“It will be more than amusing,” said Bellegarde; “it will be inspiring. I look at it from my point of view, and you from yours. After all, anything for a change! And only yesterday I was yawning so as to dislocate my jaw, and declaring that there was nothing new under the sun! If it isn’t new to see you come into the family as a suitor, I am very much mistaken. Let me say that, my dear fellow; I won’t call it anything else, bad or good; I will simply call it new.” And overcome with a sense of the novelty thus foreshadowed, Valentin de Bellegarde threw himself into a deep armchair before the fire, and, with a fixed, intense smile, seemed to read a vision of it in the flame of the logs. After a while he looked up. “Go ahead, my boy; you have my good wishes,” he said. “But it is really a pity you don’t understand me, that you don’t know just what I am doing.”
“Oh,” said Newman, laughing, “don’t do anything wrong. Leave me to myself, rather, or defy me, out and out. I wouldn’t lay any load on your conscience.”
Bellegarde sprang up again; he was evidently excited; there was a warmer spark even than usual in his eye. “You never will understand—you never will know,” he said; “and if you succeed, and I turn out to have helped you, you will never be grateful, not as I shall deserve you should be. You will be an excellent fellow always, but you will not be grateful. But it doesn’t matter, for I shall get my own fun out of it.” And he broke into an extravagant laugh. “You look puzzled,” he added; “you look almost frightened.”
“It is a pity,” said Newman, “that I don’t understand you. I shall lose some very good jokes.”
“I told you, you remember, that we were very strange people,” Bellegarde went on. “I give you warning again. We are! My mother is strange, my brother is strange, and I verily believe that I am stranger than either. You will even find my sister a little strange. Old trees have crooked branches, old houses have queer cracks, old races have odd secrets. Remember that we are eight hundred years old!”
“Very good,” said Newman; “that’s the sort of thing I came to Europe for. You come into my programme.”
“Touchez-là, then,” said Bellegarde, putting out his hand. “It’s a bargain: I accept you; I espouse your cause. It’s because I like you, in a great measure; but that is not the only reason!” And he stood holding Newman’s hand and looking at him askance.
“What is the other one?”
“I am in the Opposition. I dislike someone else.”
“Your brother?” asked Newman, in his unmodulated voice.