The Ambassadors (27 page)

The place itself went further back—that he guessed, and how old
Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the
post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the
world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Stael, even of the young
Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a
stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He
had never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of
any special dignity, of a private order—little old miniatures,
medallions, pictures, books; books in leather bindings, pinkish and
greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged, together with
other promiscuous properties, under the glass of brass-mounted
cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into account. They
were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet's apartment as
something quite different from Miss Gostrey's little museum of
bargains and from Chad's lovely home; he recognised it as founded
much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to time
shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of
curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and
picked up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the
mistress of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the
spell of transmission—transmission from her father's line, he quite
made up his mind—had only received, accepted and been quiet. When
she hadn't been quiet she had been moved at the most to some occult
charity for some fallen fortune. There had been objects she or her
predecessors might even conceivably have parted with under need,
but Strether couldn't suspect them of having sold old pieces to get
"better" ones. They would have felt no difference as to better or
worse. He could but imagine their having felt—perhaps in
emigration, in proscription, for his sketch was slight and
confused—the pressure of want or the obligation of sacrifice.

The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other
force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a
chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste
whose discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He
guessed at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions,
a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right.
The general result of this was something for which he had no name
on the spot quite ready, but something he would have come nearest
to naming in speaking of it as the air of supreme respectability,
the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but none the less
distinct and diffused, of private honour. The air of supreme
respectability—that was a strange blank wall for his adventure to
have brought him to break his nose against. It had in fact, as he
was now aware, filled all the approaches, hovered in the court as
he passed, hung on the staircase as he mounted, sounded in the
grave rumble of the old bell, as little electric as possible, of
which Chad, at the door, had pulled the ancient but neatly-kept
tassel; it formed in short the clearest medium of its particular
kind that he had ever breathed. He would have answered for it at
the end of a quarter of an hour that some of the glass cases
contained swords and epaulettes of ancient colonels and generals;
medals and orders once pinned over hearts that had long since
ceased to beat; snuff-boxes bestowed on ministers and envoys;
copies of works presented, with inscriptions, by authors now
classic. At bottom of it all for him was the sense of her rare
unlikeness to the women he had known. This sense had grown, since
the day before, the more he recalled her, and had been above all
singularly fed by his talk with Chad in the morning. Everything in
fine made her immeasurably new, and nothing so new as the old house
and the old objects. There were books, two or three, on a small
table near his chair, but they hadn't the lemon-coloured covers
with which his eye had begun to dally from the hour of his arrival
and to the opportunity of a further acquaintance with which he had
for a fortnight now altogether succumbed. On another table, across
the room, he made out the great
Revue
; but even that
familiar face, conspicuous in Mrs. Newsome's parlours, scarce
counted here as a modern note. He was sure on the spot—and he
afterwards knew he was right—that this was a touch of Chad's own
hand. What would Mrs. Newsome say to the circumstance that Chad's
interested "influence" kept her paper-knife in the
Revue
?
The interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight
to the point—had in fact soon left it quite behind.

She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed
chair one of the few modern articles in the room, and she leaned
back in it with her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in
all her person, but the fine prompt play of her deep young face.
The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and academic, had
burnt down to the silver ashes of light wood, one of the windows,
at a distance, stood open to the mildness and stillness, out of
which, in the short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and
homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a clatter of sabots from some
coach-house on the other side of the court. Madame de Vionnet,
while Strether sat there, wasn't to shift her posture by an inch.
"I don't think you seriously believe in what you're doing," she
said; "but all the same, you know, I'm going to treat you quite as
if I did."

"By which you mean," Strether directly replied, "quite as if you
didn't! I assure you it won't make the least difference with me how
you treat me."

"Well," she said, taking that menace bravely and philosophically
enough, "the only thing that really matters is that you shall get
on with me."

"Ah but I don't!" he immediately returned.

It gave her another pause; which, however, she happily enough
shook off. "Will you consent to go on with me a
little—provisionally—as if you did?"

Then it was that he saw how she had decidedly come all the way;
and there accompanied it an extraordinary sense of her raising from
somewhere below him her beautiful suppliant eyes. He might have
been perched at his door-step or at his window and she standing in
the road. For a moment he let her stand and couldn't moreover have
spoken. It had been sad, of a sudden, with a sadness that was like
a cold breath in his face. "What can I do," he finally asked, "but
listen to you as I promised Chadwick?"

"Ah but what I'm asking you," she quickly said, "isn't what Mr.
Newsome had in mind." She spoke at present, he saw, as if to take
courageously ALL her risk. "This is my own idea and a different
thing."

It gave poor Strether in truth—uneasy as it made him
too—something of the thrill of a bold perception justified. "Well,"
he answered kindly enough, "I was sure a moment since that some
idea of your own had come to you."

She seemed still to look up at him, but now more serenely. "I
made out you were sure—and that helped it to come. So you see," she
continued, "we do get on."

"Oh but it appears to me I don't at all meet your request. How
can I when I don't understand it?"

"It isn't at all necessary you should understand; it will do
quite well enough if you simply remember it. Only feel I trust
you—and for nothing so tremendous after all. Just," she said with a
wonderful smile, "for common civility."

