Confidence

CONFIDENCE

“Dame, chez elles – to their house,” said the femme de chambre, who appeared to think that Bernard asked too many questions.

But Bernard persisted. “Where is their house?”

The waiting-maid looked at him from head to foot.

“If Monsieur wishes to write, many of Madame’s letters come to her banker,” she said, inscrutably.

“And who is her banker?”

“He lives in the Rue de Provence.”

“Very good – I will find him out,” said our hero, turning away.

The discriminating reader who has been so good as to interest himself in this little narrative will perhaps at this point exclaim with a pardonable consciousness of shrewdness: “Of course he went the next day to the Rue de Provence!” Of course, yes; only as it happens Bernard did nothing of the kind. He did one of the most singular things he ever did in his life – a thing that puzzled him even at the time, and with regard to which he often afterward wondered whence he had drawn the ability for so remarkable a feat – he simply spent a fortnight at Blanquais-les-Galets. It was a very quiet fortnight; he spoke to no one, he formed no relations, he was company to himself. It may be added that he had never found his own company half so good. He struck himself as a reasonable, delicate fellow, who looked at things in such a way as to make him refrain – refrain successfully, that was the point – from concerning himself practically about Angela Vivian. His saying that he would find out the banker in the Rue de Provence

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had been for the benefit of the femme de chambre, whom he thought rather impertinent; he had really no intention whatever of entering that classic thoroughfare. He took long walks, rambled on the beach, along the base of the cliffs and among the brown sea-caves, and he thought a good deal of certain incidents which have figured at an earlier stage of this narrative. He had forbidden himself the future, as an object of contemplation, and it was therefore a matter of necessity that his imagination should take refuge among the warm and familiar episodes of the past. He wondered why Mrs. Vivian should have left the place so suddenly, and was of course struck with the analogy between this incident and her abrupt departure from Baden. It annoyed him, it troubled him, but it by no means rekindled the alarm he had felt on first perceiving the injured Angela on the beach. That alarm had been quenched by Angela’s manner during the hour that followed and during their short talk in the evening. This evening was to be forever memorable, for it had brought with it the revelation which still, at moments, suddenly made Bernard tremble; but it had also brought him the assurance that Angela cared as little as possible for anything that a chance acquaintance might have said about her. It is all the more singular, therefore, that one evening, after he had been at Blanquais a fortnight, a train of thought should suddenly have been set in motion in his mind. It was kindled by no outward occurrence, but by some wandering spark of fancy or of memory, and the immediate effect of it was to startle our hero very much as he had been startled on the evening I have described. The circumstances were the same; he had wandered down to the beach alone, very late,

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CHAPTER XXII

It was opened by the little waiting-maid whom he had seen at Blanquais, and who looked at him very hard before she answered his inquiry.

“You see I have found Mrs. Vivian’s dwelling, though you would n’t give me the address,” Bernard said to her, smiling.

“Monsieur has put some time to it!” the young woman answered dryly. And she informed him that Madame was at home, though Mademoiselle, for whom he had not asked, was not.

Mrs. Vivian occupied a diminutive apartment at the summit of one of the tall white houses which ornament the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe. The early days of September had arrived, but Paris was still a city of absentees. The weather was warm and charming, and a certain savour of early autumn in the air was in accord with the somewhat melancholy aspect of the empty streets and closed shutters of this honorable quarter, where the end of the monumental vistas seemed to be curtained with a hazy emanation from the Seine. It was late in the afternoon when Bernard was ushered into Mrs. Vivian’s little high-nestling drawing-room, and a patch of sunset tints, faintly red, rested softly upon the gilded wall. Bernard had seen these ladies only in borrowed and provisional abodes;

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but here was a place where they were really living and which was stamped with their tastes, their habits, their charm. The little salon was very elegant; it contained a multitude of pretty things, and it appeared to Bernard to be arranged in perfection. The long windows – the ceiling being low, they were really very short – opened upon one of those solid balconies, occupying the width of the apartment, which are often in Paris a compensation for living up five flights of stairs, and this balcony was filled with flowers and cushions. Bernard stepped out upon it to await the coming of Mrs. Vivian, and, as she was not quick to appear, he had time to see that his friends enjoyed a magnificent view. They looked up at the triumphal Arch, which presented itself at a picturesque angle, and near the green tree-tops of the Champs Elysees, beyond which they caught a broad gleam of the Seine and a glimpse, blue in the distance, of the great towers of Notre Dame. The whole vast city lay before them and beneath them, with its ordered brilliancy and its mingled aspect of compression and expansion; and yet the huge Parisian murmur died away before it reached Mrs. Vivian’s sky-parlor, which seemed to Bernard the brightest and quietest little habitation he had ever known.

His hostess came rustling in at last; she seemed agitated; she knocked over with the skirt of her dress a little gilded chair which was reflected in the polished parquet as in a sheet of looking-glass. Mrs. Vivian had a fixed smile – she hardly knew what to say.

