The Ambassadors (43 page)

"Oh Mamie mustn't SUFFER!" Madame de Vionnet soothingly
emphasised.

But Strether could reassure her. "Don't fear. As soon as he has
done with Jim, Jim will fall to me. And then you'll see."

It was as if in a moment she saw already; yet she still waited.
Then "Is she really quite charming?" she asked.

He had got up with his last words and gathered in his hat and
gloves. "I don't know; I'm watching. I'm studying the case, as it
were—and I dare say I shall be able to tell you."

She wondered. "Is it a case?"

"Yes—I think so. At any rate I shall see.'

"But haven't you known her before?"

"Yes," he smiled—"but somehow at home she wasn't a case. She has
become one since." It was as if he made it out for himself. "She
has become one here."

"So very very soon?"

He measured it, laughing. "Not sooner than I did."

"And you became one—?"

"Very very soon. The day I arrived."

Her intelligent eyes showed her thought of it. "Ah but the day
you arrived you met Maria. Whom has Miss Pocock met?"

He paused again, but he brought it out. "Hasn't she met
Chad?"

"Certainly—but not for the first time. He's an old friend." At
which Strether had a slow amused significant headshake that made
her go on: "You mean that for HER at least he's a new person—that
she sees him as different?"

"She sees him as different."

"And how does she see him?"

Strether gave it up. "How can one tell how a deep little girl
sees a deep young man?"

"Is every one so deep? Is she too?"

"So it strikes me deeper than I thought. But wait a
little—between us we'll make it out. You'll judge for that matter
yourself."

Madame de Vionnet looked for the moment fairly bent on the
chance. "Then she WILL come with her?—I mean Mamie with Mrs.
Pocock?"

"Certainly. Her curiosity, if nothing else, will in any case
work that. But leave it all to Chad."

"Ah," wailed Madame de Vionnet, turning away a little wearily,
"the things I leave to Chad!"

The tone of it made him look at her with a kindness that showed
his vision of her suspense. But he fell back on his confidence. "Oh
well—trust him. Trust him all the way." He had indeed no sooner so
spoken than the queer displacement of his point of view appeared
again to come up for him in the very sound, which drew from him a
short laugh, immediately checked. He became still more advisory.
"When they do come give them plenty of Miss Jeanne. Let Mamie see
her well."

She looked for a moment as if she placed them face to face. "For
Mamie to hate her?"

He had another of his corrective headshakes. "Mamie won't. Trust
THEM."

She looked at him hard, and then as if it were what she must
always come back to: "It's you I trust. But I was sincere," she
said, "at the hotel. I did, I do, want my child—"

"Well?"—Strether waited with deference while she appeared to
hesitate as to how to put it.

"Well, to do what she can for me."

Strether for a little met her eyes on it; after which something
that might have been unexpected to her came from him. "Poor little
duck!"

Not more expected for himself indeed might well have been her
echo of it. "Poor little duck! But she immensely wants herself,"
she said, "to see our friend's cousin."

"Is that what she thinks her?"

"It's what we call the young lady."

He thought again; then with a laugh: "Well, your daughter will
help you."

And now at last he took leave of her, as he had been intending
for five minutes. But she went part of the way with him,
accompanying him out of the room and into the next and the next.
Her noble old apartment offered a succession of three, the first
two of which indeed, on entering, smaller than the last, but each
with its faded and formal air, enlarged the office of the
antechamber and enriched the sense of approach. Strether fancied
them, liked them, and, passing through them with her more slowly
now, met a sharp renewal of his original impression. He stopped, he
looked back; the whole thing made a vista, which he found high
melancholy and sweet—full, once more, of dim historic shades, of
the faint faraway cannon-roar of the great Empire. It was doubtless
half the projection of his mind, but his mind was a thing that,
among old waxed parquets, pale shades of pink and green,
pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with.
They could easily make him irrelevant. The oddity, the originality,
the poetry—he didn't know what to call it—of Chad's connexion
reaffirmed for him its romantic side. "They ought to see this, you
know. They MUST."

