The Ambassadors (33 page)

Patient and beautiful was her interest. "I see—the consequences
of your speaking for me." And she waited as if not to hustle
him.

He acknowledged it by immediately going on. "The question, you
understand, was HOW I should save you. Well, I'm trying it by thus
letting her know that I consider you worth saving."

"I see—I see." Her eagerness broke through.

"How can I thank you enough?" He couldn't tell her that,
however, and she quickly pursued. "You do really, for yourself,
consider it?"

His only answer at first was to help her to the dish that had
been freshly put before them. "I've written to her again since
then—I've left her in no doubt of what I think. I've told her all
about you."

"Thanks—not so much. 'All about' me," she went on—"yes."

"All it seems to me you've done for him."

"Ah and you might have added all it seems to ME!" She laughed
again, while she took up her knife and fork, as in the cheer of
these assurances. "But you're not sure how she'll take it."

"No, I'll not pretend I'm sure."

"Voila." And she waited a moment. "I wish you'd tell me about
her."

"Oh," said Strether with a slightly strained smile, "all that
need concern you about her is that she's really a grand
person."

Madame de Vionnet seemed to demur. "Is that all that need
concern me about her?"

But Strether neglected the question. "Hasn't Chad talked to
you?"

"Of his mother? Yes, a great deal—immensely. But not from your
point of view."

"He can't," our friend returned, "have said any ill of her."

"Not the least bit. He has given me, like you, the assurance
that she's really grand. But her being really grand is somehow just
what hasn't seemed to simplify our case. Nothing," she continued,
"is further from me than to wish to say a word against her; but of
course I feel how little she can like being told of her owing me
anything. No woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another
woman."

This was a proposition Strether couldn't contradict. "And yet
what other way could I have expressed to her what I felt? It's what
there was most to say about you."

"Do you mean then that she WILL be good to me?"

"It's what I'm waiting to see. But I've little doubt she would,"
he added, "if she could comfortably see you."

It seemed to strike her as a happy, a beneficent thought. "Oh
then couldn't that be managed? Wouldn't she come out? Wouldn't she
if you so put it to her? DID you by any possibility?" she faintly
quavered.

"Oh no"—he was prompt. "Not that. It would be, much more, to
give an account of you that—since there's no question of YOUR
paying the visit—I should go home first."

It instantly made her graver. "And are you thinking of
that?"

"Oh all the while, naturally."

"Stay with us—stay with us!" she exclaimed on this. "That's your
only way to make sure."

"To make sure of what?"

"Why that he doesn't break up. You didn't come out to do that to
him."

"Doesn't it depend," Strether returned after a moment, "on what
you mean by breaking up?"

"Oh you know well enough what I mean!"

His silence seemed again for a little to denote an
understanding. "You take for granted remarkable things."

"Yes, I do—to the extent that I don't take for granted vulgar
ones. You're perfectly capable of seeing that what you came out for
wasn't really at all to do what you'd now have to do."

"Ah it's perfectly simple," Strether good-humouredly pleaded.
"I've had but one thing to do—to put our case before him. To put it
as it could only be put here on the spot—by personal pressure. My
dear lady," he lucidly pursued, "my work, you see, is really done,
and my reasons for staying on even another day are none of the
best. Chad's in possession of our case and professes to do it full
justice. What remains is with himself. I've had my rest, my
amusement and refreshment; I've had, as we say at Woollett, a
lovely time. Nothing in it has been more lovely than this happy
meeting with you—in these fantastic conditions to which you've so
delightfully consented. I've a sense of success. It's what I
wanted. My getting all this good is what Chad has waited for, and I
gather that if I'm ready to go he's the same."

She shook her head with a finer deeper wisdom. "You're not
ready. If you're ready why did you write to Mrs. Newsome in the
sense you've mentioned to me?"

Strether considered. "I shan't go before I hear from her. You're
too much afraid of her," he added.

It produced between them a long look from which neither shrank.
"I don't think you believe that—believe I've not really reason to
fear her."

"She's capable of great generosity," Strether presently
stated.

"Well then let her trust me a little. That's all I ask. Let her
recognise in spite of everything what I've done."

