第136章

Then she answered, properly: "She has gone to the other house--in the Rue d'Enfer." After Newman had sat a while longer looking very sombre, she went on: "You are not so good a man as I thought.

You are more--you are more--"

"More what?" Newman asked.

"More unforgiving."

"Good God!" cried Newman; "do you expect me to forgive?""No, not that.I have forgiven, so of course you can't.But you might forget! You have a worse temper about it than I should have expected.

You look wicked--you look dangerous."

"I may be dangerous," he said; "but I am not wicked.No, I am not wicked."And he got up to go.Mrs.Tristram asked him to come back to dinner;but he answered that he did not feel like pledging himself to be present at an entertainment, even as a solitary guest.Later in the evening, if he should be able, he would come.

He walked away through the city, beside the Seine and over it, and took the direction of the Rue d'Enfer.The day had the softness of early spring; but the weather was gray and humid.

Newman found himself in a part of Paris which he little knew--a region of convents and prisons, of streets bordered by long dead walls and traversed by a few wayfarers.At the intersection of two of these streets stood the house of the Carmelites--a dull, plain edifice, with a high-shouldered blank wall all round it.

From without Newman could see its upper windows, its steep roof and its chimneys.But these things revealed no symptoms of human life; the place looked dumb, deaf, inanimate.

The pale, dead, discolored wall stretched beneath it, far down the empty side street--a vista without a human figure.

Newman stood there a long time; there were no passers;he was free to gaze his fill.This seemed the goal of his journey;it was what he had come for.It was a strange satisfaction, and yet it was a satisfaction; the barren stillness of the place seemed to be his own release from ineffectual longing.

It told him that the woman within was lost beyond recall, and that the days and years of the future would pile themselves above her like the huge immovable slab of a tomb.These days and years, in this place, would always be just so gray and silent.

Suddenly, from the thought of their seeing him stand there, again the charm utterly departed.He would never stand there again;it was gratuitous dreariness.He turned away with a heavy heart, but with a heart lighter than the one he had brought.

Everything was over, and he too at last could rest.

He walked down through narrow, winding streets to the edge of the Seine again, and there he saw, close above him, the soft, vast towers of Notre Dame.He crossed one of the bridges and stood a moment in the empty place before the great cathedral;then he went in beneath the grossly-imaged portals.

He wandered some distance up the nave and sat down in the splendid dimness.He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off, at long intervals, to the rest of the world.

He was very tired; this was the best place he could be in.

He said no prayers; he had no prayers to say.

He had nothing to be thankful for, and he had nothing to ask;nothing to ask, because now he must take care of himself.

But a great cathedral offers a very various hospitality, and Newman sat in his place, because while he was there he was out of the world.The most unpleasant thing that had ever happened to him had reached its formal conclusion, as it were; he could close the book and put it away.

He leaned his head for a long time on the chair in front of him;when he took it up he felt that he was himself again.

Somewhere in his mind, a tight knot seemed to have loosened.

He thought of the Bellegardes; he had almost forgotten them.

He remembered them as people he had meant to do something to.

He gave a groan as he remembered what he had meant to do;he was annoyed at having meant to do it; the bottom, suddenly, had fallen out of his revenge.Whether it was Christian charity or unregenerate good nature--what it was, in the background of his soul--I don't pretend to say; but Newman's last thought was that of course he would let the Bellegardes go.

If he had spoken it aloud he would have said that he didn't want to hurt them.He was ashamed of having wanted to hurt them.

They had hurt him, but such things were really not his game.

At last he got up and came out of the darkening church;not with the elastic step of a man who had won a victory or taken a resolve, but strolling soberly, like a good-natured man who is still a little ashamed.

Going home, he said to Mrs.Bread that he must trouble her to put back his things into the portmanteau she had unpacked the evening before.

His gentle stewardess looked at him through eyes a trifle bedimmed.

"Dear me, sir," she exclaimed, "I thought you said that you were going to stay forever.""I meant that I was going to stay away forever," said Newman kindly.