Henry James - Henry James - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 10)

Valentin presented his friend, and Newman walked up to the old lady by the fire and shook hands with her. He received a rapid impression of a white, delicate, aged face, with a high forehead, a small mouth, and a pair of cold blue eyes which had kept much of the freshness of youth. Madame de Bellegarde looked hard at him, and returned his hand-shake with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of St. Dunstan’s. Her daughter-in-law stopped playing and gave him an agreeable smile. Newman sat down and looked about him, while Valentin went and kissed the hand of the young marquise.

“I ought to have seen you before,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You have paid several visits to my daughter.”

“Oh, yes,” said Newman, smiling; “Madame de Cintre and I are old friends by this time.”

“You have gone fast,” said Madame de Bellegarde.

“Not so fast as I should like,” said Newman, bravely.

“Oh, you are very ambitious,” answered the old lady.

“Yes, I confess I am,” said Newman, smiling.

Madame de Bellegarde looked at him with her cold fine eyes, and he returned her gaze, reflecting that she was a possible adversary and trying to take her measure. Their eyes remained in contact for some moments. Then Madame de Bellegarde looked away, and without smiling, “I am very ambitious, too,” she said.

Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable, inscrutable little woman. She resembled her daughter, and yet she was utterly unlike her. The coloring in Madame de Cintre was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary. But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an “Oh, dear, no!” which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty. Madame de Cintre’s face had, to Newman’s eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother’s white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines. “She is a woman of conventions and proprieties,” he said to himself as he looked at her; “her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees ‘This is genteel,’ or ‘This is improper,’ written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose.” Madame de Bellegarde wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin, and she was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl.

“You are an American?” she said presently. “I have seen several Americans.”

“There are several in Paris,” said Newman jocosely.

“Oh, really?” said Madame de Bellegarde. “It was in England I saw these, or somewhere else; not in Paris. I think it must have been in the Pyrenees, many years ago. I am told your ladies are very pretty. One of these ladies was very pretty! such a wonderful complexion! She presented me a note of introduction from some one — I forgot whom — and she sent with it a note of her own. I kept her letter a long time afterwards, it was so strangely expressed. I used to know some of the phrases by heart. But I have forgotten them now, it is so many years ago. Since then I have seen no more Americans. I think my daughter-in-law has; she is a great gad-about, she sees every one.”

At this the younger lady came rustling forward, pinching in a very slender waist, and casting idly preoccupied glances over the front of her dress, which was apparently designed for a ball. She was, in a singular way, at once ugly and pretty; she had protuberant eyes, and lips strangely red. She reminded Newman of his friend, Mademoiselle Nioche; this was what that much-obstructed young lady would have liked to be. Valentin de Bellegarde walked behind her at a distance, hopping about to keep off the far-spreading train of her dress.

“You ought to show more of your shoulders behind,” he said very gravely. “You might as well wear a standing ruff as such a dress as that.”

The young woman turned her back to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and glanced behind her, to verify Valentin’s assertion. The mirror descended low, and yet it reflected nothing but a large unclad flesh surface. The young marquise put her hands behind her and gave a downward pull to the waist of her dress. “Like that, you mean?” she asked.

“That is a little better,” said Bellegarde in the same tone, “but it leaves a good deal to be desired.”

“Oh, I never go to extremes,” said his sister-in-law. And then, turning to Madame de Bellegarde, “What were you calling me just now, madame?”

“I called you a gad-about,” said the old lady. “But I might call you something else, too.”

“A gad-about? What an ugly word! What does it mean?”

“A very beautiful person,” Newman ventured to say, seeing that it was in French.

“That is a pretty compliment but a bad translation,” said the young marquise. And then, looking at him a moment, “Do you dance?”

“Not a step.”

“You are very wrong,” she said, simply. And with another look at her back in the mirror she turned away.

“Do you like Paris?” asked the old lady, who was apparently wondering what was the proper way to talk to an American.

“Yes, rather,” said Newman. And then he added with a friendly intonation, “Don’t you?”

“I can’t say I know it. I know my house — I know my friends — I don’t know Paris.”

“Oh, you lose a great deal,” said Newman, sympathetically.

Madame de Bellegarde stared; it was presumably the first time she had been condoled with on her losses.

“I am content with what I have,” she said with dignity.

Newman’s eyes, at this moment, were wandering round the room, which struck him as rather sad and shabby; passing from the high casements, with their small, thickly-framed panes, to the sallow tints of two or three portraits in pastel, of the last century, which hung between them. He ought, obviously, to have answered that the contentment of his hostess was quite natural — she had a great deal; but the idea did not occur to him during the pause of some moments which followed.

“Well, my dear mother,” said Valentin, coming and leaning against the chimney-piece, “what do you think of my dear friend Newman? Is he not the excellent fellow I told you?”

“My acquaintance with Mr. Newman has not gone very far,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “I can as yet only appreciate his great politeness.”

“My mother is a great judge of these matters,” said Valentin to Newman. “If you have satisfied her, it is a triumph.”

“I hope I shall satisfy you, some day,” said Newman, looking at the old lady. “I have done nothing yet.”

“You must not listen to my son; he will bring you into trouble. He is a sad scatterbrain.”

“Oh, I like him — I like him,” said Newman, genially.

“He amuses you, eh?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“Do you hear that, Valentin?” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You amuse Mr. Newman.”

“Perhaps we shall all come to that!” Valentin exclaimed.

“You must see my other son,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “He is much better than this one. But he will not amuse you.”