Newman called upon the comical duchess and found her at home. An old
gentleman with a high nose and a gold-headed cane was just taking leave
of her; he made Newman a protracted obeisance as he retired, and our
hero supposed that he was one of the mysterious grandees with whom he
had shaken hands at Madame de Bellegarde’s ball. The duchess, in her
armchair, from which she did not move, with a great flower-pot on one
side of her, a pile of pink-covered novels on the other, and a large
piece of tapestry depending from her lap, presented an expansive and
imposing front; but her aspect was in the highest degree gracious, and
there was nothing in her manner to check the effusion of his
confidence. She talked to him about flowers and books, getting launched
with marvelous promptitude; about the theatres, about the peculiar
institutions of his native country, about the humidity of Paris about
the pretty complexions of the American ladies, about his impressions of
France and his opinion of its female inhabitants. All this was a
brilliant monologue on the part of the duchess, who, like many of her
country-women, was a person of an affirmative rather than an
interrogative cast of mind, who made _mots_ and put them herself into
circulation, and who was apt to offer you a present of a convenient
little opinion, neatly enveloped in the gilt paper of a happy
Gallicism. Newman had come to her with a grievance, but he found
himself in an atmosphere in which apparently no cognizance was taken of
grievance; an atmosphere into which the chill of discomfort had never
penetrated, and which seemed exclusively made up of mild, sweet, stale
intellectual perfumes. The feeling with which he had watched Madame
d’Outreville at the treacherous festival of the Bellegardes came back
to him; she struck him as a wonderful old lady in a comedy,
particularly well up in her part. He observed before long that she
asked him no questions about their common friends; she made no allusion
to the circumstances under which he had been presented to her. She
neither feigned ignorance of a change in these circumstances nor
pretended to condole with him upon it; but she smiled and discoursed
and compared the tender-tinted wools of her tapestry, as if the
Bellegardes and their wickedness were not of this world. “She is
fighting shy!” said Newman to himself; and, having made the
observation, he was prompted to observe, farther, how the duchess would
carry off her indifference. She did so in a masterly manner. There was
not a gleam of disguised consciousness in those small, clear,
demonstrative eyes which constituted her nearest claim to personal
loveliness, there was not a symptom of apprehension that Newman would
trench upon the ground she proposed to avoid. “Upon my word, she does
it very well,” he tacitly commented. “They all hold together bravely,
and, whether anyone else can trust them or not, they can certainly
trust each other.”
Newman, at this juncture, fell to admiring the duchess for her fine
manners. He felt, most accurately, that she was not a grain less urbane
than she would have been if his marriage were still in prospect; but he
felt also that she was not a particle more urbane. He had come, so
reasoned the duchess—Heaven knew why he had come, after what had
happened; and for the half hour, therefore, she would be _charmante_.
But she would never see him again. Finding no ready-made opportunity to
tell his story, Newman pondered these things more dispassionately than
might have been expected; he stretched his legs, as usual, and even
chuckled a little, appreciatively and noiselessly. And then as the
duchess went on relating a _mot_ with which her mother had snubbed the
great Napoleon, it occurred to Newman that her evasion of a chapter of
French history more interesting to himself might possibly be the result
of an extreme consideration for his feelings. Perhaps it was delicacy
on the duchess’s part—not policy. He was on the point of saying
something himself, to make the chance which he had determined to give
her still better, when the servant announced another visitor. The
duchess, on hearing the name—it was that of an Italian prince—gave a
little imperceptible pout, and said to Newman, rapidly: “I beg you to
remain; I desire this visit to be short.” Newman said to himself, at
this, that Madame d’Outreville intended, after all, that they should
discuss the Bellegardes together.
