Valentin de Bellegarde died tranquilly, just as the cold faint March
dawn began to illumine the faces of the little knot of friends gathered
about his bedside. An hour afterwards Newman left the inn and drove to
Geneva; he was naturally unwilling to be present at the arrival of
Madame de Bellegarde and her first-born. At Geneva, for the moment, he
remained. He was like a man who has had a fall and wants to sit still
and count his bruises. He instantly wrote to Madame de Cintré, relating
to her the circumstances of her brother’s death—with certain
exceptions—and asking her what was the earliest moment at which he
might hope that she would consent to see him. M. Ledoux had told him
that he had reason to know that Valentin’s will—Bellegarde had a great
deal of elegant personal property to dispose of—contained a request
that he should be buried near his father in the churchyard of
Fleurières, and Newman intended that the state of his own relations
with the family should not deprive him of the satisfaction of helping
to pay the last earthly honors to the best fellow in the world. He
reflected that Valentin’s friendship was older than Urbain’s enmity,
and that at a funeral it was easy to escape notice. Madame de Cintré’s
answer to his letter enabled him to time his arrival at Fleurières.
This answer was very brief; it ran as follows:—
“I thank you for your letter, and for your being with Valentin. It is a
most inexpressible sorrow to me that I was not. To see you will be
nothing but a distress to me; there is no need, therefore, to wait for
what you call brighter days. It is all one now, and I shall have no
brighter days. Come when you please; only notify me first. My brother
is to be buried here on Friday, and my family is to remain here. C. de
C.”
As soon as he received this letter Newman went straight to Paris and to
Poitiers. The journey took him far southward, through green Touraine
and across the far-shining Loire, into a country where the early spring
deepened about him as he went. But he had never made a journey during
which he heeded less what he would have called the lay of the land. He
obtained lodging at the inn at Poitiers, and the next morning drove in
a couple of hours to the village of Fleurières. But here, preoccupied
though he was, he could not fail to notice the picturesqueness of the
place. It was what the French call a _petit bourg_; it lay at the base
of a sort of huge mound on the summit of which stood the crumbling
ruins of a feudal castle, much of whose sturdy material, as well as
that of the wall which dropped along the hill to enclose the clustered
houses defensively, had been absorbed into the very substance of the
village. The church was simply the former chapel of the castle,
fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous
enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a little
graveyard. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep, as they
slanted into the grass; the patient elbow of the rampart held them
together on one side, and in front, far beneath their mossy lids, the
green plains and blue distances stretched away. The way to church, up
the hill, was impracticable to vehicles. It was lined with peasants,
two or three rows deep, who stood watching old Madame de Bellegarde
slowly ascend it, on the arm of her elder son, behind the pall-bearers
of the other. Newman chose to lurk among the common mourners who
murmured “Madame la Comtesse” as a tall figure veiled in black passed
before them. He stood in the dusky little church while the service was
going forward, but at the dismal tomb-side he turned away and walked
down the hill. He went back to Poitiers, and spent two days in which
patience and impatience were singularly commingled. On the third day he
sent Madame de Cintré a note, saying that he would call upon her in the
afternoon, and in accordance with this he again took his way to
Fleurières. He left his vehicle at the tavern in the village street,
and obeyed the simple instructions which were given him for finding the
château.
“It is just beyond there,” said the landlord, and pointed to the
tree-tops of the park, above the opposite houses. Newman followed the
first cross-road to the right—it was bordered with mouldy cottages—and
in a few moments saw before him the peaked roofs of the towers.
Advancing farther, he found himself before a vast iron gate, rusty and
closed; here he paused a moment, looking through the bars. The château
was near the road; this was at once its merit and its defect; but its
aspect was extremely impressive. Newman learned afterwards, from a
guide-book of the province, that it dated from the time of Henry IV. It
presented to the wide, paved area which preceded it and which was edged
with shabby farm-buildings an immense façade of dark time-stained
brick, flanked by two low wings, each of which terminated in a little
Dutch-looking pavilion capped with a fantastic roof. Two towers rose
behind, and behind the towers was a mass of elms and beeches, now just
faintly green.
