When I recommended you to try your fortune with her I of course thought well of you, and in spite of your sins I think so still.
But I confess I don't see quite what you are and what you have done, to make such a woman do this sort of thing for you.""Oh, there is something very fine in it!" said Newman with a laugh, repeating her words.He took an extreme satisfaction in hearing that there was something fine in it.
He had not the least doubt of it himself, but he had already begun to value the world's admiration of Madame de Cintre, as adding to the prospective glory of possession.
It was immediately after this conversation that Valentin de Bellegarde came to conduct his friend to the Rue de l'Universite to present him to the other members of his family."You are already introduced," he said, "and you have begun to be talked about.
My sister has mentioned your successive visits to my mother, and it was an accident that my mother was present at none of them.
I have spoken of you as an American of immense wealth, and the best fellow in the world, who is looking for something very superior in the way of a wife.""Do you suppose," asked Newman, "that Madame de Cintre has related to your mother the last conversation I had with her?""I am very certain that she has not; she will keep her own counsel.
Meanwhile you must make your way with the rest of the family.
Thus much is known about you: you have made a great fortune in trade, you are a little eccentric, and you frankly admire our dear Claire.
My sister-in-law, whom you remember seeing in Madame de Cintre's sitting-room, took, it appears, a fancy to you; she has described you as having beaucoup de cachet.My mother, therefore, is curious to see you.""She expects to laugh at me, eh?" said Newman.
"She never laughs.If she does not like you, don't hope to purchase favor by being amusing.Take warning by me!"This conversation took place in the evening, and half an hour later Valentin ushered his companion into an apartment of the house of the Rue de l'Universite into which he had not yet penetrated, the salon of the dowager Marquise de Bellegarde.It was a vast, high room, with elaborate and ponderous mouldings, painted a whitish gray, along the upper portion of the walls and the ceiling;with a great deal of faded and carefully repaired tapestry in the doorways and chair-backs; a Turkey carpet in light colors, still soft and deep, in spite of great antiquity, on the floor, and portraits of each of Madame de Bellegarde's children, at the age of ten, suspended against an old screen of red silk.
The room was illumined, exactly enough for conversation, by half a dozen candles, placed in odd corners, at a great distance apart.
In a deep armchair, near the fire, sat an old lady in black;at the other end of the room another person was seated at the piano, playing a very expressive waltz.In this latter person Newman recognized the young Marquise de Bellegarde.
Valentin presented his friend, and Newman walked up to the old lady by the fire and shook hands with her.
He received a rapid impression of a white, delicate, aged face, with a high forehead, a small mouth, and a pair of cold blue eyes which had kept much of the freshness of youth.
Madame de Bellegarde looked hard at him, and returned his hand-shake with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of St.Dunstan's.Her daughter-in-law stopped playing and gave him an agreeable smile.
Newman sat down and looked about him, while Valentin went and kissed the hand of the young marquise.
"I ought to have seen you before," said Madame de Bellegarde.
"You have paid several visits to my daughter.""Oh, yes," said Newman, smiling; "Madame de Cintre and I are old friends by this time.""You have gone fast," said Madame de Bellegarde.
"Not so fast as I should like," said Newman, bravely.
"Oh, you are very ambitious," answered the old lady.
"Yes, I confess I am," said Newman, smiling.
Madame de Bellegarde looked at him with her cold fine eyes, and he returned her gaze, reflecting that she was a possible adversary and trying to take her measure.
Their eyes remained in contact for some moments.
Then Madame de Bellegarde looked away, and without smiling, "I am very ambitious, too," she said.
Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable, inscrutable little woman.She resembled her daughter, and yet she was utterly unlike her.The coloring in Madame de Cintre was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary.
But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an "Oh, dear, no!" which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty.Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie.
But her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines.
"She is a woman of conventions and proprieties," he said to himself as he looked at her; "her world is the world of things immutably decreed.
But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it.
She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden;and when she sees 'This is genteel,' or 'This is improper,'
written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose." Madame de Bellegarde wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin, and she was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl.
"You are an American?" she said presently."I have seen several Americans.""There are several in Paris," said Newman jocosely.