# The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 20

XX
Valentin de Bellegarde died tranquilly, just as the cold faint March dawn began to clear the grave faces of the little knot of friends gathered about his bedside. An hour later Newman left the inn and drove to Geneva; he was naturally unwilling to be present at the arrival of Madame de Bellegarde and her first-born. At Geneva, for the moment, he remained. He was like a man who has had a fall and wants to sit still and count his bruises. He instantly wrote to Madame de Cintré, detailing to her the circumstances of her brother's death—with certain exceptions—and asking her what was the earliest moment at which he might hope she would consent to see him. M. Ledoux had told him he had reason to know that Valentin's will—he had had a great deal of light but pleasant personal property to dispose of—contained a request that he should be buried near his father in the churchyard of Fleurières, and Newman intended that the state of his own relations with the family should not deprive him of the satisfaction of helping to pay the last earthly honours to the best fellow in the world. He reflected that Valentin's friendship was older than Urbain's enmity, and that at a funeral it was easy to escape notice. Madame de Cintré's answer to his letter enabled him to time his arrival at Fleurières. This answer was very brief; it ran as follows:
​"I thank you for your letter and for your being with Valentin. It is the most inexpressible sorrow to me that I was not. To see you will be only anguish; there's no need therefore to wait for what you call brighter days. It is all one now, and I shall have no brighter days. Come when you please; only notify me first. My brother is to be buried here on Friday, and my family is to remain.—C. de C."
On receipt of this Newman had gone straight to Paris and to Poitiers. The journey had taken him far southward, through green Touraine and across the far-shining Loire, into a country where the early spring deepened divinely about him, but he had never made one during which he had heeded less the lay of the land. He alighted at an hotel in respect to which he scarce knew whether the wealth of its provincial note more graced or compromised it, and the next morning drove in a couple of hours to the village of Fleurières. But here, for all his melancholy, he could n't resist the intensity of an impression. The petit bourg lay at the base of a huge mound, on the summit of which stood the crumbling ruins of a feudal castle, much of whose sturdy material, as well as that of the wall that dropped along the hill to enclose the clustered houses defensively, had been absorbed into the very substance of the village. The church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a small place of interment. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep as they slanted into the grass; the patient elbow of the rampart held ​them together on one side, and in front, far beneath their mossy lids, the green plains and blue distances stretched away. The approach to the church, up the hill, defied all wheels. It was lined with peasants two or three rows deep, who stood watching old Madame de Bellegarde slowly ascend on the arm of her elder son and behind the pall-bearers of the other. Newman chose to lurk among the common mourners who murmured "Madame la Comtesse" as a particular tall slimness almost bowed beneath its ensigns of woe passed before them. He stood in the dusky little church while the service was going forward, but at the dismal tombside he turned away and walked down the hill. He went back to Poitiers and spent two days in which patience and revolt were confounded in a single ache. On the third day he sent Madame de Cintré a note to the effect that he would call on her in the afternoon, and in accordance with this he again took his way to Fleurières. He left his vehicle at the tavern in the village street and obeyed the simple instructions given him for finding the château.
"It's just beyond there," said the landlord, and pointed to the tree-tops of the parc above the opposite houses. Newman followed the first cross-road to the right—it was bordered with mouldy cottages—and in a few moments saw before him the peaked roofs of the towers. Advancing further he found himself before a vast iron gate, rusty and closed; here he paused a moment, looking through the bars. The residence was near the road, as if the very highway belonged to it; this gave it a fine old masterly air. ​Newman learned afterwards, from a guide-book of the province, that it dated from the reign of Henry III. It presented to the wide-paved area which preceded it, and which was edged with shabby farm-buildings, an immense façade of dark time-stained brick, flanked by two low wings, each of which terminated in a little Dutch-looking pavilion capped with a fantastic roof. Two towers rose behind, and behind the towers was a grand group of elms and beeches, now just faintly green. The great feature, however, was a wide green river, which washed the foundations of the pile. The whole mass rose from an island in the circling stream, so that this formed a perfect moat, spanned by a two-arched bridge without a parapet. The dull brick walls, which here and there made a grand straight sweep, the ugly little cupolas of the wings, the deep-set windows, the long steep pinnacles of mossy slate, all mirrored themselves in the quiet water.
