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Read books online » Fiction » The American by Henry James (good inspirational books txt) 📖

Book online «The American by Henry James (good inspirational books txt) 📖». Author Henry James



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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.





CHAPTER XXI

There is a pretty public walk at Poitiers, laid out upon the crest of the high hill around which the little city clusters, planted with thick trees and looking down upon the fertile fields in which the old English princes fought for their right and held it. Newman paced up and down this quiet promenade for the greater part of the next day and let his eyes wander over the historic prospect; but he would have been sadly at a loss to tell you afterwards whether the latter was made up of coal-fields or of vineyards. He was wholly given up to his grievance, of which reflection by no means diminished the weight. He feared that Madame de Cintré was irretrievably lost; and yet, as he would have said himself, he didn’t see his way clear to giving her up. He found it impossible to turn his back upon Fleurières and its inhabitants; it seemed to him that some germ of hope or reparation must lurk there somewhere, if he could only stretch his arm out far enough to pluck it. It was as if he had his hand on a door-knob and were closing his clenched fist upon it: he had thumped, he had called, he had pressed the door with his powerful knee and shaken it with all his strength, and dead, damning silence had answered him. And yet something held him there—something hardened the grasp of his fingers. Newman’s satisfaction had been too intense, his whole plan too deliberate and mature, his prospect of happiness too rich and comprehensive for this fine moral fabric to crumble at a stroke. The very foundation seemed fatally injured, and yet he felt a stubborn desire still to try to save the edifice. He was filled with a sorer sense of wrong than he had ever known, or than he had supposed it possible he should know. To accept his injury and walk away without looking behind him was a stretch of good-nature of which he found himself incapable. He looked behind him intently and continually, and what he saw there did not assuage his resentment. He saw himself trustful, generous, liberal, patient, easy, pocketing frequent irritation and furnishing unlimited modesty. To have eaten humble pie, to have been snubbed and patronized and satirized and have consented to take it as one of the conditions of the bargain—to have done this, and done it all for nothing, surely gave one a right to protest. And to be turned off because one was a commercial person! As if he had ever talked or dreamt of the commercial since his connection with the Bellegardes began—as if he had made the least circumstance of the commercial—as if he would not have consented to confound the commercial fifty times a day, if it might have increased by a hair’s breadth the chance of the Bellegardes’ not playing him a trick! Granted that being commercial was fair ground for having a trick played upon one, how little they knew about the class so designed and its enterprising way of not standing upon trifles! It was in the light of his injury that the weight of Newman’s past endurance seemed so heavy; his actual irritation had not been so great, merged as it was in his vision of the cloudless blue that overarched his immediate wooing. But now his sense of outrage was deep, rancorous, and ever present; he felt that he was a good fellow wronged. As for Madame de Cintré’s conduct, it struck him with a kind of awe, and the fact that he was powerless to understand it or feel the reality of its motives only deepened the force with which he had attached himself to her. He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the form in which her religious feelings had moulded themselves would have seemed to him on his own part a rather pretentious affectation of Protestant zeal. If such superb white flowers as that could bloom in Catholic soil, the soil was not insalubrious. But it was one thing to be a Catholic, and another to turn nun—on your hand! There was something lugubriously comical in the way Newman’s thoroughly contemporaneous optimism was confronted with this dusky old-world expedient. To see a woman made for him and for motherhood to his children juggled away in this tragic travesty—it was a thing to rub one’s eyes over, a nightmare, an illusion, a hoax. But the hours passed away without disproving the thing, and leaving him only the after-sense of the vehemence with which he had embraced Madame de Cintré. He remembered her words and her looks; he turned them over and tried to shake the mystery out of them and to infuse them with an endurable meaning. What had she meant by her feeling being a kind of religion? It was the religion simply of the family laws, the religion of which her implacable little mother was the high priestess. Twist the thing about as her generosity would, the one certain fact was that they had used force against her. Her generosity had tried to screen them, but Newman’s heart rose into his throat at the thought that they should go scot-free.

The twenty-four hours wore themselves away, and the next morning Newman sprang to his feet with the resolution to return to Fleurières and demand another interview with Madame de Bellegarde and her son. He lost no time in putting it into practice. As he rolled swiftly over the excellent road in the little calèche furnished him at the inn at Poitiers, he drew forth, as it were, from the very safe place in his mind to which he had consigned it, the last information given him by poor Valentin. Valentin had told him he could do something with it, and Newman thought it would be well to have it at hand. This was of course not the first time, lately, that Newman had given it his attention. It was information in the rough,—it was dark and puzzling; but Newman was neither helpless nor afraid. Valentin had evidently meant to put him in possession of a powerful instrument, though he could not be said to have placed the handle very securely within his grasp. But if he had not really told him the secret, he had at least given him the clew to it—a clew of which that queer old Mrs. Bread held the other end. Mrs. Bread had always looked to Newman as if she knew secrets; and as he apparently enjoyed her esteem, he suspected she might be induced to share her knowledge with him. So long as there was only Mrs. Bread to deal with, he felt easy. As to what there was to find out, he had only one fear—that it might not be bad enough. Then, when the image of the marquise and her son rose before him again, standing side by side, the old woman’s hand in Urbain’s arm, and the same cold, unsociable fixedness

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