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

Mrs. Tristram began to take slow stitches again. “Have you quite given it up?”

“Oh yes.”

“Is it very bad, this secret?”

“Yes, very bad.”

“For myself,” said Mrs. Tristram, “I am sorry you have given it up. I should have liked immensely to see your paper. They have wronged me too, you know, as your sponsor and guarantee, and it would have served for my revenge as well. How did you come into possession of your secret?”

“It’s a long story. But honestly, at any rate.”

“And they knew you were master of it?”

“Oh, I told them.”

“Dear me, how interesting!” cried Mrs. Tristram. “And you humbled them at your feet?”

Newman was silent a moment. “No, not at all. They pretended not to care — not to be afraid. But I know they did care — they were afraid.”

“Are you very sure?”

Newman stared a moment. “Yes, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Tristram resumed her slow stitches. “They defied you, eh?”

“Yes,” said Newman, “it was about that.”

“You tried by the threat of exposure to make them retract?” Mrs. Tristram pursued.

“Yes, but they wouldn’t. I gave them their choice, and they chose to take their chance of bluffing off the charge and convicting me of fraud. But they were frightened,” Newman added, “and I have had all the vengeance I want.”

“It is most provoking,” said Mrs. Tristram, “to hear you talk of the ‘charge’ when the charge is burnt up. Is it quite consumed?” she asked, glancing at the fire.

Newman assured her that there was nothing left of it. “Well then,” she said, “I suppose there is no harm in saying that you probably did not make them so very uncomfortable. My impression would be that since, as you say, they defied you, it was because they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature! You see they were right.”

Newman instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed; but there was nothing left of it.

Table of Contents Table of Contents Watch and Ward Watch and Ward Table of Contents Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson Table of Contents The American The American Table of Contents The Europeans The Europeans Table of Contents Confidence Washington Square The Portrait of a Lady The Bostonians The Princess Casamassima The Reverberator The Tragic Muse The Other House The Spoils of Poynton What Maisie Knew The Awkward Age The Sacred Fount The Wings of the Dove The Ambassadors The Golden Bowl The Outcry The Ivory Tower The Sense of the Past

Table of Contents Table of Contents Watch and Ward Watch and Ward Table of Contents Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson Table of Contents The American The American Table of Contents The Europeans The Europeans Table of Contents Confidence Washington Square The Portrait of a Lady The Bostonians The Princess Casamassima The Reverberator The Tragic Muse The Other House The Spoils of Poynton What Maisie Knew The Awkward Age The Sacred Fount The Wings of the Dove The Ambassadors The Golden Bowl The Outcry The Ivory Tower The Sense of the Past

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Table of Contents

A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time an object of enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the mouldy tombstones and funereal umbrage have received the ineffectual refreshment of a dull, moist snow-fall. If, while the air is thickened by this frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate that the blessed vernal season is already six weeks old, it will be admitted that no depressing influence is absent from the scene. This fact was keenly felt on a certain 12th of May, upwards of thirty years since, by a lady who stood looking out of one of the windows of the best hotel in the ancient city of Boston. She had stood there for half an hour — stood there, that is, at intervals; for from time to time she turned back into the room and measured its length with a restless step. In the chimney-place was a red-hot fire which emitted a small blue flame; and in front of the fire, at a table, sat a young man who was busily plying a pencil. He had a number of sheets of paper cut into small equal squares, and he was apparently covering them with pictorial designs — strange-looking figures. He worked rapidly and attentively, sometimes threw back his head and held out his drawing at arm’s-length, and kept up a soft, gay-sounding humming and whistling. The lady brushed past him in her walk; her much-trimmed skirts were voluminous. She never dropped her eyes upon his work; she only turned them, occasionally, as she passed, to a mirror suspended above the toilet-table on the other side of the room. Here she paused a moment, gave a pinch to her waist with her two hands, or raised these members — they were very plump and pretty — to the multifold braids of her hair, with a movement half caressing, half corrective. An attentive observer might have fancied that during these periods of desultory self-inspection her face forgot its melancholy; but as soon as she neared the window again it began to proclaim that she was a very ill-pleased woman. And indeed, in what met her eyes there was little to be pleased with. The window-panes were battered by the sleet; the head-stones in the grave-yard beneath seemed to be holding themselves askance to keep it out of their faces. A tall iron railing protected them from the street, and on the other side of the railing an assemblage of Bostonians were trampling about in the liquid snow. Many of them were looking up and down; they appeared to be waiting for something. From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to the place where they stood — such a vehicle as the lady at the window, in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had never seen before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colors, and decorated apparently with jangling bells, attached to a species of groove in the pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal of rumbling, bouncing and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small horses. When it reached a certain point the people in front of the grave-yard, of whom much the greater number were women, carrying satchels and parcels, projected themselves upon it in a compact body — a movement suggesting the scramble for places in a life-boat at sea — and were engulfed in its large interior. Then the life-boat — or the life-car, as the lady at the window of the hotel vaguely designated it — went bumping and jingling away upon its invisible wheels, with the helmsman (the man at the wheel) guiding its course incongruously from the prow. This phenomenon was repeated every three minutes, and the supply of eagerly-moving women in cloaks, bearing reticules and bundles, renewed itself in the most liberal manner. On the other side of the grave-yard was a row of small red brick houses, showing a series of homely, domestic-looking backs; at the end opposite the hotel a tall wooden church-spire, painted white, rose high into the vagueness of the snow-flakes. The lady at the window looked at it for some time; for reasons of her own she thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen. She hated it, she despised it; it threw her into a state of irritation that was quite out of proportion to any sensible motive. She had never known herself to care so much about church-spires.