Newman rang at the gate, and was almost frightened at the tone with which a big rusty bell above his head replied to him. An old woman came out from the gatehouse and opened the creaking portal just wide enough for him to pass, on which he went in and across the dry bare court and the little cracked white slabs of the causeway on the moat. At the door of the house he waited for some moments, and this gave him a chance to observe that Fleurières was not "kept up" and to reflect that it was a melancholy place of residence. "It looks," he said to himself—and I give the comparison for what it is worth—"like a Chinese penitentiary." At last the door was opened ​by a servant whom he remembered to have seen in the Rue de l'Université. The man's dull face brightened as he perceived our hero, the case always being that Newman, for indefinable reasons, enjoyed the confidence of the liveried gentry. The footman led the way across a great main vestibule, with a pyramid of plants at its centre and glass doors all around, to what appeared to be the principal saloon. The visitor crossed the threshold of a room of superb proportions, which made him feel at first like a tourist with a guide-book and a cicerone awaiting a fee. But when his guide had left him alone after observing that he would call Madame la Comtesse, he saw the place contained little that was remarkable beyond a dusky ceiling with curiously carved beams, a set of curtains of elaborate antiquated tapestry and a dark oaken floor polished like a mirror. He waited some minutes, walking up and down; then at last, as he turned at the end of the room, saw Madame de Cintré had come in by a distant door. She wore a black dress—she stood looking at him. As the length of the immense room lay between them he had time to take her well in before they met in the middle of it.
He was dismayed at the change in her appearance. Pale, heavy-browed, almost haggard, with a monastic rigidity in her dress, she had little but her pure features in common with the woman whose radiant good grace he had hitherto admired. She let her eyes rest on his own and surrendered to him her hand; but the eyes were like two rainy autumn moons and the touch portentously lifeless. "I was at your brother's ​funeral," he said. "Then I waited three days. But I could wait no longer."
"Nothing can be lost or gained by waiting," she answered. "But it was very considerate of you to wait, horribly wronged as you've been."
"I'm glad you think I've been horribly wronged," said Newman with that vague effect of whimsicality with which he often uttered words of the gravest meaning.
"Do I need to say so?" she asked. "I don't think I've wronged, seriously, many persons; certainly not consciously. To you, to whom I have done this hard and cruel thing, the only reparation I can make is to say that I know it, that I feel it. But such words are pitifully poor."
"Oh, they're a great step forward!" said Newman with a fixed and ah—as he even himself felt—such an anxious smile of encouragement. He pushed a chair toward her and held it, looking at her urgently. She sat down mechanically and he seated himself near her; but in a moment he got up and stood restlessly before her. She remained there like a troubled creature who had passed through the stage of restlessness.
"I say nothing's to be gained by my seeing you," she went on, "and yet I'm very glad you came. Now I can tell you what I feel. It's a selfish pleasure, but it's one of the last I shall have." And she paused with her great misty eyes on him. "I know how I've deceived and injured you; I know how cruel and cowardly I've been. I see it as vividly as you do—I feel it to the ends of my fingers." And she ​unclasped her hands, which were locked together in her lap, lifted them and dropped them at her side. "Anything that you may have said of me in your angriest passion is nothing to what I have said to myself."
"In my angriest passion," said Newman, "I've said nothing hard of you. The very worst thing I've said of you yet is that you're the most perfect of women." And he seated himself before her again abruptly.
She flushed a little, but even her flush was dim. "That's because you think I 'll come back. But I shall not come back. It's in that hope you have come here, I know; I'm very sorry for you. I 'd 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 apologise—that's easy enough. I should not, heaven forgive me, have wronged you." She stopped a moment, always with her tragic eyes on him, but motioned him to let her talk. "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 does n't matter. I've given you up."
Newman gave a great thump with his clenched fist upon his knee. "Why, why, why?" he cried. "Give me a reason—a decent reason. You're not a child—you're not a minor nor an idiot. You're not obliged to drop me because your mother told you to. Such a reason is n'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 vain hands, "think me an idiot and forget me! That will be the simplest way."
He 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 beyond it. When he turned round she had risen; she stood there silent and passive, so passive that it told terribly of her detachment. "You're not frank," he began again; "you're not really honest any more than you're merciful. Instead of saying you're 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'm 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, lifting the strong arms to which she would n't come. She but turned away and began to leave him. "You told me the other day that you were afraid of your mother," he followed her to say. "It must have meant something. What therefore did it mean?"