The prince was a short, stout man, with a head disproportionately
large. He had a dusky complexion and a bushy eyebrow, beneath which his
eye wore a fixed and somewhat defiant expression; he seemed to be
challenging you to insinuate that he was top-heavy. The duchess,
judging from her charge to Newman, regarded him as a bore; but this was
not apparent from the unchecked flow of her conversation. She made a
fresh series of _mots_, characterized with great felicity the Italian
intellect and the taste of the figs at Sorrento, predicted the ultimate
future of the Italian kingdom (disgust with the brutal Sardinian rule
and complete reversion, throughout the peninsula, to the sacred sway of
the Holy Father), and, finally, gave a history of the love affairs of
the Princess X——. This narrative provoked some rectifications on the
part of the prince, who, as he said, pretended to know something about
that matter; and having satisfied himself that Newman was in no
laughing mood, either with regard to the size of his head or anything
else, he entered into the controversy with an animation for which the
duchess, when she set him down as a bore, could not have been prepared.
The sentimental vicissitudes of the Princess X—— led to a discussion of
the heart history of Florentine nobility in general; the duchess had
spent five weeks in Florence and had gathered much information on the
subject. This was merged, in turn, in an examination of the Italian
heart _per se_. The duchess took a brilliantly heterodox view—thought
it the least susceptible organ of its kind that she had ever
encountered, related examples of its want of susceptibility, and at
last declared that for her the Italians were a people of ice. The
prince became flame to refute her, and his visit really proved
charming. Newman was naturally out of the conversation; he sat with his
head a little on one side, watching the interlocutors. The duchess, as
she talked, frequently looked at him with a smile, as if to intimate,
in the charming manner of her nation, that it lay only with him to say
something very much to the point. But he said nothing at all, and at
last his thoughts began to wander. A singular feeling came over him—a
sudden sense of the folly of his errand. What under the sun had he to
say to the duchess, after all? Wherein would it profit him to tell her
that the Bellegardes were traitors and that the old lady, into the
bargain was a murderess? He seemed morally to have turned a sort of
somersault, and to find things looking differently in consequence. He
felt a sudden stiffening of his will and quickening of his reserve.
What in the world had he been thinking of when he fancied the duchess
could help him, and that it would conduce to his comfort to make her
think ill of the Bellegardes? What did her opinion of the Bellegardes
matter to him? It was only a shade more important than the opinion the
Bellegardes entertained of her. The duchess help him—that cold, stout,
soft, artificial woman help him?—she who in the last twenty minutes had
built up between them a wall of polite conversation in which she
evidently flattered herself that he would never find a gate. Had it
come to that—that he was asking favors of conceited people, and
appealing for sympathy where he had no sympathy to give? He rested his
arms on his knees, and sat for some minutes staring into his hat. As he
did so his ears tingled—he had come very near being an ass. Whether or
no the duchess would hear his story, he wouldn’t tell it. Was he to sit
there another half hour for the sake of exposing the Bellegardes? The
Bellegardes be hanged! He got up abruptly, and advanced to shake hands
with his hostess.
“You can’t stay longer?” she asked very graciously.
“I am afraid not,” he said.
She hesitated a moment, and then, “I had an idea you had something
particular to say to me,” she declared.
Newman looked at her; he felt a little dizzy; for the moment he seemed
to be turning his somersault again. The little Italian prince came to
his help: “Ah, madam, who has not that?” he softly sighed.
“Don’t teach Mr. Newman to say _fadaises_,” said the duchess. “It is
his merit that he doesn’t know how.”
“Yes, I don’t know how to say _fadaises_,” said Newman, “and I don’t
want to say anything unpleasant.”
“I am sure you are very considerate,” said the duchess with a smile;
and she gave him a little nod for good-bye with which he took his
departure.
Once in the street, he stood for some time on the pavement, wondering
whether, after all, he was not an ass not to have discharged his
pistol. And then again he decided that to talk to anyone whomsoever
about the Bellegardes would be extremely disagreeable to him. The least
disagreeable thing, under the circumstances, was to banish them from
his mind, and never think of them again. Indecision had not hitherto
been one of Newman’s weaknesses, and in this case it was not of long
duration. For three days after this he did not, or at least he tried
not to, think of the Bellegardes. He dined with Mrs. Tristram, and on
her mentioning their name, he begged her almost severely to desist.
