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

“My box is locked and corded; but I haven’t yet spoken to my lady.”

“Speak to her, then, and have done with it. I should like to have your chance!” cried Newman.

“I would gladly give it you, sir. I have passed some weary hours in my lady’s dressing-room; but this will be one of the longest. She will tax me with ingratitude.”

“Well,” said Newman, “so long as you can tax her with murder —”

“Oh, sir, I can’t; not I,” sighed Mrs. Bread.

“You don’t mean to say anything about it? So much the better. Leave that to me.”

“If she calls me a thankless old woman,” said Mrs. Bread, “I shall have nothing to say. But it is better so,” she softly added. “She shall be my lady to the last. That will be more respectable.”

“And then you will come to me and I shall be your gentleman,” said Newman; “that will be more respectable still!”

Mrs. Bread rose, with lowered eyes, and stood a moment; then, looking up, she rested her eyes upon Newman’s face. The disordered proprieties were somehow settling to rest. She looked at Newman so long and so fixedly, with such a dull, intense devotedness, that he himself might have had a pretext for embarrassment. At last she said gently, “You are not looking well, sir.”

“That’s natural enough,” said Newman. “I have nothing to feel well about. To be very indifferent and very fierce, very dull and very jovial, very sick and very lively, all at once — why, it rather mixes one up.”

Mrs. Bread gave a noiseless sigh. “I can tell you something that will make you feel duller still, if you want to feel all one way. About Madame de Cintre.”

“What can you tell me?” Newman demanded. “Not that you have seen her?”

She shook her head. “No, indeed, sir, nor ever shall. That’s the dullness of it. Nor my lady. Nor M. de Bellegarde.”

“You mean that she is kept so close.”

“Close, close,” said Mrs. Bread, very softly.

These words, for an instant, seemed to check the beating of Newman’s heart. He leaned back in his chair, staring up at the old woman. “They have tried to see her, and she wouldn’t — she couldn’t?”

“She refused — forever! I had it from my lady’s own maid,” said Mrs. Bread, “who had it from my lady. To speak of it to such a person my lady must have felt the shock. Madame de Cintre won’t see them now, and now is her only chance. A while hence she will have no chance.”

“You mean the other women — the mothers, the daughters, the sisters; what is it they call them? — won’t let her?”

“It is what they call the rule of the house — or of the order, I believe,” said Mrs. Bread. “There is no rule so strict as that of the Carmelites. The bad women in the reformatories are fine ladies to them. They wear old brown cloaks — so the femme de chambre told me — that you wouldn’t use for a horse blanket. And the poor countess was so fond of soft-feeling dresses; she would never have anything stiff! They sleep on the ground,” Mrs. Bread went on; “they are no better, no better,”— and she hesitated for a comparison — “they are no better than tinkers’ wives. They give up everything, down to the very name their poor old nurses called them by. They give up father and mother, brother and sister — to say nothing of other persons,” Mrs. Bread delicately added. “They wear a shroud under their brown cloaks and a rope round their waists, and they get up on winter nights and go off into cold places to pray to the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is a hard mistress!”

Mrs. Bread, dwelling on these terrible facts, sat dry-eyed and pale, with her hands clasped in her satin lap. Newman gave a melancholy groan and fell forward, leaning his head on his hands. There was a long silence, broken only by the ticking of the great gilded clock on the chimney-piece.

“Where is this place — where is the convent?” Newman asked at last, looking up.

“There are two houses,” said Mrs. Bread. “I found out; I thought you would like to know — though it’s poor comfort, I think. One is in the Avenue de Messine; they have learned that Madame de Cintre is there. The other is in the Rue d’Enfer. That’s a terrible name; I suppose you know what it means.”

Newman got up and walked away to the end of his long room. When he came back Mrs. Bread had got up, and stood by the fire with folded hands. “Tell me this,” he said. “Can I get near her — even if I don’t see her? Can I look through a grating, or some such thing, at the place where she is?”

It is said that all women love a lover, and Mrs. Bread’s sense of the pre-established harmony which kept servants in their “place,” even as planets in their orbits (not that Mrs. Bread had ever consciously likened herself to a planet), barely availed to temper the maternal melancholy with which she leaned her head on one side and gazed at her new employer. She probably felt for the moment as if, forty years before, she had held him also in her arms. “That wouldn’t help you, sir. It would only make her seem farther away.”

“I want to go there, at all events,” said Newman. “Avenue de Messine, you say? And what is it they call themselves?”

“Carmelites,” said Mrs. Bread.

“I shall remember that.”

Mrs. Bread hesitated a moment, and then, “It’s my duty to tell you this, sir,” she went on. “The convent has a chapel, and some people are admitted on Sunday to the Mass. You don’t see the poor creatures that are shut up there, but I am told you can hear them sing. It’s a wonder they have any heart for singing! Some Sunday I shall make bold to go. It seems to me I should know her voice in fifty.”

Newman looked at his visitor very gratefully; then he held out his hand and shook hers. “Thank you,” he said. “If any one can get in, I will.” A moment later Mrs. Bread proposed, deferentially, to retire, but he checked her and put a lighted candle into her hand. “There are half a dozen rooms there I don’t use,” he said, pointing through an open door. “Go and look at them and take your choice. You can live in the one you like best.” From this bewildering opportunity Mrs. Bread at first recoiled; but finally, yielding to Newman’s gentle, reassuring push, she wandered off into the dusk with her tremulous taper. She remained absent a quarter of an hour, during which Newman paced up and down, stopped occasionally to look out of the window at the lights on the Boulevard, and then resumed his walk. Mrs. Bread’s relish for her investigation apparently increased as she proceeded; but at last she reappeared and deposited her candlestick on the chimney-piece.

“Well, have you picked one out?” asked Newman.

“A room, sir? They are all too fine for a dingy old body like me. There isn’t one that hasn’t a bit of gilding.”

“It’s only tinsel, Mrs. Bread,” said Newman. “If you stay there a while it will all peel off of itself.” And he gave a dismal smile.

“Oh, sir, there are things enough peeling off already!” rejoined Mrs. Bread, with a head-shake. “Since I was there I thought I would look about me. I don’t believe you know, sir. The corners are most dreadful. You do want a housekeeper, that you do; you want a tidy Englishwoman that isn’t above taking hold of a broom.”

Newman assured her that he suspected, if he had not measured, his domestic abuses, and that to reform them was a mission worthy of her powers. She held her candlestick aloft again and looked around the salon with compassionate glances; then she intimated that she accepted the mission, and that its sacred character would sustain her in her rupture with Madame de Bellegarde. With this she curtsied herself away.

She came back the next day with her worldly goods, and Newman, going into his drawing-room, found her upon her aged knees before a divan, sewing up some detached fringe. He questioned her as to her leave-taking with her late mistress, and she said it had proved easier than she feared. “I was perfectly civil, sir, but the Lord helped me to remember that a good woman has no call to tremble before a bad one.”