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 arm-chair, 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 any one 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.