This gave Tom Tristram a much-coveted opportunity to offer his
condolences.
He leaned forward, laying his hand on Newman’s arm compressing his lips
and shaking his head. “The fact is my dear fellow, you see, that you
ought never to have gone into it. It was not your doing, I know—it was
all my wife. If you want to come down on her, I’ll stand off; I give
you leave to hit her as hard as you like. You know she has never had a
word of reproach from me in her life, and I think she is in need of
something of the kind. Why didn’t you listen to _me?_ You know I didn’t
believe in the thing. I thought it at the best an amiable delusion. I
don’t profess to be a Don Juan or a gay Lothario,—that class of man,
you know; but I do pretend to know something about the harder sex. I
have never disliked a woman in my life that she has not turned out
badly. I was not at all deceived in Lizzie, for instance; I always had
my doubts about her. Whatever you may think of my present situation, I
must at least admit that I got into it with my eyes open. Now suppose
you had got into something like this box with Madame de Cintré. You may
depend upon it she would have turned out a stiff one. And upon my word
I don’t see where you could have found your comfort. Not from the
marquis, my dear Newman; he wasn’t a man you could go and talk things
over with in a sociable, common-sense way. Did he ever seem to want to
have you on the premises—did he ever try to see you alone? Did he ever
ask you to come and smoke a cigar with him of an evening, or step in,
when you had been calling on the ladies, and take something? I don’t
think you would have got much encouragement out of _him_. And as for
the old lady, she struck one as an uncommonly strong dose. They have a
great expression here, you know; they call it ‘sympathetic.’ Everything
is sympathetic—or ought to be. Now Madame de Bellegarde is about as
sympathetic as that mustard-pot. They’re a d—d cold-blooded lot, any
way; I felt it awfully at that ball of theirs. I felt as if I were
walking up and down in the Armory, in the Tower of London! My dear boy,
don’t think me a vulgar brute for hinting at it, but you may depend
upon it, all they wanted was your money. I know something about that; I
can tell when people want one’s money! Why they stopped wanting yours I
don’t know; I suppose because they could get someone else’s without
working so hard for it. It isn’t worth finding out. It may be that it
was not Madame de Cintré that backed out first, very likely the old
woman put her up to it. I suspect she and her mother are really as
thick as thieves, eh? You are well out of it, my boy; make up your mind
to that. If I express myself strongly it is all because I love you so
much; and from that point of view I may say I should as soon have
thought of making up to that piece of pale high-mightiness as I should
have thought of making up to the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde.”
Newman sat gazing at Tristram during this harangue with a lack-lustre
eye; never yet had he seemed to himself to have outgrown so completely
the phase of equal comradeship with Tom Tristram. Mrs. Tristram’s
glance at her husband had more of a spark; she turned to Newman with a
slightly lurid smile. “You must at least do justice,” she said, “to the
felicity with which Mr. Tristram repairs the indiscretions of a too
zealous wife.”
But even without the aid of Tom Tristram’s conversational felicities,
Newman would have begun to think of the Bellegardes again. He could
cease to think of them only when he ceased to think of his loss and
privation, and the days had as yet but scantily lightened the weight of
this incommodity. In vain Mrs. Tristram begged him to cheer up; she
assured him that the sight of his countenance made her miserable.
“How can I help it?” he demanded with a trembling voice. “I feel like a
widower—and a widower who has not even the consolation of going to
stand beside the grave of his wife—who has not the right to wear so
much mourning as a weed on his hat. I feel,” he added in a moment “as
if my wife had been murdered and her assassins were still at large.”
Mrs. Tristram made no immediate rejoinder, but at last she said, with a
smile which, in so far as it was a forced one, was less successfully
simulated than such smiles, on her lips, usually were; “Are you very
sure that you would have been happy?”