"The Pococks?"—she looked about in deprecation; she seemed to
see gaps he didn't.

"Mamie and Sarah—Mamie in particular."

"My shabby old place? But THEIR things—!"

"Oh their things! You were talking of what will do something for
you—"

"So that it strikes you," she broke in, "that my poor place may?
Oh," she ruefully mused, "that WOULD be desperate!"

"Do you know what I wish?" he went on. "I wish Mrs. Newsome
herself could have a look."

She stared, missing a little his logic. "It would make a
difference?"

Her tone was so earnest that as he continued to look about he
laughed. "It might!"

"But you've told her, you tell me—"

"All about you? Yes, a wonderful story. But there's all the
indescribable—what one gets only on the spot."

"Thank you!" she charmingly and sadly smiled.

"It's all about me here," he freely continued. "Mrs. Newsome
feels things."

But she seemed doomed always to come back to doubt. "No one
feels so much as YOU. No—not any one."

"So much the worse then for every one. It's very easy."

They were by this time in the antechamber, still alone together,
as she hadn't rung for a servant. The antechamber was high and
square, grave and suggestive too, a little cold and slippery even
in summer, and with a few old prints that were precious, Strether
divined, on the walls. He stood in the middle, slightly lingering,
vaguely directing his glasses, while, leaning against the door-post
of the room, she gently pressed her cheek to the side of the
recess. "YOU would have been a friend."

"I?"—it startled him a little.

"For the reason you say. You're not stupid." And then abruptly,
as if bringing it out were somehow founded on that fact: "We're
marrying Jeanne."

It affected him on the spot as a move in a game, and he was even
then not without the sense that that wasn't the way Jeanne should
be married. But he quickly showed his interest, though—as quickly
afterwards struck him—with an absurd confusion of mind. "'You'? You
and—a—not Chad?" Of course it was the child's father who made the
'we,' but to the child's father it would have cost him an effort to
allude. Yet didn't it seem the next minute that Monsieur de Vionnet
was after all not in question?—since she had gone on to say that it
was indeed to Chad she referred and that he had been in the whole
matter kindness itself.

"If I must tell you all, it is he himself who has put us in the
way. I mean in the way of an opportunity that, so far as I can yet
see, is all I could possibly have dreamed of. For all the trouble
Monsieur de Vionnet will ever take!" It was the first time she had
spoken to him of her husband, and he couldn't have expressed how
much more intimate with her it suddenly made him feel. It wasn't
much, in truth—there were other things in what she was saying that
were far more; but it was as if, while they stood there together so
easily in these cold chambers of the past, the single touch had
shown the reach of her confidence. "But our friend," she asked,
"hasn't then told you?"

"He has told me nothing."

"Well, it has come with rather a rush—all in a very few days;
and hasn't moreover yet taken a form that permits an announcement.
It's only for you—absolutely you alone—that I speak; I so want you
to know." The sense he had so often had, since the first hour of
his disembarkment, of being further and further "in," treated him
again at this moment to another twinge; but in this wonderful way
of her putting him in there continued to be something exquisitely
remorseless. "Monsieur de Vionnet will accept what he MUST accept.
He has proposed half a dozen things—each one more impossible than
the other; and he wouldn't have found this if he lives to a
hundred. Chad found it," she continued with her lighted, faintly
flushed, her conscious confidential face, "in the quietest way in
the world. Or rather it found HIM—for everything finds him; I mean
finds him right. You'll think we do such things strangely—but at my
age," she smiled, "one has to accept one's conditions. Our young
man's people had seen her; one of his sisters, a charming woman—we
know all about them—had observed her somewhere with me. She had
spoken to her brother—turned him on; and we were again observed,
poor Jeanne and I, without our in the least knowing it. It was at
the beginning of the winter; it went on for some time; it outlasted
our absence; it began again on our return; and it luckily seems all
right. The young man had met Chad, and he got a friend to approach
him—as having a decent interest in us. Mr. Newsome looked well
before he leaped; he kept beautifully quiet and satisfied himself
fully; then only he spoke. It's what has for some time past
occupied us. It seems as if it were what would do; really, really
all one could wish. There are only two or three points to be
settled—they depend on her father. But this time I think we're
safe."

