Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/431

THE AMERICAN But his friend went on without heeding him. "Even if they should come round again the shame—the baseness—is there."

"Oh, they won't come round!" said Newman.

"Well, you can make them."

"Make them?"

"I can tell you something—a great secret—an immense secret. You can use it against them—frighten them, coerce them."

"A secret!" Newman repeated. The idea of letting Valentin, on his deathbed, confide to him any matter sacredly intimate, shocked him, for the moment, and made him draw back. It seemed an illicit way of arriving at information and even had a vague analogy with listening at a keyhole. Then suddenly the thought of reducing Madame de Bellegarde and her son to the forms of submission became attractive, and, as to lose in any case no last breath of the spirit for which he had felt such a kindness, he brought his head nearer. For some time, however, nothing more came. Valentin but covered him with kindled, expanded, troubled eyes, and he began to believe he had spoken in delirium. But at last he spoke again.

"There was something done—something done at Fleurières. It was some wrong, some violence, I believe some cruelty. It may have been—God forgive me now—some crime. My father—something happened to him: I don't know what; I Ve been ashamed, afraid, to know. But a bad business—a worse even than yours—there was that. My mother knows—Urbain knows." 401