In that uninitiated observation of the great spectacle of English life
upon which I have touched, it might be supposed that Newman passed a
great many dull days. But the dullness of his days pleased him; his
melancholy, which was settling into a secondary stage, like a healing
wound, had in it a certain acrid, palatable sweetness. He had company
in his thoughts, and for the present he wanted no other. He had no
desire to make acquaintances, and he left untouched a couple of notes
of introduction which had been sent him by Tom Tristram. He thought a
great deal of Madame de Cintré—sometimes with a dogged tranquillity
which might have seemed, for a quarter of an hour at a time, a near
neighbor to forgetfulness. He lived over again the happiest hours he
had known—that silver chain of numbered days in which his afternoon
visits, tending sensibly to the ideal result, had subtilized his good
humor to a sort of spiritual intoxication. He came back to reality,
after such reveries, with a somewhat muffled shock; he had begun to
feel the need of accepting the unchangeable. At other times the reality
became an infamy again and the unchangeable an imposture, and he gave
himself up to his angry restlessness till he was weary. But on the
whole he fell into a rather reflective mood. Without in the least
intending it or knowing it, he attempted to read the moral of his
strange misadventure. He asked himself, in his quieter hours, whether
perhaps, after all, he _was_ more commercial than was pleasant. We know
that it was in obedience to a strong reaction against questions
exclusively commercial that he had come out to pick up æsthetic
entertainment in Europe; it may therefore be understood that he was
able to conceive that a man might be too commercial. He was very
willing to grant it, but the concession, as to his own case, was not
made with any very oppressive sense of shame. If he had been too
commercial, he was ready to forget it, for in being so he had done no
man any wrong that might not be as easily forgotten. He reflected with
sober placidity that at least there were no monuments of his “meanness”
scattered about the world. If there was any reason in the nature of
things why his connection with business should have cast a shadow upon
a connection—even a connection broken—with a woman justly proud, he was
willing to sponge it out of his life forever. The thing seemed a
possibility; he could not feel it, doubtless, as keenly as some people,
and it hardly seemed worth while to flap his wings very hard to rise to
the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that still
remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be made to,
here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there
sometimes played a shadowy imagery. He had a fancy of carrying out his
life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintré had been left to
him—of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked.
In this, certainly, there was no sacrifice; but there was a pale,
oblique ray of inspiration. It would be lonely entertainment—a good
deal like a man talking to himself in the mirror for want of better
company. Yet the idea yielded Newman several half hours’ dumb
exaltation as he sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs
stretched, over the relics of an expensively poor dinner, in the
undying English twilight. If, however, his commercial imagination was
dead, he felt no contempt for the surviving actualities begotten by it.
He was glad he had been prosperous and had been a great man of business
rather than a small one; he was extremely glad he was rich. He felt no
impulse to sell all he had and give to the poor, or to retire into
meditative economy and asceticism. He was glad he was rich and
tolerably young; if it was possible to think too much about buying and
selling, it was a gain to have a good slice of life left in which not
to think about them. Come, what should he think about now? Again and
again Newman could think only of one thing; his thoughts always came
back to it, and as they did so, with an emotional rush which seemed
physically to express itself in a sudden upward choking, he leaned
forward—the waiter having left the room—and, resting his arms on the
table, buried his troubled face.
He remained in England till midsummer, and spent a month in the
country, wandering about cathedrals, castles, and ruins. Several times,
taking a walk from his inn into meadows and parks, he stopped by a
well-worn stile, looked across through the early evening at a gray
church tower, with its dusky nimbus of thick-circling swallows, and
remembered that this might have been part of the entertainment of his
honeymoon. He had never been so much alone or indulged so little in
accidental dialogue. The period of recreation appointed by Mrs.
Tristram had at last expired, and he asked himself what he should do
now. Mrs. Tristram had written to him, proposing to him that he should
join her in the Pyrenees; but he was not in the humor to return to
France. The simplest thing was to repair to Liverpool and embark on the
first American steamer. Newman made his way to the great seaport and
secured his berth; and the night before sailing he sat in his room at
the hotel, staring down, vacantly and wearily, at an open portmanteau.
