The Ambassadors Henry James (novel24 txt) 📖

“Oh immensely. Don’t you see it?”

“Well,” said Chad, “she won’t do anything worse to you than make you like her.”

“It’s just of that I’m afraid.”

“Then it’s not fair to me.”

Strether cast about. “It’s fair to your mother.”

“Oh,” said Chad, “are you afraid of her?”

“Scarcely less. Or perhaps even more. But is this lady against your interests at home?” Strether went on.

“Not directly, no doubt; but she’s greatly in favour of them here.”

“And what⁠—‘here’⁠—does she consider them to be?”

“Well, good relations!”

“With herself?”

“With herself.”

“And what is it that makes them so good?”

“What? Well, that’s exactly what you’ll make out if you’ll only go, as I’m supplicating you, to see her.”

Strether stared at him with a little of the wanness, no doubt, that the vision of more to “make out” could scarce help producing. “I mean how good are they?”

“Oh awfully good.”

Again Strether had faltered, but it was brief. It was all very well, but there was nothing now he wouldn’t risk. “Excuse me, but I must really⁠—as I began by telling you⁠—know where I am. Is she bad?”

“ ‘Bad’?”⁠—Chad echoed it, but without a shock. “Is that what’s implied⁠—?”

“When relations are good?” Strether felt a little silly, and was even conscious of a foolish laugh, at having it imposed on him to have appeared to speak so. What indeed was he talking about? His stare had relaxed; he looked now all round him. But something in him brought him back, though he still didn’t know quite how to turn it. The two or three ways he thought of, and one of them in particular, were, even with scruples dismissed, too ugly. He none the less at last found something. “Is her life without reproach?”

It struck him, directly he had found it, as pompous and priggish; so much so that he was thankful to Chad for taking it only in the right spirit. The young man spoke so immensely to the point that the effect was practically of positive blandness. “Absolutely without reproach. A beautiful life. Allez donc voir!”

These last words were, in the liberality of their confidence, so imperative that Strether went through no form of assent; but before they separated it had been confirmed that he should be picked up at a quarter to five.

It was quite by half-past five⁠—after the two men had been together in Madame de Vionnet’s drawing-room not more than a dozen minutes⁠—that Chad, with a look at his watch and then another at their hostess, said genially, gaily: “I’ve an engagement, and I know you won’t complain if I leave him with you. He’ll interest you immensely; and as for her,” he declared to Strether, “I assure you, if you’re at all nervous, she’s perfectly safe.”

He had left them to be embarrassed or not by this guarantee, as they could best manage, and embarrassment was a thing that Strether wasn’t at first sure Madame de Vionnet escaped. He escaped it himself, to his surprise; but he had grown used by this time to thinking of himself as brazen. She occupied, his hostess, in the Rue de Bellechasse, the first floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from an old clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches; the house, to his restless sense, was in the high homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was always looking for⁠—sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely missed⁠—was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, mouldings, mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish-white salon into which he had been shown. He seemed at the very outset to see her in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary cherished charming. While his eyes turned after a little from those of his hostess and Chad freely talked⁠—not in the least about him, but about other people, people he didn’t know, and quite as if he did know them⁠—he found himself making out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes’ heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk.

The place itself went further back⁠—that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Staël, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private order⁠—little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of brass-mounted cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet’s apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey’s little museum of bargains and from Chad’s lovely home; he recognised it as founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the spell of transmission⁠—transmission from her father’s line, he quite made up his mind⁠—had only received, accepted and been quiet. When she hadn’t been quiet she had been moved at the most to some occult charity for some fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her predecessors might even conceivably have parted