“Give me back Madame de Cintré in the same state in which you took her from me.”
M. de Bellegarde threw back his head and his pale face flushed. “Never!” he said.
“You can’t!”
“We wouldn’t if we could! In the sentiment which led us to deprecate her marriage nothing is changed.”
“‘Deprecate’ is good!” cried Newman. “It was hardly worth while to come here only to tell me that you are not ashamed of yourselves. I could have guessed that!”
The marquis slowly walked toward the door, and Newman, following, opened it for him. “What you propose to do will be very disagreeable,” M. de Bellegarde said. “That is very evident. But it will be nothing more.”
“As I understand it,” Newman answered, “that will be quite enough!”
M. de Bellegarde stood for a moment looking on the ground, as if he were ransacking his ingenuity to see what else he could do to save his father’s reputation. Then, with a little cold sigh, he seemed to signify that he regretfully surrendered the late marquis to the penalty of his turpitude. He gave a hardly perceptible shrug, took his neat umbrella from the servant in the vestibule, and, with his gentlemanly walk, passed out. Newman stood listening till he heard the door close; then he slowly exclaimed, “Well, I ought to begin to be satisfied now!”
CHAPTER XXV
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 armchair, 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 anyone else can trust them or not, they can certainly trust each other.”