The Ambassadors Part 39

"To pay her every attention as soon as he has polished off Jim. He wants what Jim can give him--and what Jim really won't--though he has had it all, and more than all, from me. He wants in short his own personal impression, and he'll get it--strong. But as soon as he has got it Mamie won't suffer."

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

But Strether could rea.s.sure 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 Poc.o.c.k 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. Poc.o.c.k?"

"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 n.o.ble 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, pa.s.sing 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-cla.s.sic 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 Poc.o.c.ks?"--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."