A number of papers were lying upon it, which he had been meaning to
look over; some of them might conveniently be destroyed. But at last he
shuffled them roughly together, and pushed them into a corner of the
valise; they were business papers, and he was in no humor for sifting
them. Then he drew forth his pocket-book and took out a paper of
smaller size than those he had dismissed. He did not unfold it; he
simply sat looking at the back of it. If he had momentarily entertained
the idea of destroying it, the idea quickly expired. What the paper
suggested was the feeling that lay in his innermost heart and that no
reviving cheerfulness could long quench—the feeling that after all and
above all he was a good fellow wronged. With it came a hearty hope that
the Bellegardes were enjoying their suspense as to what he would do
yet. The more it was prolonged the more they would enjoy it! He had
hung fire once, yes; perhaps, in his present queer state of mind, he
might hang fire again. But he restored the little paper to his
pocket-book very tenderly, and felt better for thinking of the suspense
of the Bellegardes. He felt better every time he thought of it after
that, as he sailed the summer seas. He landed in New York and journeyed
across the continent to San Francisco, and nothing that he observed by
the way contributed to mitigate his sense of being a good fellow
wronged.
He saw a great many other good fellows—his old friends—but he told none
of them of the trick that had been played him. He said simply that the
lady he was to have married had changed her mind, and when he was asked
if he had changed his own, he said, “Suppose we change the subject.” He
told his friends that he had brought home no “new ideas” from Europe,
and his conduct probably struck them as an eloquent proof of failing
invention. He took no interest in chatting about his affairs and
manifested no desire to look over his accounts. He asked half a dozen
questions which, like those of an eminent physician inquiring for
particular symptoms, showed that he still knew what he was talking
about; but he made no comments and gave no directions. He not only
puzzled the gentlemen on the stock exchange, but he was himself
surprised at the extent of his indifference. As it seemed only to
increase, he made an effort to combat it; he tried to interest himself
and to take up his old occupations. But they appeared unreal to him; do
what he would he somehow could not believe in them. Sometimes he began
to fear that there was something the matter with his head; that his
brain, perhaps, had softened, and that the end of his strong activities
had come. This idea came back to him with an exasperating force. A
hopeless, helpless loafer, useful to no one and detestable to
himself—this was what the treachery of the Bellegardes had made of him.
In his restless idleness he came back from San Francisco to New York,
and sat for three days in the lobby of his hotel, looking out through a
huge wall of plate-glass at the unceasing stream of pretty girls in
Parisian-looking dresses, undulating past with little parcels nursed
against their neat figures. At the end of three days he returned to San
Francisco, and having arrived there he wished he had stayed away. He
had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, and it seemed to him that
he should never find it again. He had nothing to do _here_, he
sometimes said to himself; but there was something beyond the ocean
that he was still to do; something that he had left undone
experimentally and speculatively, to see if it could content itself to
remain undone. But it was not content: it kept pulling at his
heartstrings and thumping at his reason; it murmured in his ears and
hovered perpetually before his eyes. It interposed between all new
resolutions and their fulfillment; it seemed like a stubborn ghost,
dumbly entreating to be laid. Till that was done he should never be
able to do anything else.
One day, toward the end of the winter, after a long interval, he
received a letter from Mrs. Tristram, who apparently was animated by a
charitable desire to amuse and distract her correspondent. She gave him
much Paris gossip, talked of General Packard and Miss Kitty Upjohn,
enumerated the new plays at the theatre, and enclosed a note from her
husband, who had gone down to spend a month at Nice. Then came her
signature, and after this her postscript. The latter consisted of these
few lines: “I heard three days since from my friend, the Abbé Aubert,
that Madame de Cintré last week took the veil at the Carmelites. It was
on her twenty-seventh birthday, and she took the name of her,
patroness, St. Veronica. Sister Veronica has a lifetime before her!”
