"That seems very little to do."
"Don't be so sure! It is never very little to your race." She leaned
back, studying him through half-dropped lids.
"Well, try me," he protested.
She did not immediately respond; and when she spoke, her first words
were explanatory rather than interrogative.
"I want to begin by saying that I believe I once did you an
injustice, to the extent of misunderstanding your motive for a
certain action."
Durham's uneasy flush confessed his recognition of her meaning. "Ah,
if we must go back to _that_--"
"You withdraw your assent to my request?"
"By no means; but nothing consolatory you can find to say on that
point can really make any difference."
"Will not the difference in my view of you perhaps make a difference
in your own?"
She looked at him earnestly, without a trace of irony in her eyes or
on her lips. "It is really I who have an _amende_ to make, as I now
understand the situation. I once turned to you for help in a painful
extremity, and I have only now learned to understand your reasons
for refusing to help me."
"Oh, my reasons--" groaned Durham.
"I have learned to understand them," she persisted, "by being so
much, lately, with Fanny."
"But I never told her!" he broke in.
"Exactly. That was what told _me_. I understood you through her, and
through your dealings with her. There she was--the woman you adored
and longed to save; and you would not lift a finger to make her
yours by means which would have seemed--I see it now--a desecration
of your feeling for each other." She paused, as if to find the exact
words for meanings she had never before had occasion to formulate.
"It came to me first--a light on your attitude--when I found you had
never breathed to her a word of our talk together. She had
confidently commissioned you to find a way for her, as the mediaeval
lady sent a prayer to her knight to deliver her from captivity, and
you came back, confessing you had failed, but never justifying
yourself by so much as a hint of the reason why. And when I had
lived a little in Fanny's intimacy--at a moment when circumstances
helped to bring us extraordinarily close--I understood why you had
done this; why you had let her take what view she pleased of your
failure, your passive acceptance of defeat, rather than let her
suspect the alternative offered you. You couldn't, even with my
permission, betray to any one a hint of my miserable secret, and you
couldn't, for your life's happiness, pay the particular price that I
asked." She leaned toward him in the intense, almost childlike,
effort at full expression. "Oh, we are of different races, with a
different point of honour; but I understand, I see, that you are
good people--just simply, courageously _good!_"
She paused, and then said slowly: "Have I understood you? Have I put
my hand on your motive?"
Durham sat speechless, subdued by the rush of emotion which her
words set free.
"That, you understand, is my question," she concluded with a faint
smile; and he answered hesitatingly: "What can it matter, when the
upshot is something I infinitely regret?"
"Having refused me? Don't!" She spoke with deep seriousness, bending
her eyes full on his: "Ah, I have suffered--suffered! But I have
learned also--my life has been enlarged. You see how I have
understood you both. And that is something I should have been
incapable of a few months ago."
Durham returned her look. "I can't think that you can ever have been
incapable of any generous interpretation."
She uttered a slight exclamation, which resolved itself into a laugh
of self-directed irony.
"If you knew into what language I have always translated life! But
that," she broke off, "is not what you are here to learn."
"I think," he returned gravely, "that I am here to learn the measure
of Christian charity."
She threw him a new, odd look. "Ah, no--but to show it!" she
exclaimed.
"To show it? And to whom?"
She paused for a moment, and then rejoined, instead of answering:
"Do you remember that day I talked with you at Fanny's? The day
after you came back from Italy?"
He made a motion of assent, and she went on: "You asked me then what
return I expected for my service to you, as you called it; and I
answered, the contemplation of your happiness. Well, do you know
what that meant in my old language--the language I was still
speaking then? It meant that I knew there was horrible misery in
store for you, and that I was waiting to feast my eyes on it: that's
all!"
She had flung out the words with one of her quick bursts of
self-abandonment, like a fevered sufferer stripping the bandage from
a wound. Durham received them with a face blanching to the pallour
of her own.
"What misery do you mean?" he exclaimed.
She leaned forward, laying her hand on his with just such a gesture
as she had used to enforce her appeal in Mrs. Boykin's boudoir. The
remembrance made him shrink slightly from her touch, and she drew
back with a smile.
"Have you never asked yourself," she enquired, "why our family
consented so readily to a divorce?"
"Yes, often," he replied, all his unformed fears gathering in a dark
throng about him. "But Fanny was so reassured, so convinced that we
owed it to your good offices--"
She broke into a laugh. "My good offices! Will you never, you
Americans, learn that we do not act individually in such cases? That
we are all obedient to a common principle of authority?"
"Then it was not you--?"
She made an impatient shrugging motion. "Oh, you are too
confiding--it is the other side of your beautiful good faith!"
"The side you have taken advantage of, it appears?"
"I--we--all of us. I especially!" she confessed.
X
There was another pause, during which Durham tried to steady himself
against the shock of the impending revelation. It was an odd
circumstance of the case that, though Madame de Treymes' avowal of
duplicity was fresh in his ears, he did not for a moment believe
that she would deceive him again. Whatever passed between them now
would go to the root of the matter.
