Chapter 26

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 Cintre — 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 aesthetic 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 Cintre 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; 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 inclosed 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 Abbe Aubert, that Madame de Cintre 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 life-time 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 Cintre’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 Sevres vase on the drawing-room mantel-shelf.

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 resume 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?— Fleurieres. 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 fire-place, 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 every one. 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