Strether had a long pause while they sat again face to face, as
they had sat, scarce less conscious, before the poor lady had
crossed the stream. She was the poor lady for Strether now because
clearly she had some trouble, and her appeal to him could only mean
that her trouble was deep. He couldn't help it; it wasn't his
fault; he had done nothing; but by a turn of the hand she had
somehow made their encounter a relation. And the relation profited
by a mass of things that were not strictly in it or of it; by the
very air in which they sat, by the high cold delicate room, by the
world outside and the little plash in the court, by the First
Empire and the relics in the stiff cabinets, by matters as far off
as those and by others as near as the unbroken clasp of her hands
in her lap and the look her expression had of being most natural
when her eyes were most fixed. "You count upon me of course for
something really much greater than it sounds."

"Oh it sounds great enough too!" she laughed at this.

He found himself in time on the point of telling her that she
was, as Miss Barrace called it, wonderful; but, catching himself
up, he said something else instead. "What was it Chad's idea then
that you should say to me?"

"Ah his idea was simply what a man's idea always is—to put every
effort off on the woman."

"The 'woman'—?" Strether slowly echoed.

"The woman he likes—and just in proportion as he likes her. In
proportion too—for shifting the trouble—as she likes HIM."

Strether followed it; then with an abruptness of his own: "How
much do you like Chad?"

"Just as much as THAT—to take all, with you, on myself." But she
got at once again away from this. "I've been trembling as if we
were to stand or fall by what you may think of me; and I'm even
now," she went on wonderfully, "drawing a long breath—and, yes,
truly taking a great courage—from the hope that I don't in fact
strike you as impossible."

"That's at all events, clearly," he observed after an instant,
"the way I don't strike YOU."

"Well," she so far assented, "as you haven't yet said you WON'T
have the little patience with me I ask for—"

"You draw splendid conclusions? Perfectly. But I don't
understand them," Strether pursued. "You seem to me to ask for much
more than you need. What, at the worst for you, what at the best
for myself, can I after all do? I can use no pressure that I
haven't used. You come really late with your request. I've already
done all that for myself the case admits of. I've said my say, and
here I am."

"Yes, here you are, fortunately!" Madame de Vionnet laughed.
"Mrs. Newsome," she added in another tone, "didn't think you can do
so little."

He had an hesitation, but he brought the words out. "Well, she
thinks so now."

"Do you mean by that—?" But she also hung fire.

"Do I mean what?"

She still rather faltered. "Pardon me if I touch on it, but if
I'm saying extraordinary things, why, perhaps, mayn't I? Besides,
doesn't it properly concern us to know?"

"To know what?" he insisted as after thus beating about the bush
she had again dropped.

She made the effort. "Has she given you up?"

He was amazed afterwards to think how simply and quietly he had
met it. "Not yet." It was almost as if he were a trifle
disappointed—had expected still more of her freedom. But he went
straight on. "Is that what Chad has told you will happen to
me?"

She was evidently charmed with the way he took it. "If you mean
if we've talked of it—most certainly. And the question's not what
has had least to do with my wishing to see you."

"To judge if I'm the sort of man a woman CAN—?"

"Precisely," she exclaimed—"you wonderful gentleman! I do
judge—I HAVE judged. A woman can't. You're safe—with every right to
be. You'd be much happier if you'd only believe it."

Strether was silent a little; then he found himself speaking
with a cynicism of confidence of which even at the moment the
sources were strange to him. "I try to believe it. But it's a
marvel," he exclaimed, "how YOU already get at it!"

Oh she was able to say. "Remember how much I was on the way to
it through Mr. Newsome—before I saw you. He thinks everything of
your strength."

"Well, I can bear almost anything!" our friend briskly
interrupted. Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and
with the effect of making him hear what he had said just as she had
heard it. He easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what in
truth had everything done but that? It had been all very well to
think at moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had
coerced her: what had he by this time done but let her practically
see that he accepted their relation? What was their relation
moreover—though light and brief enough in form as yet—but whatever
she might choose to make it? Nothing could prevent her—certainly he
couldn't—from making it pleasant. At the back of his head, behind
everything, was the sense that she was—there, before him, close to
him, in vivid imperative form—one of the rare women he had so often
heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence,
look, voice, the mere contemporaneous FACT of whom, from the moment
it was at all presented, made a relation of mere recognition. That
was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs. Newsome, a
contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to establish
herself; and at present, confronted with Madame de Vionnet, he felt
the simplicity of his original impression of Miss Gostrey. She
certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide,
each day was more and more a new lesson. There were at any rate
even among the stranger ones relations and relations. "Of course I
suit Chad's grand way," he quickly added. "He hasn't had much
difficulty in working me in."

She seemed to deny a little, on the young man's behalf, by the
rise of her eyebrows, an intention of any process at all
inconsiderate. "You must know how grieved he'd be if you were to
lose anything. He believes you can keep his mother patient."

Strether wondered with his eyes on her. "I see. THAT'S then what
you really want of me. And how am I to do it? Perhaps you'll tell
me that."

"Simply tell her the truth."

"And what do you call the truth?"

"Well, any truth—about us all—that you see yourself. I leave it
to you."

"Thank you very much. I like," Strether laughed with a slight
harshness, "the way you leave things!"