"Ah remember," our friend replied, "that she can't effectually
recognise it without seeing it for herself. Let Chad go over and
show her what you've done, and let him plead with her there for it
and, as it were, for YOU."

She measured the depth of this suggestion. "Do you give me your
word of honour that if she once has him there she won't do her best
to marry him?"

It made her companion, this enquiry, look again a while out at
the view; after which he spoke without sharpness. "When she sees
for herself what he is—"

But she had already broken in. "It's when she sees for herself
what he is that she'll want to marry him most."

Strether's attitude, that of due deference to what she said,
permitted him to attend for a minute to his luncheon. "I doubt if
that will come off. It won't be easy to make it."

"It will be easy if he remains there—and he'll remain for the
money. The money appears to be, as a probability, so hideously
much."

"Well," Strether presently concluded, "nothing COULD really hurt
you but his marrying."

She gave a strange light laugh. "Putting aside what may really
hurt HIM."

But her friend looked at her as if he had thought of that too.
"The question will come up, of course, of the future that you
yourself offer him."

She was leaning back now, but she fully faced him. "Well, let it
come up!"

"The point is that it's for Chad to make of it what he can. His
being proof against marriage will show what he does make."

"If he IS proof, yes"—she accepted the proposition. "But for
myself," she added, "the question is what YOU make."

"Ah I make nothing. It's not my affair."

"I beg your pardon. It's just there that, since you've taken it
up and are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours. You're
not saving me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your
interest in our friend. The one's at any rate wholly dependent on
the other. You can't in honour not see me through," she wound up,
"because you can't in honour not see HIM."

Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness. The
thing that most moved him was really that she was so deeply
serious. She had none of the portentous forms of it, but he had
never come in contact, it struck him, with a force brought to so
fine a head. Mrs. Newsome, goodness knew, was serious; but it was
nothing to this. He took it all in, he saw it all together. "No,"
he mused, "I can't in honour not see him."

Her face affected him as with an exquisite light. "You WILL
then?"

"I will."

At this she pushed back her chair and was the next moment on her
feet. "Thank you!" she said with her hand held out to him across
the table and with no less a meaning in the words than her lips had
so particularly given them after Chad's dinner. The golden nail she
had then driven in pierced a good inch deeper. Yet he reflected
that he himself had only meanwhile done what he had made up his
mind to on the same occasion. So far as the essence of the matter
went he had simply stood fast on the spot on which he had then
planted his feet.

He received three days after this a communication from America,
in the form of a scrap of blue paper folded and gummed, not
reaching him through his bankers, but delivered at his hotel by a
small boy in uniform, who, under instructions from the concierge,
approached him as he slowly paced the little court. It was the
evening hour, but daylight was long now and Paris more than ever
penetrating. The scent of flowers was in the streets, he had the
whiff of violets perpetually in his nose; and he had attached
himself to sounds and suggestions, vibrations of the air, human and
dramatic, he imagined, as they were not in other places, that came
out for him more and more as the mild afternoons deepened—a far-off
hum, a sharp near click on the asphalt, a voice calling, replying,
somewhere and as full of tone as an actor's in a play. He was to
dine at home, as usual, with Waymarsh—they had settled to that for
thrift and simplicity; and he now hung about before his friend came
down.

He read his telegram in the court, standing still a long time
where he had opened it and giving five minutes afterwards to the
renewed study of it. At last, quickly, he crumpled it up as if to
get it out of the way; in spite of which, however, he kept it
there—still kept it when, at the end of another turn, he had
dropped into a chair placed near a small table. Here, with his
scrap of paper compressed in his fist and further concealed by his
folding his arms tight, he sat for some time in thought, gazed
before him so straight that Waymarsh appeared and approached him
without catching his eye. The latter in fact, struck with his
appearance, looked at him hard for a single instant and then, as if
determined to that course by some special vividness in it, dropped
back into the salon de lecture without addressing him. But the
pilgrim from Milrose permitted himself still to observe the scene
from behind the clear glass plate of that retreat. Strether ended,
as he sat, by a fresh scrutiny of his compressed missive, which he
smoothed out carefully again as he placed it on his table. There it
remained for some minutes, until, at last looking up, he saw
Waymarsh watching him from within. It was on this that their eyes
met—met for a moment during which neither moved. But Strether then
got up, folding his telegram more carefully and putting it into his
waistcoat pocket.