This letter came to Newman in the morning; in the evening he started
for Paris. His wound began to ache with its first fierceness, and
during his long bleak journey the thought of Madame de Cintré’s
“life-time,” passed within prison walls on whose outer side he might
stand, kept him perpetual company. Now he would fix himself in Paris
forever; he would extort a sort of happiness from the knowledge that if
she was not there, at least the stony sepulchre that held her was. He
descended, unannounced, upon Mrs. Bread, whom he found keeping lonely
watch in his great empty saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann. They were
as neat as a Dutch village, Mrs. Bread’s only occupation had been
removing individual dust-particles. She made no complaint, however, of
her loneliness, for in her philosophy a servant was but a mysteriously
projected machine, and it would be as fantastic for a housekeeper to
comment upon a gentleman’s absences as for a clock to remark upon not
being wound up. No particular clock, Mrs. Bread supposed, went all the
time, and no particular servant could enjoy all the sunshine diffused
by the career of an exacting master. She ventured, nevertheless, to
express a modest hope that Newman meant to remain a while in Paris.
Newman laid his hand on hers and shook it gently. “I mean to remain
forever,” he said.
He went after this to see Mrs. Tristram, to whom he had telegraphed,
and who expected him. She looked at him a moment and shook her head.
“This won’t do,” she said; “you have come back too soon.” He sat down
and asked about her husband and her children, tried even to inquire
about Miss Dora Finch. In the midst of this—“Do you know where she is?”
he asked, abruptly.
Mrs. Tristram hesitated a moment; of course he couldn’t mean Miss Dora
Finch. Then she answered, properly: “She has gone to the other house—in
the Rue d’Enfer.” After Newman had sat a while longer looking very
sombre, she went on: “You are not so good a man as I thought. You are
more—you are more—”
“More what?” Newman asked.
“More unforgiving.”
“Good God!” cried Newman; “do you expect me to forgive?”
“No, not that. I have forgiven, so of course you can’t. But you might
forget! You have a worse temper about it than I should have expected.
You look wicked—you look dangerous.”
“I may be dangerous,” he said; “but I am not wicked. No, I am not
wicked.” And he got up to go. Mrs. Tristram asked him to come back to
dinner; but he answered that he did not feel like pledging himself to
be present at an entertainment, even as a solitary guest. Later in the
evening, if he should be able, he would come.
He walked away through the city, beside the Seine and over it, and took
the direction of the Rue d’Enfer. The day had the softness of early
spring; but the weather was gray and humid. Newman found himself in a
part of Paris which he little knew—a region of convents and prisons, of
streets bordered by long dead walls and traversed by a few wayfarers.
At the intersection of two of these streets stood the house of the
Carmelites—a dull, plain edifice, with a high-shouldered blank wall all
round it. From without Newman could see its upper windows, its steep
roof and its chimneys. But these things revealed no symptoms of human
life; the place looked dumb, deaf, inanimate. The pale, dead,
discolored wall stretched beneath it, far down the empty side street—a
vista without a human figure. Newman stood there a long time; there
were no passers; he was free to gaze his fill. This seemed the goal of
his journey; it was what he had come for. It was a strange
satisfaction, and yet it was a satisfaction; the barren stillness of
the place seemed to be his own release from ineffectual longing. It
told him that the woman within was lost beyond recall, and that the
days and years of the future would pile themselves above her like the
huge immovable slab of a tomb. These days and years, in this place,
would always be just so gray and silent. Suddenly, from the thought of
their seeing him stand there, again the charm utterly departed. He
would never stand there again; it was gratuitous dreariness. He turned
away with a heavy heart, but with a heart lighter than the one he had
brought. Everything was over, and he too at last could rest. He walked
down through narrow, winding streets to the edge of the Seine again,
and there he saw, close above him, the soft, vast towers of Notre Dame.
He crossed one of the bridges and stood a moment in the empty place
before the great cathedral; then he went in beneath the grossly-imaged
portals. He wandered some distance up the nave and sat down in the
splendid dimness. He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming
off, at long intervals, to the rest of the world. He was very tired;
this was the best place he could be in. He said no prayers; he had no
prayers to say. He had nothing to be thankful for, and he had nothing
to ask; nothing to ask, because now he must take care of himself. But a
great cathedral offers a very various hospitality, and Newman sat in
his place, because while he was there he was out of the world. The most
unpleasant thing that had ever happened to him had reached its formal
conclusion, as it were; he could close the book and put it away. He
leaned his head for a long time on the chair in front of him; when he
took it up he felt that he was himself again. Somewhere in his mind, a
tight knot seemed to have loosened. He thought of the Bellegardes; he
had almost forgotten them. He remembered them as people he had meant to
do something to. He gave a groan as he remembered what he had meant to
do; he was annoyed at having meant to do it; the bottom, suddenly, had
fallen out of his revenge. Whether it was Christian charity or
unregenerate good nature—what it was, in the background of his soul—I
don’t pretend to say; but Newman’s last thought was that of course he
would let the Bellegardes go.