Strether, consciously gaping a little, had fairly hung upon her
lips. "I hope so with all my heart." And then he permitted himself:
"Does nothing depend on HER?"

"Ah naturally; everything did. But she's pleased comme tout. She
has been perfectly free; and he—our young friend—is really a
combination. I quite adore him."

Strether just made sure. "You mean your future son-in-law?"

"Future if we all bring it off."

"Ah well," said Strether decorously, "I heartily hope you may."
There seemed little else for him to say, though her communication
had the oddest effect on him. Vaguely and confusedly he was
troubled by it; feeling as if he had even himself been concerned in
something deep and dim. He had allowed for depths, but these were
greater: and it was as if, oppressively—indeed absurdly—he was
responsible for what they had now thrown up to the surface. It
was—through something ancient and cold in it—what he would have
called the real thing. In short his hostess's news, though he
couldn't have explained why, was a sensible shock, and his
oppression a weight he felt he must somehow or other immediately
get rid of. There were too many connexions missing to make it
tolerable he should do anything else. He was prepared to
suffer—before his own inner tribunal—for Chad; he was prepared to
suffer even for Madame de Vionnet. But he wasn't prepared to suffer
for the little girl So now having said the proper thing, he wanted
to get away. She held him an instant, however, with another
appeal.

"Do I seem to you very awful?"

"Awful? Why so?" But he called it to himself, even as he spoke,
his biggest insincerity yet.

"Our arrangements are so different from yours."

"Mine?" Oh he could dismiss that too! "I haven't any
arrangements."

"Then you must accept mine; all the more that they're excellent.
They're founded on a vieille sagesse. There will be much more, if
all goes well, for you to hear and to know, and everything, believe
me, for you to like. Don't be afraid; you'll be satisfied." Thus
she could talk to him of what, of her innermost life—for that was
what it came to—he must "accept"; thus she could extraordinarily
speak as if in such an affair his being satisfied had an
importance. It was all a wonder and made the whole case larger. He
had struck himself at the hotel, before Sarah and Waymarsh, as
being in her boat; but where on earth was he now? This question was
in the air till her own lips quenched it with another. "And do you
suppose HE—who loves her so—would do anything reckless or
cruel?"

He wondered what he supposed. "Do you mean your young man—?"

"I mean yours. I mean Mr. Newsome." It flashed for Strether the
next moment a finer light, and the light deepened as she went on.
"He takes, thank God, the truest tenderest interest in her."

It deepened indeed. "Oh I'm sure of that!"

"You were talking," she said, "about one's trusting him. You see
then how I do."

He waited a moment—it all came. "I see—I see." He felt he really
did see.

"He wouldn't hurt her for the world, nor—assuming she marries at
all—risk anything that might make against her happiness.
And—willingly, at least—he would never hurt ME."

Her face, with what he had by this time grasped, told him more
than her words; whether something had come into it, or whether he
only read clearer, her whole story—what at least he then took for
such—reached out to him from it. With the initiative she now
attributed to Chad it all made a sense, and this sense—a light, a
lead, was what had abruptly risen before him. He wanted, once more,
to get off with these things; which was at last made easy, a
servant having, for his assistance, on hearing voices in the hall,
just come forward. All that Strether had made out was, while the
man opened the door and impersonally waited, summed up in his last
word. "I don't think, you know, Chad will tell me anything."

"No—perhaps not yet."

"And I won't as yet speak to him."

"Ah that's as you'll think best. You must judge."

She had finally given him her hand, which he held a moment. "How
MUCH I have to judge!"

"Everything," said Madame de Vionnet: a remark that was
indeed—with the refined disguised suppressed passion of her
face—what he most carried away.