A few minutes later the friends were seated together at dinner;
but Strether had meanwhile said nothing about it, and they
eventually parted, after coffee in the court, with nothing said on
either side. Our friend had moreover the consciousness that even
less than usual was on this occasion said between them, so that it
was almost as if each had been waiting for something from the
other. Waymarsh had always more or less the air of sitting at the
door of his tent, and silence, after so many weeks, had come to
play its part in their concert. This note indeed, to Strether's
sense, had lately taken a fuller tone, and it was his fancy
to-night that they had never quite so drawn it out. Yet it befell,
none the less that he closed the door to confidence when his
companion finally asked him if there were anything particular the
matter with him. "Nothing," he replied, "more than usual."

On the morrow, however, at an early hour, he found occasion to
give an answer more in consonance with the facts. What was the
matter had continued to be so all the previous evening, the first
hours of which, after dinner, in his room, he had devoted to the
copious composition of a letter. He had quitted Waymarsh for this
purpose, leaving him to his own resources with less ceremony than
their wont, but finally coming down again with his letter
unconcluded and going forth into the streets without enquiry for
his comrade. He had taken a long vague walk, and one o'clock had
struck before his return and his re-ascent to his room by the aid
of the glimmering candle-end left for him on the shelf outside the
porter's lodge. He had possessed himself, on closing his door, of
the numerous loose sheets of his unfinished composition, and then,
without reading them over, had torn them into small pieces. He had
thereupon slept—as if it had been in some measure thanks to that
sacrifice—the sleep of the just, and had prolonged his rest
considerably beyond his custom. Thus it was that when, between nine
and ten, the tap of the knob of a walking-stick sounded on his
door, he had not yet made himself altogether presentable. Chad
Newsome's bright deep voice determined quickly enough none the less
the admission of the visitor. The little blue paper of the evening
before, plainly an object the more precious for its escape from
premature destruction, now lay on the sill of the open window,
smoothed out afresh and kept from blowing away by the
superincumbent weight of his watch. Chad, looking about with
careless and competent criticism, as he looked wherever he went
immediately espied it and permitted himself to fix it for a moment
rather hard. After which he turned his eyes to his host. "It has
come then at last?"

Strether paused in the act of pinning his necktie. "Then you
know—? You've had one too?"

"No, I've had nothing, and I only know what I see. I see that
thing and I guess. Well," he added, "it comes as pat as in a play,
for I've precisely turned up this morning—as I would have done
yesterday, but it was impossible—to take you."

"To take me?" Strether had turned again to his glass.

"Back, at last, as I promised. I'm ready—I've really been ready
this month. I've only been waiting for you—as was perfectly right.
But you're better now; you're safe—I see that for myself; you've
got all your good. You're looking, this morning, as fit as a
flea."

Strether, at his glass, finished dressing; consulting that
witness moreover on this last opinion. WAS he looking
preternaturally fit? There was something in it perhaps for Chad's
wonderful eye, but he had felt himself for hours rather in pieces.
Such a judgement, however, was after all but a contribution to his
resolve; it testified unwittingly to his wisdom. He was still
firmer, apparently—since it shone in him as a light—than he had
flattered himself. His firmness indeed was slightly compromised, as
he faced about to his friend, by the way this very personage
looked—though the case would of course have been worse hadn't the
secret of personal magnificence been at every hour Chad's unfailing
possession. There he was in all the pleasant morning freshness of
it—strong and sleek and gay, easy and fragrant and fathomless, with
happy health in his colour, and pleasant silver in his thick young
hair, and the right word for everything on the lips that his clear
brownness caused to show as red. He had never struck Strether as
personally such a success; it was as if now, for his definite
surrender, he had gathered himself vividly together. This, sharply
and rather strangely, was the form in which he was to be presented
to Woollett. Our friend took him in again—he was always taking him
in and yet finding that parts of him still remained out; though
even thus his image showed through a mist of other things. "I've
had a cable," Strether said, "from your mother."