The first thing that passed was the long look they exchanged:
searching on his part, tender, sad, undefinable on hers. As the
result of it he said: "Why, then, did you consent to the divorce?"
"To get the boy back," she answered instantly; and while he sat
stunned by the unexpectedness of the retort, she went on: "Is it
possible you never suspected? It has been our whole thought from the
first. Everything was planned with that object."
He drew a sharp breath of alarm. "But the divorce--how could that
give him back to you?"
"It was the only thing that could. We trembled lest the idea should
occur to you. But we were reasonably safe, for there has only been
one other case of the same kind before the courts." She leaned back,
the sight of his perplexity checking her quick rush of words. "You
didn't know," she began again, "that in that case, on the remarriage
of the mother, the courts instantly restored the child to the
father, though he had--well, given as much cause for divorce as my
unfortunate brother?"
Durham gave an ironic laugh. "Your French justice takes a grammar
and dictionary to understand."
She smiled. "_We_ understand it--and it isn't necessary that you
should."
"So it would appear!" he exclaimed bitterly.
"Don't judge us too harshly--or not, at least, till you have taken
the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the
individual--we think only of the family."
"Why don't you take care to preserve it, then?"
"Ah, that's what we do; in spite of every aberration of the
individual. And so, when we saw it was impossible that my brother
and his wife should live together, we simply transferred our
allegiance to the child--we constituted _him_ the family."
"A precious kindness you did him! If the result is to give him back
to his father."
"That, I admit, is to be deplored; but his father is only a fraction
of the whole. What we really do is to give him back to his race, his
religion, his true place in the order of things."
"His mother never tried to deprive him of any of those inestimable
advantages!"
Madame de Treymes unclasped her hands with a slight gesture of
deprecation.
"Not consciously, perhaps; but silences and reserves can teach so
much. His mother has another point of view--"
"Thank heaven!" Durham interjected.
"Thank heaven for _her_--yes--perhaps; but it would not have done
for the boy."
Durham squared his shoulders with the sudden resolve of a man
breaking through a throng of ugly phantoms.
"You haven't yet convinced me that it won't have to do for him. At
the time of Madame de Malrive's separation, the court made no
difficulty about giving her the custody of her son; and you must
pardon me for reminding you that the father's unfitness was the
reason alleged."
Madame de Treymes shrugged her shoulders. "And my poor brother, you
would add, has not changed; but the circumstances have, and that
proves precisely what I have been trying to show you: that, in such
cases, the general course of events is considered, rather than the
action of any one person."
"Then why is Madame de Malrive's action to be considered?"
"Because it breaks up the unity of the family."
"_Unity--!_" broke from Durham; and Madame de Treymes gently
suffered his smile.
"Of the family tradition, I mean: it introduces new elements. You
are a new element."
"Thank heaven!" said Durham again.
She looked at him singularly. "Yes--you may thank heaven. Why isn't
it enough to satisfy Fanny?"
"Why isn't what enough?"
"Your being, as I say, a new element; taking her so completely into
a better air. Why shouldn't she be content to begin a new life with
you, without wanting to keep the boy too?"
Durham stared at her dumbly. "I don't know what you mean," he said
at length.
"I mean that in her place--" she broke off, dropping her eyes. "She
may have another son--the son of the man she adores."
Durham rose from his seat and took a quick turn through the room.
She sat motionless, following his steps through her lowered lashes,
which she raised again slowly as he stood before her.
"Your idea, then, is that I should tell her nothing?" he said.
"Tell her _now?_ But, my poor friend, you would be ruined!"
"Exactly." He paused. "Then why have you told _me?_"
Under her dark skin he saw the faint colour stealing. "We see things
so differently--but can't you conceive that, after all that has
passed, I felt it a kind of loyalty not to leave you in ignorance?"
"And you feel no such loyalty to her?"
"Ah, I leave her to you," she murmured, looking down again.
Durham continued to stand before her, grappling slowly with his
perplexity, which loomed larger and darker as it closed in on him.
"You don't leave her to me; you take her from me at a stroke! I
suppose," he added painfully, "I ought to thank you for doing it
before it's too late."
She stared. "I take her from you? I simply prevent your going to her
unprepared. Knowing Fanny as I do, it seemed to me necessary that
you should find a way in advance--a way of tiding over the first
moment. That, of course, is what we had planned that you shouldn't
have. We meant to let you marry, and then--. Oh, there is no
question about the result: we are certain of our case--our measures
have been taken _de loin_." She broke off, as if oppressed by his
stricken silence. "You will think me stupid, but my warning you of
this is the only return I know how to make for your generosity. I
could not bear to have you say afterward that I had deceived you
twice."
"Twice?" He looked at her perplexedly, and her colour rose.
"I deceived you once--that night at your cousin's, when I tried to
get you to bribe me. Even then we meant to consent to the
divorce--it was decided the first day that I saw you." He was
silent, and she added, with one of her mocking gestures: "You see
from what a _milieu_ you are taking her!"