If he had spoken it aloud he would have said that he didn’t want to
hurt them. He was ashamed of having wanted to hurt them. They had hurt
him, but such things were really not his game. At last he got up and
came out of the darkening church; not with the elastic step of a man
who had won a victory or taken a resolve, but strolling soberly, like a
good-natured man who is still a little ashamed.
Going home, he said to Mrs. Bread that he must trouble her to put back
his things into the portmanteau she had unpacked the evening before.
His gentle stewardess looked at him through eyes a trifle bedimmed.
“Dear me, sir,” she exclaimed, “I thought you said that you were going
to stay forever.”
“I meant that I was going to stay away forever,” said Newman kindly.
And since his departure from Paris on the following day he has
certainly not returned. The gilded apartments I have so often spoken of
stand ready to receive him; but they serve only as a spacious residence
for Mrs. Bread, who wanders eternally from room to room, adjusting the
tassels of the curtains, and keeps her wages, which are regularly
brought her by a banker’s clerk, in a great pink Sèvres vase on the
drawing-room mantelshelf.
Late in the evening Newman went to Mrs. Tristram’s and found Tom
Tristram by the domestic fireside. “I’m glad to see you back in Paris,”
this gentleman declared. “You know it’s really the only place for a
white man to live.” Mr. Tristram made his friend welcome, according to
his own rosy light, and offered him a convenient _résumé_ of the
Franco-American gossip of the last six months. Then at last he got up
and said he would go for half an hour to the club. “I suppose a man who
has been for six months in California wants a little intellectual
conversation. I’ll let my wife have a go at you.”
Newman shook hands heartily with his host, but did not ask him to
remain; and then he relapsed into his place on the sofa, opposite to
Mrs. Tristram. She presently asked him what he had done after leaving
her. “Nothing particular,” said Newman.
“You struck me,” she rejoined, “as a man with a plot in his head. You
looked as if you were bent on some sinister errand, and after you had
left me I wondered whether I ought to have let you go.”
“I only went over to the other side of the river—to the Carmelites,”
said Newman.
Mrs. Tristram looked at him a moment and smiled. “What did you do
there? Try to scale the wall?”
“I did nothing. I looked at the place for a few minutes and then came
away.”
Mrs. Tristram gave him a sympathetic glance. “You didn’t happen to meet
M. de Bellegarde,” she asked, “staring hopelessly at the convent wall
as well? I am told he takes his sister’s conduct very hard.”
“No, I didn’t meet him, I am happy to say,” Newman answered, after a
pause.
“They are in the country,” Mrs. Tristram went on; “at—what is the name
of the place?—Fleurières. They returned there at the time you left
Paris and have been spending the year in extreme seclusion. The little
marquise must enjoy it; I expect to hear that she has eloped with her
daughter’s music-master!”
Newman was looking at the light wood-fire; but he listened to this with
extreme interest. At last he spoke: “I mean never to mention the name
of those people again, and I don’t want to hear anything more about
them.” And then he took out his pocket-book and drew forth a scrap of
paper. He looked at it an instant, then got up and stood by the fire.
“I am going to burn them up,” he said. “I am glad to have you as a
witness. There they go!” And he tossed the paper into the flame.
Mrs. Tristram sat with her embroidery needle suspended. “What is that
paper?” she asked.
Newman leaning against the fireplace, stretched his arms and drew a
longer breath than usual. Then after a moment, “I can tell you now,” he
said. “It was a paper containing a secret of the Bellegardes—something
which would damn them if it were known.”
Mrs. Tristram dropped her embroidery with a reproachful moan. “Ah, why
didn’t you show it to me?”
“I thought of showing it to you—I thought of showing it to everyone. I
thought of paying my debt to the Bellegardes that way. So I told them,
and I frightened them. They have been staying in the country as you
tell me, to keep out of the explosion. But I have given it up.”
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.
THE END