She shook her head. "I remember. I was sorry afterwards."
"You were sorry when she came down on you and used some atrocious advantage. In God's name, what is it she does to you?"
​"Nothing. Nothing that you can understand. And now that I've given you up I must n't complain of her to you."
"That's no reasoning!" cried Newman. "Complain of her, on the contrary, for all you're worth. To whom on God's earth but to me? Tell me all about it, frankly and trustfully, as you ought, and we 'll talk it over so satisfactorily that you 'll keep your plighted faith."
Madame de Cintré looked down some moments fixedly; at last she raised her eyes. "One good at least has come of this: I've made you judge me more fairly. You thought of me in a way that did me great honour; 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 that even then and there he found all so inconsequently sweet. "I 'm too proud to be honest, I 'm not too proud to be faithless. I'm timid and cold and selfish. I'm afraid of being uncomfortable."
"And you call marrying me uncomfortable?" he stared.
She flushed as with the sense of being only shut up in her pain, and seemed to say that if begging his pardon in words had that effect of an easy condition for her she might at least thus mutely express her ​perfect comprehension of his finding her conduct odious. "It's not marrying you; it's 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—?" Again she broke down.
"When what?" he pressed.
"When others have so suffered."
"What others?" he demanded. "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 strangely contradict yourself."
"Yes, I strangely contradict myself; that shows you—strangely enough too—that I'm not even intelligent."
"You 're laughing at me!" he cried. "It 's as if you were horribly mocking!"
She looked at him intently, and an observer might have believed her to be asking herself if she should n't most quickly end their common pain by confessing to some such monstrosity. Yet "No; I'm not," was what she presently said.
"Granting that you 're not intelligent," he went on, "that you 're weak, that you 're common, that you 're nothing I've believed you to be—what I ask of you is not an heroic effort, it's a very easy and possible effort. There's a great deal on my side to make it so. The simple truth is that you don't care enough for me to make it."
"I'm cold," said Madame de Cintré. "I'm as cold as that flowing river."
​Newman gave a great rap on the floor with his stick and a long grim laugh. "Ah, not you! You go altogether too far—you overshoot the mark. There is n't a woman in the world as bad as you would make yourself out. I see your game; it's what I said. You're blackening yourself to whiten others. You don't want to give me up at all; you like me—you like me, God help you! I know you do; you've shown it, and I've felt it and adored you for it! After that you may be as cold as you please! They've bullied you, I say; they've tortured you. It's an outrage, and I insist on saving you from the extravagance of your generosity. Would you chop off your hand if your mother required it?"
She gave at this the long sigh of a creature too hard pressed. "I spoke of my mother too blindly the other day. I'm 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 then seems to me rather extraordinarily mixed!" he passionately returned.
"It has been in great trouble, but now it's very clear. 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," he agreed. "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 is a bath of fire!—tried to push him on to make up to you."
"Who told you this?" she asked with her strange, stricken mildness.
"Not Valentin. I observed it. I guessed it. I did n'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," she immediately pleaded.
"It does n'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—getting rid of me easily, or at least decently, somehow. Lord Deepmere is n't remarkably bright, 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 did n't like being mixed up with that sort of treachery, and he came to you and told tales. That was about the size of it, was n't it? And then you said you were perfectly happy."
"I don't see why we should talk of Lord Deepmere," she returned. "It was n't for that you came here; and about my mother it does n't matter what you suspect and what you know. When once my ​mind has been made up, as it is now, I should n't discuss these things. Discussing anything now is very vain and only a fresh torment. We must try and live each as we can. I believe you'll 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've things to reckon with that you don't know. I mean I've feelings. I must do as they force me—I must, I must. They 'd haunt me otherwise," she cried, with vehemence; "they 'd give me no rest and would kill me!"
"I know what your feelings are: they're perversities and superstitions! They're the feeling that after all, though I am a good fellow, I've 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 great order, your order, that they should have a hand in everything you do. It makes my blood boil. That is cold; you're right. And what I feel here," and Newman struck his heart and became more eloquent 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 her voice might betray her. "No, I was not right—I 'm not cold! I believe that if I'm doing what seems so bad it's not mere weakness and falsity. My dear friend, my best of friends, 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 should n'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've been too selfish; I wanted to escape from it. You offered me a great chance—besides my liking you. I liked you more than I ever liked any one," she insisted to him with a beauty and purity of clearness, and yet with the sad fallacy of thinking, apparently, that she made the case less tragic for him by making it more tragic for herself. "It seemed good to change completely, to break, to go away. And then I admired you, I admired you," she so nobly and decently repeated. "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 beauty 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'm afraid, for my life, 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'm not meant for that—I 'm not made for boldness and defiance. I was made to be happy in a quiet natural way." At this Newman gave a most expressive groan, but she quavered heartbreakingly on: "I was made to do gladly and gratefully what's expected of me. My mother has always been very good to me; that's all I can say. I must n't judge her; I must n't criticise ​her. If I did it would come dreadfully back to me. I can't change!"