Newman stared a moment, and then shook his head. “That’s weak,” he
said; “that won’t do.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Tristram with a more triumphant bravery, “I don’t
believe you would have been happy.”
Newman gave a little laugh. “Say I should have been miserable, then;
it’s a misery I should have preferred to any happiness.”
Mrs. Tristram began to muse. “I should have been curious to see; it
would have been very strange.”
“Was it from curiosity that you urged me to try and marry her?”
“A little,” said Mrs. Tristram, growing still more audacious. Newman
gave her the one angry look he had been destined ever to give her,
turned away and took up his hat. She watched him a moment, and then she
said, “That sounds very cruel, but it is less so than it sounds.
Curiosity has a share in almost everything I do. I wanted very much to
see, first, whether such a marriage could actually take place; second,
what would happen if it should take place.”
“So you didn’t believe,” said Newman, resentfully.
“Yes, I believed—I believed that it would take place, and that you
would be happy. Otherwise I should have been, among my speculations, a
very heartless creature. _But_,” she continued, laying her hand upon
Newman’s arm and hazarding a grave smile, “it was the highest flight
ever taken by a tolerably bold imagination!”
Shortly after this she recommended him to leave Paris and travel for
three months. Change of scene would do him good, and he would forget
his misfortune sooner in absence from the objects which had witnessed
it. “I really feel,” Newman rejoined, “as if to leave _you_, at least,
would do me good—and cost me very little effort. You are growing
cynical, you shock me and pain me.”
“Very good,” said Mrs. Tristram, good-naturedly or cynically, as may be
thought most probable. “I shall certainly see you again.”
Newman was very willing to get away from Paris; the brilliant streets
he had walked through in his happier hours, and which then seemed to
wear a higher brilliancy in honor of his happiness, appeared now to be
in the secret of his defeat and to look down upon it in shining
mockery. He would go somewhere; he cared little where; and he made his
preparations. Then, one morning, at haphazard, he drove to the train
that would transport him to Boulogne and dispatch him thence to the
shores of Britain. As he rolled along in the train he asked himself
what had become of his revenge, and he was able to say that it was
provisionally pigeon-holed in a very safe place; it would keep till
called for.
He arrived in London in the midst of what is called “the season,” and
it seemed to him at first that he might here put himself in the way of
being diverted from his heavy-heartedness. He knew no one in all
England, but the spectacle of the mighty metropolis roused him somewhat
from his apathy. Anything that was enormous usually found favor with
Newman, and the multitudinous energies and industries of England
stirred within him a dull vivacity of contemplation. It is on record
that the weather, at that moment, was of the finest English quality; he
took long walks and explored London in every direction; he sat by the
hour in Kensington Gardens and beside the adjoining Drive, watching the
people and the horses and the carriages; the rosy English beauties, the
wonderful English dandies, and the splendid flunkies. He went to the
opera and found it better than in Paris; he went to the theatre and
found a surprising charm in listening to dialogue the finest points of
which came within the range of his comprehension. He made several
excursions into the country, recommended by the waiter at his hotel,
with whom, on this and similar points, he had established confidential
relations. He watched the deer in Windsor Forest and admired the Thames
from Richmond Hill; he ate white-bait and brown-bread and butter at
Greenwich, and strolled in the grassy shadow of the cathedral of
Canterbury. He also visited the Tower of London and Madame Tussaud’s
exhibition. One day he thought he would go to Sheffield, and then,
thinking again, he gave it up. Why should he go to Sheffield? He had a
feeling that the link which bound him to a possible interest in the
manufacture of cutlery was broken. He had no desire for an “inside
view” of any successful enterprise whatever, and he would not have
given the smallest sum for the privilege of talking over the details of
the most “splendid” business with the shrewdest of overseers.