But the great feature was a wide, green river which washed the
foundations of the château. The building rose from an island in the
circling stream, so that this formed a perfect moat spanned by a
two-arched bridge without a parapet. The dull brick walls, which here
and there made a grand, straight sweep; the ugly little cupolas of the
wings, the deep-set windows, the long, steep pinnacles of mossy slate,
all mirrored themselves in the tranquil river. Newman rang at the gate,
and was almost frightened at the tone with which a big rusty bell above
his head replied to him. An old woman came out from the gate-house and
opened the creaking portal just wide enough for him to pass, and he
went in, across the dry, bare court and the little cracked white slabs
of the causeway on the moat. At the door of the château he waited for
some moments, and this gave him a chance to observe that Fleurières was
not “kept up,” and to reflect that it was a melancholy place of
residence. “It looks,” said Newman to himself—and I give the comparison
for what it is worth—“like a Chinese penitentiary.” At last the door
was opened by a servant whom he remembered to have seen in the Rue de
l’Université. The man’s dull face brightened as he perceived our hero,
for Newman, for indefinable reasons, enjoyed the confidence of the
liveried gentry. The footman led the way across a great central
vestibule, with a pyramid of plants in tubs in the middle of glass
doors all around, to what appeared to be the principal drawing-room of
the château. Newman crossed the threshold of a room of superb
proportions, which made him feel at first like a tourist with a
guide-book and a cicerone awaiting a fee. But when his guide had left
him alone, with the observation that he would call Madame la Comtesse,
Newman perceived that the salon contained little that was remarkable
save a dark ceiling with curiously carved rafters, some curtains of
elaborate, antiquated tapestry, and a dark oaken floor, polished like a
mirror. He waited some minutes, walking up and down; but at length, as
he turned at the end of the room, he saw that Madame de Cintré had come
in by a distant door. She wore a black dress, and she stood looking at
him. As the length of the immense room lay between them he had time to
look at her before they met in the middle of it.
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 Cintré. “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 Cintré, 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 Cintré 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 Cintré shook her head. “I remember; I was sorry afterwards.”
“You were sorry when she came down and put on the thumbscrews. 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 Cintré 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 Cintré 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 Cintré, “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?”
Madame de Cintré looked a little frightened. “I spoke of my mother too
blindly, the other day. I am my own mistress, by law and by her
approval. She can do nothing to me; she has done nothing. She has never
alluded to those hard words I used about her.”
“She has made you feel them, I’ll promise you!” said Newman.
“It’s my conscience that makes me feel them.”
“Your conscience seems to me to be rather mixed!” exclaimed Newman,
passionately.
“It has been in great trouble, but now it is very clear,” said Madame
de Cintré. “I don’t give you up for any worldly advantage or for any
worldly happiness.”
“Oh, you don’t give me up for Lord Deepmere, I know,” said Newman. “I
won’t pretend, even to provoke you, that I think that. But that’s what
your mother and your brother wanted, and your mother, at that
villainous ball of hers—I liked it at the time, but the very thought of
it now makes me rabid—tried to push him on to make up to you.”
“Who told you this?” said Madame de Cintré softly.
“Not Valentin. I observed it. I guessed it. I didn’t know at the time
that I was observing it, but it stuck in my memory. And afterwards, you
recollect, I saw Lord Deepmere with you in the conservatory. You said
then that you would tell me at another time what he had said to you.”
“That was before—before _this_,” said Madame de Cintré.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Newman; “and, besides, I think I know. He’s
an honest little Englishman. He came and told you what your mother was
up to—that she wanted him to supplant me; not being a commercial
person. If he would make you an offer she would undertake to bring you
over and give me the slip. Lord Deepmere isn’t very intellectual, so
she had to spell it out to him. He said he admired you ‘no end,’ and
that he wanted you to know it; but he didn’t like being mixed up with
that sort of underhand work, and he came to you and told tales. That
was about the amount of it, wasn’t it? And then you said you were
perfectly happy.”
“I don’t see why we should talk of Lord Deepmere,” said Madame de
Cintré. “It was not for that you came here. And about my mother, it
doesn’t matter what you suspect and what you know. When once my mind
has been made up, as it is now, I should not discuss these things.
Discussing anything, now, is very idle. We must try and live each as we
can. I believe you will be happy again; even, sometimes, when you think
of me. When you do so, think this—that it was not easy, and that I did
the best I could. I have things to reckon with that you don’t know. I
mean I have feelings. I must do as they force me—I must, I must. They
would haunt me otherwise,” she cried, with vehemence; “they would kill
me!”
“I know what your feelings are: they are superstitions! They are the
feeling that, after all, though I _am_ a good fellow, I have been in
business; the feeling that your mother’s looks are law and your
brother’s words are gospel; that you all hang together, and that it’s a
part of the everlasting proprieties that they should have a hand in
everything you do. It makes my blood boil. That _is_ cold; you are
right. And what I feel here,” and Newman struck his heart and became
more poetical than he knew, “is a glowing fire!”
A spectator less preoccupied than Madame de Cintré’s distracted wooer
would have felt sure from the first that her appealing calm of manner
was the result of violent effort, in spite of which the tide of
agitation was rapidly rising. On these last words of Newman’s it
overflowed, though at first she spoke low, for fear of her voice
betraying her. “No. I was not right—I am not cold! I believe that if I
am doing what seems so bad, it is not mere weakness and falseness. Mr.