"No," said Newman bitterly; "I must change—if I break in two in the effort!"
"You 're different. You 're a man; you 'll get over it. You 'll live, you 'll do things, you can't not do good, therefore you can't not be happy: you 'll find all kinds of consolation. You were born—you were trained—to changes. Besides, besides, I shall always think of you."
"I don't care for that!" he almost shouted. "You're cruel—you're terribly cruel, God forgive you! You may have the best reasons and the finest feelings in the world; that makes no difference. You're a mystery to me; I don't see how such hardness can go with anything so divine!"
Madame de Cintré fixed him a moment with her swimming eyes. "You believe I'm hard then?"
He glared as if at her drowning beyond help; then he broke out: "You're a perfect, faultless, priceless creature! For God's sake, stay by me!"
"Of course I'm hard in effect," she pitifully reasoned; "though if ever a creature was innocent, in intention—! Whenever we give pain we're hard. And we must give pain; that's the world—the hateful miserable world! Ah!" and she gave a sigh as sharp as the shudder of an ague, "I can't even say I'm glad to have known you—though I am. That too is to wrong you. I can say nothing that's not cruel. Therefore let us part without more of this. Good-bye!" And she put out her hand.
Newman stood and looked at it without taking it, ​and then raised his eyes to her face. He felt in them the rising tears of rage. "What do you mean to do? Where are you going?"
"Where I shall give no more pain and suspect no more evil. I'm going out of the world."
"Out of the world?"
"I 'm going into a convent."
"Into a convent!" He repeated the words with the deepest dismay; it was as if she had said she was going into an hospital for incurables. "Into a convent—you!"
"I told you that it was not for my worldly advantage or pleasure I was leaving you."
But still he hardly understood. "You 're going to be a nun," he went on; "in a cell—for life—with a gown and a black veil?"
"A nun—a blest Carmelite nun," said Madame de Cintré. "For life, with God's leave and mercy."
The image rose there, at her words, too dark and horrible for belief, and affected him as if she had told him she was going to mutilate her beautiful face or drink some potion that would make her mad. He clasped his hands and began to tremble visibly. "Madame de Cintré, don't, don't, I beseech you! On my knees, if you like, I'll beseech you."
She laid her hand on his arm with a tender, pitying, almost reassuring gesture. "You don't understand, you 've wrong ideas. It's nothing horrible. It 's only peace and safety. It 's to be out of the world, where such troubles as this come to the innocent, to the best. And for life—that's the blessing of it! They can't begin again."
​He dropped into a chair and sat looking at her with a long inarticulate wail. That this superb woman, in whom he had seen all human grace, the rarest personal resource, should turn from him and all the brightness he offered her—him and his future and his fortune and his fidelity—to muffle herself in ascetic rags and entomb herself in a cell, was a confounding combination of the merciless and the impossible. As the vision spread before him the impossibility turned to the monstrous; it was a reduction to the absurd of the trial to which he was subjected. "You—you a nun; you with your beauty defaced and your nature wasted—you behind locks and bars! Never, never, if I can prevent it!" And he sprang to his feet in loud derision.
"You can't prevent it," she returned, "and it ought a little to satisfy you. Do you suppose I 'll go on living in the world, still beside you, and yet not with you? It 's all arranged. Good-bye, good-bye."
This time he took her hand, took it in both his own. "For ever?" he said. Her lips made an inaudible movement and his own sounded a deep imprecation. She closed her eyes as if with the pain of hearing it; then he drew her toward him and clasped her to his breast. He kissed her white face again and again, as to leave less of it for his loss; for an instant she resisted and for a minute she submitted; then, with a force that threw him back panting, she disengaged herself and hurried away over the long shining floor. The next moment the door closed behind her, and after another he had made his way out as he could.