One afternoon he had walked into Hyde Park, and was slowly threading
his way through the human maze which edges the Drive. The stream of
carriages was no less dense, and Newman, as usual, marveled at the
strange, dingy figures which he saw taking the air in some of the
stateliest vehicles. They reminded him of what he had read of eastern
and southern countries, in which grotesque idols and fetiches were
sometimes taken out of their temples and carried abroad in golden
chariots to be displayed to the multitude. He saw a great many pretty
cheeks beneath high-plumed hats as he squeezed his way through serried
waves of crumpled muslin; and sitting on little chairs at the base of
the great serious English trees, he observed a number of quiet-eyed
maidens who seemed only to remind him afresh that the magic of beauty
had gone out of the world with Madame de Cintré: to say nothing of
other damsels, whose eyes were not quiet, and who struck him still more
as a satire on possible consolation. He had been walking for some time,
when, directly in front of him, borne back by the summer breeze, he
heard a few words uttered in that bright Parisian idiom from which his
ears had begun to alienate themselves. The voice in which the words
were spoken made them seem even more like a thing with which he had
once been familiar, and as he bent his eyes it lent an identity to the
commonplace elegance of the back hair and shoulders of a young lady
walking in the same direction as himself. Mademoiselle Nioche,
apparently, had come to seek a more rapid advancement in London, and
another glance led Newman to suppose that she had found it. A gentleman
was strolling beside her, lending a most attentive ear to her
conversation and too entranced to open his lips. Newman did not hear
his voice, but perceived that he presented the dorsal expression of a
well-dressed Englishman. Mademoiselle Nioche was attracting attention:
the ladies who passed her turned round to survey the Parisian
perfection of her toilet. A great cataract of flounces rolled down from
the young lady’s waist to Newman’s feet; he had to step aside to avoid
treading upon them. He stepped aside, indeed, with a decision of
movement which the occasion scarcely demanded; for even this imperfect
glimpse of Miss Noémie had excited his displeasure. She seemed an
odious blot upon the face of nature; he wanted to put her out of his
sight. He thought of Valentin de Bellegarde, still green in the earth
of his burial—his young life clipped by this flourishing impudence. The
perfume of the young lady’s finery sickened him; he turned his head and
tried to deflect his course; but the pressure of the crowd kept him
near her a few minutes longer, so that he heard what she was saying.
“Ah, I am sure he will miss me,” she murmured. “It was very cruel in me
to leave him; I am afraid you will think me a very heartless creature.
He might perfectly well have come with us. I don’t think he is very
well,” she added; “it seemed to me to-day that he was not very gay.”
Newman wondered whom she was talking about, but just then an opening
among his neighbors enabled him to turn away, and he said to himself
that she was probably paying a tribute to British propriety and playing
at tender solicitude about her papa. Was that miserable old man still
treading the path of vice in her train? Was he still giving her the
benefit of his experience of affairs, and had he crossed the sea to
serve as her interpreter? Newman walked some distance farther, and then
began to retrace his steps taking care not to traverse again the orbit
of Mademoiselle Nioche. At last he looked for a chair under the trees,
but he had some difficulty in finding an empty one. He was about to
give up the search when he saw a gentleman rise from the seat he had
been occupying, leaving Newman to take it without looking at his
neighbors. He sat there for some time without heeding them; his
attention was lost in the irritation and bitterness produced by his
recent glimpse of Miss Noémie’s iniquitous vitality. But at the end of
a quarter of an hour, dropping his eyes, he perceived a small pug-dog
squatted upon the path near his feet—a diminutive but very perfect
specimen of its interesting species. The pug was sniffing at the
fashionable world, as it passed him, with his little black muzzle, and
was kept from extending his investigation by a large blue ribbon
attached to his collar with an enormous rosette and held in the hand of
a person seated next to Newman. To this person Newman transferred his
attention, and immediately perceived that he was the object of all that
of his neighbor, who was staring up at him from a pair of little fixed
white eyes. These eyes Newman instantly recognized; he had been sitting
for the last quarter of an hour beside M. Nioche. He had vaguely felt
that someone was staring at him. M. Nioche continued to stare; he
appeared afraid to move, even to the extent of evading Newman’s glance.