Newman, it’s like a religion. I can’t tell you—I can’t! It’s cruel of
you to insist. I don’t see why I shouldn’t ask you to believe me—and
pity me. It’s like a religion. There’s a curse upon the house; I don’t
know what—I don’t know why—don’t ask me. We must all bear it. I have
been too selfish; I wanted to escape from it. You offered me a great
chance—besides my liking you. It seemed good to change completely, to
break, to go away. And then I admired you. But I can’t—it has overtaken
and come back to me.” Her self-control had now completely abandoned
her, and her words were broken with long sobs. “Why do such dreadful
things happen to us—why is my brother Valentin killed, like a beast in
the midst of his youth and his gaiety and his brightness and all that
we loved him for? Why are there things I can’t ask about—that I am
afraid to know? Why are there places I can’t look at, sounds I can’t
hear? Why is it given to me to choose, to decide, in a case so hard and
so terrible as this? I am not meant for that—I am not made for boldness
and defiance. I was made to be happy in a quiet, natural way.” At this
Newman gave a most expressive groan, but Madame de Cintré went on. “I
was made to do gladly and gratefully what is expected of me. My mother
has always been very good to me; that’s all I can say. I must not judge
her; I must not criticize her. If I did, it would come back to me. I
can’t change!”
“No,” said Newman, bitterly; “_I_ must change—if I break in two in the
effort!”
“You are different. You are a man; you will get over it. You have all
kinds of consolation. You were born—you were trained, to changes.
Besides—besides, I shall always think of you.”
“I don’t care for that!” cried Newman. “You are cruel—you are terribly
cruel. God forgive you! You may have the best reasons and the finest
feelings in the world; that makes no difference. You are a mystery to
me; I don’t see how such hardness can go with such loveliness.”
Madame de Cintré fixed him a moment with her swimming eyes. “You
believe I am hard, then?”
Newman answered her look, and then broke out, “You are a perfect,
faultless creature! Stay by me!”
“Of course I am hard,” she went on. “Whenever we give pain we are hard.
And we _must_ give pain; that’s the world,—the hateful, miserable
world! Ah!” and she gave a long, deep sigh, “I can’t even say I am glad
to have known you—though I am. That too is to wrong you. I can say
nothing that is not cruel. Therefore let us part, without more of this.
Good-bye!” And she put out her hand.
Newman stood and looked at it without taking it, and raised his eyes to
her face. He felt, himself, like shedding tears of rage. “What are you
going to do?” he asked. “Where are you going?”
“Where I shall give no more pain and suspect no more evil. I am going
out of the world.”
“Out of the world?”
“I am going into a convent.”
“Into a convent!” Newman repeated the words with the deepest dismay; it
was as if she had said she was going into an hospital. “Into a
convent—_you!_”
“I told you that it was not for my worldly advantage or pleasure I was
leaving you.”
But still Newman hardly understood. “You are going to be a nun,” he
went on, “in a cell—for life—with a gown and white veil?”
“A nun—a Carmelite nun,” said Madame de Cintré. “For life, with God’s
leave.”
The idea struck Newman as too dark and horrible for belief, and made
him feel as he would have done if she had told him that she was going
to mutilate her beautiful face, or drink some potion that would make
her mad. He clasped his hands and began to tremble, visibly.
“Madame de Cintré, don’t, don’t!” he said. “I beseech you! On my knees,
if you like, I’ll beseech you.”
She laid her hand upon his arm, with a tender, pitying, almost
reassuring gesture. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You have wrong
ideas. It’s nothing horrible. It is only peace and safety. It is to be
out of the world, where such troubles as this come to the innocent, to
the best. And for life—that’s the blessing of it! They can’t begin
again.”
Newman dropped into a chair and sat looking at her with a long,
inarticulate murmur. That this superb woman, in whom he had seen all
human grace and household force, should turn from him and all the
brightness that he offered her—him and his future and his fortune and
his fidelity—to muffle herself in ascetic rags and entomb herself in a
cell was a confounding combination of the inexorable and the grotesque.
As the image deepened before him the grotesque seemed to expand and
overspread it; it was a reduction to the absurd of the trial to which
he was subjected. “You—you a nun!” he exclaimed; “you with your beauty
defaced—you behind locks and bars! Never, never, if I can prevent it!”
And he sprang to his feet with a violent laugh.
“You can’t prevent it,” said Madame de Cintré, “and it ought—a
little—to satisfy you. Do you suppose I will go on living in the world,
still beside you, and yet not with you? It is all arranged. Good-bye,
good-bye.”
This time he took her hand, took it in both his own. “Forever?” he
said. Her lips made an inaudible movement and his own uttered a deep
imprecation. She closed her eyes, as if with the pain of hearing it;
then he drew her towards him and clasped her to his breast. He kissed
her white face; for an instant she resisted and for a moment she
submitted; then, with force, she disengaged herself and hurried away
over the long shining floor. The next moment the door closed behind
her.
Newman made his way out as he could.