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?”