“Dear me,” said Newman; “are you here, too?” And he looked at his
neighbor’s helplessness more grimly than he knew. M. Nioche had a new
hat and a pair of kid gloves; his clothes, too, seemed to belong to a
more recent antiquity than of yore. Over his arm was suspended a lady’s
mantilla—a light and brilliant tissue, fringed with white lace—which
had apparently been committed to his keeping; and the little dog’s blue
ribbon was wound tightly round his hand. There was no expression of
recognition in his face—or of anything indeed save a sort of feeble,
fascinated dread; Newman looked at the pug and the lace mantilla, and
then he met the old man’s eyes again. “You know me, I see,” he pursued.
“You might have spoken to me before.” M. Nioche still said nothing, but
it seemed to Newman that his eyes began faintly to water. “I didn’t
expect,” our hero went on, “to meet you so far from—from the Café de la
Patrie.” The old man remained silent, but decidedly Newman had touched
the source of tears. His neighbor sat staring and Newman added, “What’s
the matter, M. Nioche? You used to talk—to talk very prettily. Don’t
you remember you even gave lessons in conversation?”
At this M. Nioche decided to change his attitude. He stooped and picked
up the pug, lifted it to his face and wiped his eyes on its little soft
back. “I’m afraid to speak to you,” he presently said, looking over the
puppy’s shoulder. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice me. I should have moved
away, but I was afraid that if I moved you would notice me. So I sat
very still.”
“I suspect you have a bad conscience, sir,” said Newman.
The old man put down the little dog and held it carefully in his lap.
Then he shook his head, with his eyes still fixed upon his
interlocutor. “No, Mr. Newman, I have a good conscience,” he murmured.
“Then why should you want to slink away from me?”
“Because—because you don’t understand my position.”
“Oh, I think you once explained it to me,” said Newman. “But it seems
improved.”
“Improved!” exclaimed M. Nioche, under his breath. “Do you call this
improvement?” And he glanced at the treasures in his arms.
“Why, you are on your travels,” Newman rejoined. “A visit to London in
the season is certainly a sign of prosperity.”
M. Nioche, in answer to this cruel piece of irony, lifted the puppy up
to his face again, peering at Newman with his small blank eye-holes.
There was something almost imbecile in the movement, and Newman hardly
knew whether he was taking refuge in a convenient affectation of
unreason, or whether he had in fact paid for his dishonor by the loss
of his wits. In the latter case, just now, he felt little more tenderly
to the foolish old man than in the former. Responsible or not, he was
equally an accomplice of his detestably mischievous daughter. Newman
was going to leave him abruptly, when a ray of entreaty appeared to
disengage itself from the old man’s misty gaze. “Are you going away?”
he asked.
“Do you want me to stay?” said Newman.
“I should have left you—from consideration. But my dignity suffers at
your leaving me—that way.”
“Have you got anything particular to say to me?”
M. Nioche looked around him to see that no one was listening, and then
he said, very softly but distinctly, “I have _not_ forgiven her!”
Newman gave a short laugh, but the old man seemed for the moment not to
perceive it; he was gazing away, absently, at some metaphysical image
of his implacability. “It doesn’t much matter whether you forgive her
or not,” said Newman. “There are other people who won’t, I assure you.”
“What has she done?” M. Nioche softly questioned, turning round again.
“I don’t know what she does, you know.”
“She has done a devilish mischief; it doesn’t matter what,” said
Newman. “She’s a nuisance; she ought to be stopped.”
M. Nioche stealthily put out his hand and laid it very gently upon
Newman’s arm. “Stopped, yes,” he whispered. “That’s it. Stopped short.
She is running away—she must be stopped.” Then he paused a moment and
looked round him. “I mean to stop her,” he went on. “I am only waiting
for my chance.”
“I see,” said Newman, laughing briefly again. “She is running away and
you are running after her. You have run a long distance!”
