He felt, himself, that he was an antidote to oppressive secrets;what he offered her was, in fact, above all things a vast, sunny immunity from the need of having any.
He often passed his evenings, when Madame de Cintre had so appointed it, at the chilly fireside of Madame de Bellegarde, contenting himself with looking across the room, through narrowed eyelids, at his mistress, who always made a point, before her family, of talking to some one else.
Madame de Bellegarde sat by the fire conversing neatly and coldly with whomsoever approached her, and glancing round the room with her slowly-restless eye, the effect of which, when it lighted upon him, was to Newman's sense identical with that of a sudden spurt of damp air.
When he shook hands with her he always asked her with a laugh whether she could "stand him" another evening, and she replied, without a laugh, that thank God she had always been able to do her duty.Newman, talking once of the marquise to Mrs.Tristram, said that after all it was very easy to get on with her; it always was easy to get on with out-and-out rascals.
"And is it by that elegant term," said Mrs.Tristram, "that you designate the Marquise de Bellegarde?""Well," said Newman, "she is wicked, she is an old sinner.""What is her crime?" asked Mrs.Tristram.
"I shouldn't wonder if she had murdered some one--all from a sense of duty, of course.""How can you be so dreadful?" sighed Mrs.Tristram.
"I am not dreadful.I am speaking of her favorably.""Pray what will you say when you want to be severe?""I shall keep my severity for some one else--for the marquis.
There's a man I can't swallow, mix the drink as I will.""And what has HE done?"
"I can't quite make out; it is something dreadfully bad, something mean and underhand, and not redeemed by audacity, as his mother's misdemeanors may have been.If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while some one else was committing it."In spite of this invidious hypothesis, which must be taken for nothing more than an example of the capricious play of "American humor," Newman did his best to maintain an easy and friendly style of communication with M.de Bellegarde.
So long as he was in personal contact with people he disliked extremely to have anything to forgive them, and he was capable of a good deal of unsuspected imaginative effort (for the sake of his own personal comfort) to assume for the time that they were good fellows.He did his best to treat the marquis as one; he believed honestly, moreover, that he could not, in reason, be such a confounded fool as he seemed.
Newman's familiarity was never importunate; his sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance and consequently was innocent of ungraceful eagerness.
His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M.de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colorless form, unpleasantly dissimilar to the impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror.
He never forgot himself for an instant, and replied to what he must have considered Newman's "advances" with mechanical politeness.
Newman, who was constantly forgetting himself, and indulging in an unlimited amount of irresponsible inquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself confronted by the conscious, ironical smile of his host.What the deuce M.de Bellegarde was smiling at he was at a loss to divine.
M.de Bellegarde's smile may be supposed to have been, for himself, a compromise between a great many emotions.
So long as he smiled he was polite, and it was proper he should be polite.A smile, moreover, committed him to nothing more than politeness, and left the degree of politeness agreeably vague.
A smile, too, was neither dissent--which was too serious--nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible complications.
And then a smile covered his own personal dignity, which in this critical situation he was resolved to keep immaculate; it was quite enough that the glory of his house should pass into eclipse.
Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.
Newman was far from being versed in European politics, but he liked to have a general idea of what was going on about him, and he accordingly asked M.de Bellegarde several times what he thought of public affairs.
M.de Bellegarde answered with suave concision that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse, and that the age was rotten to its core.This gave Newman, for the moment, an almost kindly feeling for the marquis;he pitied a man for whom the world was so cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M.de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the time.
The marquis presently replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was enough for him:
he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name, to the throne of France.Newman stared, and after this he ceased to talk politics with M.de Bellegarde.
He was not horrified nor scandalized, he was not even amused;he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M.de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of diet;an appetite, for instance, for fishbones or nutshells.
Under these circumstances, of course, he would never have broached dietary questions with him.