," he weakly wailed.
"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!" his companion quavered. "Do you call this improvement?" And he ruefully embraced the treasures in his arms.
"Why, you're on your travels," Newman rejoined. "A visit to London in the Season is certainly a sign of prosperity."
M. Nioche, in answer to this superior dig, lifted the puppy up to his face again, peering at his critic from his small blank eye-holes. There was something inane in the movement, and Newman hardly knew if he were taking refuge in an affected failure of reason or whether he had in fact paid for his base ​accommodation 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 pestilent daughter. Newman was going to leave him abruptly when his face gave out a peculiar convulsion. "Are you going away?" he appealed.
"Do you want me to stay?"
"I should have left you—from consideration. But my dignity suffers at your leaving me—that way."
"Have you anything particular to say to me?"
M. Nioche looked round to see no one was listening, and then returned with mild portentousness: "Je ne lui ai pas trouvé d'excuses." Newman gave a short laugh, but the old man seemed for the moment not to heed; he was gazing away, absently, at some metaphysical image of his implacability. "It does n't much matter whether you have or not," said Newman. "There are other people who never will, I assure you."
"What has she done?" M. Nioche vaguely enquired, turning round again. "I don't know what she does, you know."
"She has done a devilish mischief; it does n't matter what. She's a public nuisance; she ought to be stopped."
M. Nioche stealthily put out his hand and laid it on Newman's arm. "Stopped, yes," he concurred. "That's it. Stopped short. She's running away—she must be stopped." Then he paused and again looked round him. "I mean to stop her," he went on. "I'm only waiting for my chance."
​"I see," Newman dryly enough laughed. "She's running away and you're running after her. You've run a long distance."
But M. Nioche had a competent upward nod, "Oh, I know what to do!"
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 Newman had lately observed. His face being now presented to our hero, the latter recognised the irregular features and the hardly more composed 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, without agitation, "Tiens, how we keep meeting!" she sweetly shrilled. 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, mon bichon—what a horrid false friend he must believe me! He has been very unwell," she added, turning and affecting to explain to Newman, a spark of infernal impudence, fine as a needle-point, lighted in each charming eye. "I don't think the English climate does for him."
​"Do you mean me? I've never been better, thank you," Miss Noémie declared. "But with milord," and she gave a shining shot 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 his fellow-candidate in that recent remarkable competition by which each had so signally failed to profit 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 he stood there with his hand on his hip and with a conscious grin, staring askance at the mistress of the invalid pug. Suddenly an idea seemed to strike him and he caught at the light. "Oh, you know her?"
"Yes," said Newman, "I know her. I don't believe you do."
"Oh dear, yes, I do!"—Lord Deepmere was sure of that. "I knew her in Paris—by my late cousin Bellegarde, you know. He knew her, poor fellow, did n't he? It was she, you know, who was at the bottom of his affair. Awfully sad, wasn't it?" the young man continued, talking off his embarrassment as his simple nature permitted. "They got up some story of its being for the Pope; of the other fellow 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!" his lordship pursued, directing an eye illumined by this pleasantry toward Mademoiselle Nioche, who, bending gracefully over her lap-dog, was apparently absorbed in conversation with it. "I dare say you think it rather odd that I should—a—keep up the acquaintance," he resumed; "but she could n't help it, you know, and Bellegarde was only my twentieth cousin. I dare say you think it rather cheeky my showing with her in this place; but you see she is n't known yet and she's so remarkably, thoroughly nice—!" With which his attesting glance returned to the young lady.
Newman turned away; he was having too much of her niceness. 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 decidedly never yet, as between him and his late protector, been so apposite to place on record that, for his vindication, he was only waiting to strike. As Newman turned off he felt himself held, and, seeing the old man, who had drawn so near, had something particular to say, bent his head an instant.
"You'll see it some day dans les feuilles."
Our hero broke away, for impatience of the whole connexion, 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.