The Ambassadors (32 page)

"I come often," she said. "I love this place, but I'm terrible,
in general, for churches. The old women who live in them all know
me; in fact I'm already myself one of the old women. It's like
that, at all events, that I foresee I shall end." Looking about for
a chair, so that he instantly pulled one nearer, she sat down with
him again to the sound of an "Oh, I like so much your also being
fond—!"

He confessed the extent of his feeling, though she left the
object vague; and he was struck with the tact, the taste of her
vagueness, which simply took for granted in him a sense of
beautiful things. He was conscious of how much it was affected,
this sense, by something subdued and discreet in the way she had
arranged herself for her special object and her morning walk—he
believed her to have come on foot; the way her slightly thicker
veil was drawn—a mere touch, but everything; the composed gravity
of her dress, in which, here and there, a dull wine-colour seemed
to gleam faintly through black; the charming discretion of her
small compact head; the quiet note, as she sat, of her folded,
grey-gloved hands. It was, to Strether's mind, as if she sat on her
own ground, the light honours of which, at an open gate, she thus
easily did him, while all the vastness and mystery of the domain
stretched off behind. When people were so completely in possession
they could be extraordinarily civil; and our friend had indeed at
this hour a kind of revelation of her heritage. She was romantic
for him far beyond what she could have guessed, and again he found
his small comfort in the conviction that, subtle though she was,
his impression must remain a secret from her. The thing that, once
more, made him uneasy for secrets in general was this particular
patience she could have with his own want of colour; albeit that on
the other hand his uneasiness pretty well dropped after he had been
for ten minutes as colourless as possible and at the same time as
responsive.

The moments had already, for that matter, drawn their deepest
tinge from the special interest excited in him by his vision of his
companion's identity with the person whose attitude before the
glimmering altar had so impressed him. This attitude fitted
admirably into the stand he had privately taken about her connexion
with Chad on the last occasion of his seeing them together. It
helped him to stick fast at the point he had then reached; it was
there he had resolved that he WOULD stick, and at no moment since
had it seemed as easy to do so. Unassailably innocent was a
relation that could make one of the parties to it so carry herself.
If it wasn't innocent why did she haunt the churches?—into which,
given the woman he could believe he made out, she would never have
come to flaunt an insolence of guilt. She haunted them for
continued help, for strength, for peace—sublime support which, if
one were able to look at it so, she found from day to day. They
talked, in low easy tones and with lifted lingering looks, about
the great monument and its history and its beauty—all of which,
Madame de Vionnet professed, came to her most in the other, the
outer view. "We'll presently, after we go," she said, "walk round
it again if you like. I'm not in a particular hurry, and it will be
pleasant to look at it well with you." He had spoken of the great
romancer and the great romance, and of what, to his imagination,
they had done for the whole, mentioning to her moreover the
exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy blazing volumes that were
so out of proportion.

"Out of proportion to what?"

"Well, to any other plunge." Yet he felt even as he spoke how at
that instant he was plunging. He had made up his mind and was
impatient to get into the air; for his purpose was a purpose to be
uttered outside, and he had a fear that it might with delay still
slip away from him. She however took her time; she drew out their
quiet gossip as if she had wished to profit by their meeting, and
this confirmed precisely an interpretation of her manner, of her
mystery. While she rose, as he would have called it, to the
question of Victor Hugo, her voice itself, the light low quaver of
her deference to the solemnity about them, seemed to make her words
mean something that they didn't mean openly. Help, strength, peace,
a sublime support—she hadn't found so much of these things as that
the amount wouldn't be sensibly greater for any scrap his
appearance of faith in her might enable her to feel in her hand.
Every little, in a long strain, helped, and if he happened to
affect her as a firm object she could hold on by, he wouldn't jerk
himself out of her reach. People in difficulties held on by what
was nearest, and he was perhaps after all not further off than
sources of comfort more abstract. It was as to this he had made up
his mind; he had made it up, that is, to give her a sign. The sign
would be that—though it was her own affair—he understood; the sign
would be that—though it was her own affair—she was free to clutch.
Since she took him for a firm object—much as he might to his own
sense appear at times to rock—he would do his best to BE one.

The end of it was that half an hour later they were seated
together for an early luncheon at a wonderful, a delightful house
of entertainment on the left bank—a place of pilgrimage for the
knowing, they were both aware, the knowing who came, for its great
renown, the homage of restless days, from the other end of the
town. Strether had already been there three times—first with Miss
Gostrey, then with Chad, then with Chad again and with Waymarsh and
little Bilham, all of whom he had himself sagaciously entertained;
and his pleasure was deep now on learning that Madame de Vionnet
hadn't yet been initiated. When he had said as they strolled round
the church, by the river, acting at last on what, within, he had
made up his mind to, "Will you, if you have time, come to dejeuner
with me somewhere? For instance, if you know it, over there on the
other side, which is so easy a walk"—and then had named the place;
when he had done this she stopped short as for quick intensity, and
yet deep difficulty, of response. She took in the proposal as if it
were almost too charming to be true; and there had perhaps never
yet been for her companion so unexpected a moment of pride—so fine,
so odd a case, at any rate, as his finding himself thus able to
offer to a person in such universal possession a new, a rare
amusement. She had heard of the happy spot, but she asked him in
reply to a further question how in the world he could suppose her
to have been there. He supposed himself to have supposed that Chad
might have taken her, and she guessed this the next moment to his
no small discomfort.

