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

In spite of this invidious hypothesis, which must be taken for nothing more than an example of the capricious play of “American humor,” Newman did his best to maintain an easy and friendly style of communication with M. de Bellegarde. So long as he was in personal contact with people he disliked extremely to have anything to forgive them, and he was capable of a good deal of unsuspected imaginative effort (for the sake of his own personal comfort) to assume for the time that they were good fellows. He did his best to treat the marquis as one; he believed honestly, moreover, that he could not, in reason, be such a confounded fool as he seemed. Newman’s familiarity was never importunate; his sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance and consequently was innocent of ungraceful eagerness. His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colorless form, unpleasantly dissimilar to the impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror. He never forgot himself for an instant, and replied to what he must have considered Newman’s “advances” with mechanical politeness. Newman, who was constantly forgetting himself, and indulging in an unlimited amount of irresponsible inquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself confronted by the conscious, ironical smile of his host. What the deuce M. de Bellegarde was smiling at he was at a loss to divine. M. de Bellegarde’s smile may be supposed to have been, for himself, a compromise between a great many emotions. So long as he smiled he was polite, and it was proper he should be polite. A smile, moreover, committed him to nothing more than politeness, and left the degree of politeness agreeably vague. A smile, too, was neither dissent — which was too serious — nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible complications. And then a smile covered his own personal dignity, which in this critical situation he was resolved to keep immaculate; it was quite enough that the glory of his house should pass into eclipse. Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy. Newman was far from being versed in European politics, but he liked to have a general idea of what was going on about him, and he accordingly asked M. de Bellegarde several times what he thought of public affairs. M. de Bellegarde answered with suave concision that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse, and that the age was rotten to its core. This gave Newman, for the moment, an almost kindly feeling for the marquis; he pitied a man for whom the world was so cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the time. The marquis presently replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was enough for him: he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name, to the throne of France. Newman stared, and after this he ceased to talk politics with M. de Bellegarde. He was not horrified nor scandalized, he was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M. de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of diet; an appetite, for instance, for fishbones or nutshells. Under these circumstances, of course, he would never have broached dietary questions with him.

One afternoon, on his calling on Madame de Cintre, Newman was requested by the servant to wait a few moments, as his hostess was not at liberty. He walked about the room a while, taking up her books, smelling her flowers, and looking at her prints and photographs (which he thought prodigiously pretty), and at last he heard the opening of a door to which his back was turned. On the threshold stood an old woman whom he remembered to have met several times in entering and leaving the house. She was tall and straight and dressed in black, and she wore a cap which, if Newman had been initiated into such mysteries, would have been a sufficient assurance that she was not a Frenchwoman; a cap of pure British composition. She had a pale, decent, depressed-looking face, and a clear, dull, English eye. She looked at Newman a moment, both intently and timidly, and then she dropped a short, straight English curtsey.

“Madame de Cintre begs you will kindly wait,” she said. “She has just come in; she will soon have finished dressing.”

“Oh, I will wait as long as she wants,” said Newman. “Pray tell her not to hurry.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the woman, softly; and then, instead of retiring with her message, she advanced into the room. She looked about her for a moment, and presently went to a table and began to arrange certain books and knick-knacks. Newman was struck with the high respectability of her appearance; he was afraid to address her as a servant. She busied herself for some moments with putting the table in order and pulling the curtains straight, while Newman walked slowly to and fro. He perceived at last from her reflection in the mirror, as he was passing that her hands were idle and that she was looking at him intently. She evidently wished to say something, and Newman, perceiving it, helped her to begin.

“You are English?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, please,” she answered, quickly and softly; “I was born in Wiltshire.”

“And what do you think of Paris?”

“Oh, I don’t think of Paris, sir,” she said in the same tone. “It is so long since I have been here.”

“Ah, you have been here very long?”

“It is more than forty years, sir. I came over with Lady Emmeline.”

“You mean with old Madame de Bellegarde?”

“Yes, sir. I came with her when she was married. I was my lady’s own woman.”

“And you have been with her ever since?”

“I have been in the house ever since. My lady has taken a younger person. You see I am very old. I do nothing regular now. But I keep about.”

“You look very strong and well,” said Newman, observing the erectness of her figure, and a certain venerable rosiness in her cheek.

“Thank God I am not ill, sir; I hope I know my duty too well to go panting and coughing about the house. But I am an old woman, sir, and it is as an old woman that I venture to speak to you.”

“Oh, speak out,” said Newman, curiously. “You needn’t be afraid of me.”

“Yes, sir. I think you are kind. I have seen you before.”

“On the stairs, you mean?”

“Yes, sir. When you have been coming to see the countess. I have taken the liberty of noticing that you come often.”

“Oh yes; I come very often,” said Newman, laughing. “You need not have been wide-awake to notice that.”

“I have noticed it with pleasure, sir,” said the ancient tire-woman, gravely. And she stood looking at Newman with a strange expression of face. The old instinct of deference and humility was there; the habit of decent self-effacement and knowledge of her “own place.” But there mingled with it a certain mild audacity, born of the occasion and of a sense, probably, of Newman’s unprecedented approachableness, and, beyond this, a vague indifference to the old proprieties; as if my lady’s own woman had at last begun to reflect that, since my lady had taken another person, she had a slight reversionary property in herself.

“You take a great interest in the family?” said Newman.

“A deep interest, sir. Especially in the countess.”

“I am glad of that,” said Newman. And in a moment he added, smiling, “So do I!”