“I found your address at the banker’s,” said Bernard. “Your maid, at Blanquais, refused to give it to me.”

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Mrs. Vivian gave him a little look – there was always more or less of it in her face – which seemed equivalent to an entreaty that her interlocutor should spare her.

“Maids are so strange,” she murmured; “especially the French!”

It pleased Bernard for the moment not to spare her, though he felt a sort of delight of kindness for her.

“Your going off from Blanquais so suddenly, without leaving me any explanation, any clue, any message of any sort – made me feel at first as if you did n’t wish that I should look you up. It reminded me of the way you left Baden – do you remember? – three years ago.”

“Baden was so charming – but one could n’t stay forever,” said Mrs. Vivian.

“I had a sort of theory one could. Our life was so pleasant that it seemed a shame to break the spell, and if no one had moved I am sure we might be sitting there now.”

Mrs. Vivian stared, still with her little fixed smile. “I think we should have had bad weather.”

“Very likely,” said Bernard, laughing. “Nature would have grown jealous of our good-humor – of our tranquil happiness. And after all, here we are together again – that is, some of us. But I have only my own audacity to thank for it. I was quite free to believe that you were not at all pleased to see me re-appear – and it is only because I am not easy to discourage – am indeed probably a rather impudent fellow – that I have ventured to come here to-day.”

“I am very glad to see you re-appear, Mr. Longueville,” Mrs. Vivian declared with the accent of veracity.

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“It was your daughter’s idea, then, running away from Blanquais?”

Mrs. Vivian lowered her eyes.

“We were obliged to go to Fontainebleau. We have but just come back. I thought of writing to you,” she softly added.

“Ah, what pleasure that would have given me!”

“I mean, to tell you where we were, and that we should have been so happy to see you.”

“I thank you for the intention. I suppose your daughter would n’t let you carry it out.”

“Angela is so peculiar,” Mrs. Vivian said, simply. “You told me that the first time I saw you.” “Yes, at Siena,” said Mrs. Vivian.

“I am glad to hear you speak frankly of that place!” “Perhaps it ‘s better,” Mrs. Vivian murmured. She got up

and went to the window; then stepping upon the balcony, she looked down a moment into the street. “She will come back in a moment,” she said, coming into the room again. “She has gone to see a friend who lives just beside us. We don’t mind about Siena now,” she added, softly.

Bernard understood her – understood this to be a retraction of the request she had made of him at Baden.

“Dear little woman,” he said to himself, “she wants to marry her daughter still – only now she wants to marry her to me!” He wished to show her that he understood her, and he was on the point of seizing her hand, to do he did n’t know what – to hold it, to press it, to kiss it – when he heard the sharp

twang of the bell at the door of the little apartment. Mrs. Vivian fluttered away.

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“It ‘s Angela,” she cried, and she stood there waiting and listening, smiling at Bernard, with her handkerchief pressed to her lips.

In a moment the girl came into the drawing-room, but on seeing Bernard she stopped, with her hand on the door-knob. Her mother went to her and kissed her.

“It ‘s Mr. Longueville, dearest – he has found us out.” “Found us out?” repeated Angela, with a little laugh. “What

a singular expression!”

She was blushing as she had blushed when she first saw him at Blanquais. She seemed to Bernard now to have a great and peculiar brightness – something she had never had before.

“I certainly have been looking for you,” he said. “I was greatly disappointed when I found you had taken flight from Blanquais.”

“Taken flight?” She repeated his words as she had repeated her mother’s. “That is also a strange way of speaking!”

“I don’t care what I say,” said Bernard, “so long as I make you understand that I have wanted very much to see you again, and that I have wondered every day whether I might venture – ”

“I don’t know why you should n’t venture!” she interrupted, giving her little laugh again. “We are not so terrible, are we, mamma? – that is, when once you have climbed our five flights of stairs.”

“I came up very fast,” said Bernard, “and I find your apartment magnificent.”

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CHAPTER XXIII

And he had them in fact. He called the next day at the same hour, and he found the mother and the daughter together in their pretty salon. Angela was very gentle and gracious; he suspected Mrs. Vivian had given her a tender little lecture upon the manner in which she had received him the day before. After he had been there five minutes, Mrs. Vivian took a decanter of water that was standing upon a table and went out on the balcony to irrigate her flowers. Bernard watched her a while from his place in the room; then she moved along the balcony and out of sight. Some ten minutes elapsed without her re-appearing, and then Bernard stepped to the threshold of the window and looked for her. She was not there, and as he came and took his seat near Angela again, he announced, rather formally, that Mrs. Vivian had passed back into one of the other windows.

Angela was silent a moment – then she said – “Should you like me to call her?”

She was very peculiar – that was very true; yet Bernard held to his declaration of the day before that he now understood her a little.

“No, I don’t desire it,” he said. “I wish to see you alone; I have something particular to say to you.”

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