第75章

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.