Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/521

THE AMERICAN the name of Henri-Urbain de Bellegarde. Written and dated after you, madam, had left him for dead, and while you, sir, had gone—not very fast—for the doctor."

The Marquis turned to his mother; she moved a little at random, averting herself and looking vaguely round her. But her answer to his appeal fell, after an instant, rather short. "I must sit down," she simply said, and went back to the bench on which Newman had been posted.

"Could n't you have spoken to me alone?" her companion then asked, all remarkably, of their pursuer, who wondered if it meant that there was suddenly, quite amazingly, a basis for discussion.

"Well, yes, if I could have been sure of speaking to your mother alone too," Newman answered. "But I've had to take you as I could get you, don't you see?"

Madame de Bellegarde, in a manner very eloquent of what he would have called her "grit," her steel-cold pluck and her instinctive appeal to her own personal resources, seated herself on the bench with her head erect and her hands folded in her lap. The expression of her face was such that he fancied her at first inconceivably smiling, but on his drawing nearer felt this display to be strange and convulsive. He saw, however, equally, that she was resisting her agitation with all the rigour of her inflexible will, and there was nothing like either fear or submission in the fine front she presented. She had been upset, but she could intensely think. He felt the pang of a conviction that she would get the better of him still, and 491