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

He was dismayed at the change in her appearance. Pale, heavy-browed, almost haggard with a sort of 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 she let him take her hand; but her eyes looked like two rainy autumn moons, and her touch was portentously lifeless.

“I was at your brother’s funeral,” Newman said. “Then I waited three days. But I could wait no longer.”

“Nothing can be lost or gained by waiting,” said Madame de Cintre. “But it was very considerate of you to wait, wronged as you have been.”

“I’m glad you think I have been wronged,” said Newman, with that oddly humorous accent with which he often uttered words of the gravest meaning.

“Do I need to say so?” she asked. “I don’t think I have 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, ‘I know it, I feel it!’ The reparation is pitifully small!”

“Oh, it’s a great step forward!” said Newman, with a gracious smile of encouragement. He pushed a chair towards 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, restlessly, and stood before her. She remained seated, like a troubled creature who had passed through the stage of restlessness.

“I say nothing is to be gained by my seeing you,” she went on, “and yet I am very glad you came. Now I can tell you what I feel. It is a selfish pleasure, but it is one of the last I shall have.” And she paused, with her great misty eyes fixed upon him. “I know how I have deceived and injured you; I know how cruel and cowardly I have 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 have said nothing hard of you. The very worst thing I have said of you yet is that you are the loveliest of women.” And he seated himself before her again, abruptly.

She flushed a little, but even her flush was pale. “That is because you think I will come back. But I will not come back. It is in that hope you have come here, I know; I am very sorry for you. I would 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 apologize — that is easy enough. I should not have wronged you.” She stopped a moment, looking at him, and motioned him to let her go on. “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 doesn’t matter. I have given you up.”

Newman gave a powerful thump with his clenched fist upon his knee. “Why, why, why?” he cried. “Give me a reason — a decent reason. You are not a child — you are not a minor, nor an idiot. You are not obliged to drop me because your mother told you to. Such a reason isn’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 Cintre, throwing out her hands, “think me an idiot and forget me! That will be the simplest way.”

Newman 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 which lay beyond it. When he turned round, Madame de Cintre had risen; she stood there silent and passive. “You are not frank,” said Newman; “you are not honest. Instead of saying that you are 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 am 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, holding out his hands. She turned away and began to leave him. “You told me the other day that you were afraid of your mother,” he said, following her. “What did you mean?”

Madame de Cintre shook her head. “I remember; I was sorry afterwards.”

“You were sorry when she came down and put on the thumb-screws. In God’s name what IS it she does to you?”

“Nothing. Nothing that you can understand. And now that I have given you up, I must not complain of her to you.”

“That’s no reasoning!” cried Newman. “Complain of her, on the contrary. Tell me all about it, frankly and trustfully, as you ought, and we will talk it over so satisfactorily that you won’t give me up.”

Madame de Cintre looked down some moments, fixedly; and then, raising her eyes, she said, “One good at least has come of this: I have made you judge me more fairly. You thought of me in a way that did me great honor; 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 which even then and there Newman thought beautiful. “I am too proud to be honest, I am not too proud to be faithless. I am timid and cold and selfish. I am afraid of being uncomfortable.”

“And you call marrying me uncomfortable!” said Newman staring.

Madame de Cintre blushed a little and seemed to say that if begging his pardon in words was impudent, she might at least thus mutely express her perfect comprehension of his finding her conduct odious. “It is not marrying you; it is 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”— And she paused.

“When what?” said Newman.

“When others have been most unhappy!”

“What others?” Newman asked. “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 contradict yourself.”

“Yes, I contradict myself; that shows you that I am not even intelligent.”

“You are laughing at me!” cried Newman. “You are mocking me!”

She looked at him intently, and an observer might have said that she was asking herself whether she might not most quickly end their common pain by confessing that she was mocking him. “No; I am not,” she presently said.

“Granting that you are not intelligent,” he went on, “that you are weak, that you are common, that you are nothing that I have believed you were — what I ask of you is not heroic effort, it is a very common effort. There is a great deal on my side to make it easy. The simple truth is that you don’t care enough about me to make it.”

“I am cold,” said Madame de Cintre, “I am as cold as that flowing river.”

Newman gave a great rap on the floor with his stick, and a long, grim laugh. “Good, good!” he cried. “You go altogether too far — you overshoot the mark. There isn’t a woman in the world as bad as you would make yourself out. I see your game; it’s what I said. You are blackening yourself to whiten others. You don’t want to give me up, at all; you like me — you like me. I know you do; you have shown it, and I have felt it. After that, you may be as cold as you please! They have bullied you, I say; they have tortured you. It’s an outrage, and I insist upon saving you from the extravagance of your own generosity. Would you chop off your hand if your mother requested it?”