But M. Nioche stared insistently: “I shall stop her!” he softly
repeated.
He had hardly spoken when the crowd in front of them separated, as if
by the impulse to make way for an important personage. Presently,
through the opening, advanced Mademoiselle Nioche, attended by the
gentleman whom Newman had lately observed. His face being now presented
to our hero, the latter recognized the irregular features, the hardly
more regular complexion, and the amiable expression of Lord Deepmere.
Noémie, on finding herself suddenly confronted with Newman, who, like
M. Nioche, had risen from his seat, faltered for a barely perceptible
instant. She gave him a little nod, as if she had seen him yesterday,
and then, with a good-natured smile, “_Tiens_, how we keep meeting!”
she said. She looked consummately pretty, and the front of her dress
was a wonderful work of art. She went up to her father, stretching out
her hands for the little dog, which he submissively placed in them, and
she began to kiss it and murmur over it: “To think of leaving him all
alone,—what a wicked, abominable creature he must believe me! He has
been very unwell,” she added, turning and affecting to explain to
Newman, with a spark of infernal impudence, fine as a needlepoint, in
her eye. “I don’t think the English climate agrees with him.”
“It seems to agree wonderfully well with his mistress,” said Newman.
“Do you mean me? I have never been better, thank you,” Miss Noémie
declared. “But with _milord_”—and she gave a brilliant glance at her
late companion—“how can one help being well?” She seated herself in the
chair from which her father had risen, and began to arrange the little
dog’s rosette.
Lord Deepmere carried off such embarrassment as might be incidental to
this unexpected encounter with the inferior grace of a male and a
Briton. He blushed a good deal, and greeted the object of his late
momentary aspiration to rivalry in the favor of a person other than the
mistress of the invalid pug with an awkward nod and a rapid
ejaculation—an ejaculation to which Newman, who often found it hard to
understand the speech of English people, was able to attach no meaning.
Then the young man stood there, with his hand on his hip, and with a
conscious grin, staring askance at Miss Noémie. Suddenly an idea seemed
to strike him, and he said, turning to Newman, “Oh, you know her?”
“Yes,” said Newman, “I know her. I don’t believe you do.”
“Oh dear, yes, I do!” said Lord Deepmere, with another grin. “I knew
her in Paris—by my poor cousin Bellegarde, you know. He knew her, poor
fellow, didn’t he? It was she, you know, who was at the bottom of his
affair. Awfully sad, wasn’t it?” continued the young man, talking off
his embarrassment as his simple nature permitted. “They got up some
story about its being for the Pope; about the other man having said
something against the Pope’s morals. They always do that, you know.
They put it on the Pope because Bellegarde was once in the Zouaves. But
it was about _her_ morals—_she_ was the Pope!” Lord Deepmere pursued,
directing an eye illumined by this pleasantry toward Mademoiselle
Nioche, who was bending gracefully over her lap-dog, apparently
absorbed in conversation with it. “I dare say you think it rather odd
that I should—ah—keep up the acquaintance,” the young man resumed; “but
she couldn’t help it, you know, and Bellegarde was only my twentieth
cousin. I dare say you think it’s rather cheeky, my showing with her in
Hyde Park, but you see she isn’t known yet, and she’s in such very good
form——” And Lord Deepmere’s conclusion was lost in the attesting glance
which he again directed toward the young lady.
Newman turned away; he was having more of her than he relished. M.
Nioche had stepped aside on his daughter’s approach, and he stood
there, within a very small compass, looking down hard at the ground. It
had never yet, as between him and Newman, been so apposite to place on
record the fact that he had not forgiven his daughter. As Newman was
moving away he looked up and drew near to him, and Newman, seeing the
old man had something particular to say, bent his head for an instant.
“You will see it some day in the papers,” murmured M. Nioche.
Our hero departed to hide his smile, and to this day, though the
newspapers form his principal reading, his eyes have not been arrested
by any paragraph forming a sequel to this announcement.