第121章

"There are half a dozen rooms there I don't use," he said, pointing through an open door."Go and look at them and take your choice.You can live in the one you like best."From this bewildering opportunity Mrs.Bread at first recoiled;but finally, yielding to Newman's gentle, reassuring push, she wandered off into the dusk with her tremulous taper.

She remained absent a quarter of an hour, during which Newman paced up and down, stopped occasionally to look out of the window at the lights on the Boulevard, and then resumed his walk.

Mrs.Bread's relish for her investigation apparently increased as she proceeded; but at last she reappeared and deposited her candlestick on the chimney-piece.

"Well, have you picked one out?" asked Newman.

"A room, sir? They are all too fine for a dingy old body like me.

There isn't one that hasn't a bit of gilding.""It's only tinsel, Mrs.Bread," said Newman.

"If you stay there a while it will all peel off of itself."And he gave a dismal smile.

"Oh, sir, there are things enough peeling off already!" rejoined Mrs.Bread, with a head-shake."Since I was there I thought I would look about me.

I don't believe you know, sir.The corners are most dreadful.

You do want a housekeeper, that you do; you want a tidy Englishwoman that isn't above taking hold of a broom."Newman assured her that he suspected, if he had not measured, his domestic abuses, and that to reform them was a mission worthy of her powers.She held her candlestick aloft again and looked around the salon with compassionate glances; then she intimated that she accepted the mission, and that its sacred character would sustain her in her rupture with Madame de Bellegarde.

With this she curtsied herself away.

She came back the next day with her worldly goods, and Newman, going into his drawing-room, found her upon her aged knees before a divan, sewing up some detached fringe.

He questioned her as to her leave-taking with her late mistress, and she said it had proved easier than she feared.

"I was perfectly civil, sir, but the Lord helped me to remember that a good woman has no call to tremble before a bad one.""I should think so!" cried Newman."And does she know you have come to me?""She asked me where I was going, and I mentioned your name,"said Mrs.Bread.

"What did she say to that?"

"She looked at me very hard, and she turned very red.Then she bade me leave her.I was all ready to go, and I had got the coachman, who is an Englishman, to bring down my poor box and to fetch me a cab.

But when I went down myself to the gate I found it closed.

My lady had sent orders to the porter not to let me pass, and by the same orders the porter's wife--she is a dreadful sly old body--had gone out in a cab to fetch home M.de Bellegarde from his club."Newman slapped his knee."She IS scared! she IS scared!"he cried, exultantly.

"I was frightened too, sir," said Mrs.Bread, "but I was also mightily vexed.I took it very high with the porter and asked him by what right he used violence to an honorable Englishwoman who had lived in the house for thirty years before he was heard of.

Oh, sir, I was very grand, and I brought the man down.

He drew his bolts and let me out, and I promised the cabman something handsome if he would drive fast.But he was terribly slow;it seemed as if we should never reach your blessed door.

I am all of a tremble still; it took me five minutes, just now, to thread my needle."Newman told her, with a gleeful laugh, that if she chose she might have a little maid on purpose to thread her needles;and he went away murmuring to himself again that the old woman WAS scared--she WAS scared!

He had not shown Mrs.Tristram the little paper that he carried in his pocket-book, but since his return to Paris he had seen her several times, and she had told him that he seemed to her to be in a strange way--an even stranger way than his sad situation made natural.

Had his disappointment gone to his head? He looked like a man who was going to be ill, and yet she had never seen him more restless and active.

One day he would sit hanging his head and looking as if he were firmly resolved never to smile again; another he would indulge in laughter that was almost unseemly and make jokes that were bad even for him.

If he was trying to carry off his sorrow, he at such times really went too far.She begged him of all things not to be "strange."Feeling in a measure responsible as she did for the affair which had turned out so ill for him, she could endure anything but his strangeness.

He might be melancholy if he would, or he might be stoical;he might be cross and cantankerous with her and ask her why she had ever dared to meddle with his destiny: to this she would submit;for this she would make allowances.Only, for Heaven's sake, let him not be incoherent.That would be extremely unpleasant.

It was like people talking in their sleep; they always frightened her.

And Mrs.Tristram intimated that, taking very high ground as regards the moral obligation which events had laid upon her, she proposed not to rest quiet until she should have confronted him with the least inadequate substitute for Madame de Cintre that the two hemispheres contained.

"Oh," said Newman, "we are even now, and we had better not open a new account! You may bury me some day, but you shall never marry me.It's too rough.I hope, at any rate," he added, "that there is nothing incoherent in this--that I want to go next Sunday to the Carmelite chapel in the Avenue de Messine.

You know one of the Catholic ministers--an abbe, is that it?--I have seen him here, you know; that motherly old gentleman with the big waist-band.Please ask him if I need a special leave to go in, and if I do, beg him to obtain it for me."Mrs.Tristram gave expression to the liveliest joy.

"I am so glad you have asked me to do something!" she cried.

"You shall get into the chapel if the abbe is disfrocked for his share in it." And two days afterwards she told him that it was all arranged; the abbe was enchanted to serve him, and if he would present himself civilly at the convent gate there would be no difficulty.