"Ah, let me explain," she smiled, "that I don't go about with
him in public; I never have such chances—not having them
otherwise—and it's just the sort of thing that, as a quiet creature
living in my hole, I adore." It was more than kind of him to have
thought of it—though, frankly, if he asked whether she had time she
hadn't a single minute. That however made no difference—she'd throw
everything over. Every duty at home, domestic, maternal, social,
awaited her; but it was a case for a high line. Her affairs would
go to smash, but hadn't one a right to one's snatch of scandal when
one was prepared to pay? It was on this pleasant basis of costly
disorder, consequently, that they eventually seated themselves, on
either side of a small table, at a window adjusted to the busy quay
and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where, for an hour, in the
matter of letting himself go, of diving deep, Strether was to feel
he had touched bottom. He was to feel many things on this occasion,
and one of the first of them was that he had travelled far since
that evening in London, before the theatre, when his dinner with
Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had struck him as
requiring so many explanations. He had at that time gathered them
in, the explanations—he had stored them up; but it was at present
as if he had either soared above or sunk below them—he couldn't
tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn't seem to
leave the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than
lucidity. How could he wish it to be lucid for others, for any one,
that he, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the
bright clean ordered water-side life came in at the open
window?—the mere way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their
intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their
bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost
with the smile of a child, while her grey eyes moved in and out of
their talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which
early summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his
face and their human questions.

Their human questions became many before they had done—many
more, as one after the other came up, than our friend's free fancy
had at all foreseen. The sense he had had before, the sense he had
had repeatedly, the sense that the situation was running away with
him, had never been so sharp as now; and all the more that he could
perfectly put his finger on the moment it had taken the bit in its
teeth. That accident had definitely occurred, the other evening,
after Chad's dinner; it had occurred, as he fully knew, at the
moment when he interposed between this lady and her child, when he
suffered himself so to discuss with her a matter closely concerning
them that her own subtlety, marked by its significant "Thank you!"
instantly sealed the occasion in her favour. Again he had held off
for ten days, but the situation had continued out of hand in spite
of that; the fact that it was running so fast being indeed just WHY
he had held off. What had come over him as he recognised her in the
nave of the church was that holding off could be but a losing game
from the instant she was worked for not only by her subtlety, but
by the hand of fate itself. If all the accidents were to fight on
her side—and by the actual showing they loomed large—he could only
give himself up. This was what he had done in privately deciding
then and there to propose she should breakfast with him. What did
the success of his proposal in fact resemble but the smash in which
a regular runaway properly ends? The smash was their walk, their
dejeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their
present talk and his present pleasure in it—to say nothing, wonder
of wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less, accordingly,
was his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted up at least
the folly of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory,
in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the
hum of the town and the plash of the river. It WAS clearly better
to suffer as a sheep than as a lamb. One might as well perish by
the sword as by famine.

"Maria's still away?"—that was the first thing she had asked
him; and when he had found the frankness to be cheerful about it in
spite of the meaning he knew her to attach to Miss Gostrey's
absence, she had gone on to enquire if he didn't tremendously miss
her. There were reasons that made him by no means sure, yet he
nevertheless answered "Tremendously"; which she took in as if it
were all she had wished to prove. Then, "A man in trouble MUST be
possessed somehow of a woman," she said; "if she doesn't come in
one way she comes in another."

"Why do you call me a man in trouble?"

"Ah because that's the way you strike me." She spoke ever so
gently and as if with all fear of wounding him while she sat
partaking of his bounty. "AREn't you in trouble?"

He felt himself colour at the question, and then hated
that—hated to pass for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable
by Chad's lady, in respect to whom he had come out with such a fund
of indifference—was he already at that point? Perversely, none the
less, his pause gave a strange air of truth to her supposition; and
what was he in fact but disconcerted at having struck her just in
the way he had most dreamed of not doing? "I'm not in trouble yet,"
he at last smiled. "I'm not in trouble now."

"Well, I'm always so. But that you sufficiently know." She was a
woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on
the table. It was a posture unknown to Mrs. Newsome, but it was
easy for a femme du monde. "Yes—I am 'now'!"

"There was a question you put to me," he presently returned,
"the night of Chad's dinner. I didn't answer it then, and it has
been very handsome of you not to have sought an occasion for
pressing me about it since."

She was instantly all there. "Of course I know what you allude
to. I asked you what you had meant by saying, the day you came to
see me, just before you left me, that you'd save me. And you then
said—at our friend's—that you'd have really to wait to see, for
yourself, what you did mean."

"Yes, I asked for time," said Strether. "And it sounds now, as
you put it, like a very ridiculous speech."

"Oh!" she murmured—she was full of attenuation. But she had
another thought. "If it does sound ridiculous why do you deny that
you're in trouble?"

"Ah if I were," he replied, "it wouldn't be the trouble of
fearing ridicule. I don't fear it."

"What then do you?"

"Nothing—now." And he leaned back in his chair.

"I like your 'now'!" she laughed across at him.

"Well, it's precisely that it fully comes to me at present that
I've kept you long enough. I know by this time, at any rate, what I
meant by my speech; and I really knew it the night of Chad's
dinner."

"Then why didn't you tell me?"

"Because it was difficult at the moment. I had already at that
moment done something for you, in the sense of what I had said the
day I went to see you; but I wasn't then sure of the importance I
might represent this as having."

She was all eagerness. "And you're sure now?"

"Yes; I see that, practically, I've done for you—had done for
you when you put me your question—all that it's as yet possible to
me to do. I feel now," he went on, "that it may go further than I
thought. What I did after my visit to you," he explained, "was to
write straight off to Mrs. Newsome about you, and I'm at last, from
one day to the other, expecting her answer. It's this answer that
will represent, as I believe, the consequences."