Madame De Treymes

by Edith Wharton

  Durham raised his head quickly. “By letting me do something in return?”

  She made an assenting motion. “By asking you to answer a question.”

  “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 t
he 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!”

  Durham groaned. “She will never give up her son!”

  “How can she help it? After you are married there will be no choice.”

  “No—but there is one now.”

  “Now?“ She sprang to her feet, clasping her hands in dismay. “Haven’t I made it clear to you? Haven’t I shown you your course?” She paused, and then brought out with emphasis: “I love Fanny, and I am ready to trust her happiness to you.”

  “I shall have nothing to do with her happiness,” he repeated doggedly.

  She stood close to him, with a look intently fixed on his face. “Are you afraid?” she asked with one of her mocking flashes.

  “Afraid?”

  “Of not being able to make it up to her—?”

  Their eyes met, and he returned her look steadily.

  “No; if I had the chance, I believe I could.”

  “I know you could!” she exclaimed.

  “That’s the worst of it,” he said with a cheerless laugh.

  “The worst—?”

  “Don’t you see that I can’t deceive her? Can’t trick her into marrying me now?”

  Madame de Treymes continued to hold his eyes for a puzzled moment after he had spoken; then she broke out despairingly: “Is happiness never more to you, then, than this abstract standard of truth?”

  Durham reflected. “I don’t know—it’s an instinct. There doesn’t seem to be any choice.”

  “Then I am a miserable wretch for not holding my tongue!”

  He shook his head sadly. “That would not have helped me; and it would have been a thousand times worse for her.”

  “Nothing can be as bad for her as losing you! Aren’t you moved by seeing her need?”

  “Horribly—are not you?“ he said, lifting his eyes to hers suddenly.

  She started under his look. “You mean, why don’t I help you? Why don’t I use my influence? Ah, if you knew how I have tried!”

  “And you are sure that nothing can be done?”

  “Nothing, nothing: what arguments can I use? We abhor divorce—we go against our religion in consenting to it—and nothing short of recovering the boy could possibly justify us.”

  Durham turned slowly away. “Then there is nothing to be done,” he said, speaking more to himself than to her.

  He felt her light touch on his arm. “Wait! There is one thing more—” She stood close to him, with entreaty written on her small passionate face. “There is one thing more,” she repeated. “And that is, to believe that I am deceiving you again.”

  He stopped short with a bewildered stare. “That you are deceiving me—about the boy?”

  “Yes—yes; why shouldn’t I? You’re so credulous—the temptation is irresistible.”

  “Ah, it would be too easy to find out—”

  “Don’t try, then! Go on as if nothing had happened. I have been lying to you,” she declared with vehemence.

  “Do you give me your word of honour?” he rejoined.

  “A liar’s? I haven’t any! Take the logic of the facts instead. What reason have you to believe any good of me? And what reason have I to do any to you? Why on earth should I betray my family for your benefit? Ah, don’t let yourself be deceived to the end!” She sparkled up at him, her eyes suffused with mockery; but on the lashes he saw a tear.

  He shook his head sadly. “I should first have to find a reason for your deceiving me.”

  “Why, I gave it to you long ago. I wanted to punish you—and now I’ve punished you enough.”

  “Yes, you’ve punished me enough,” he conceded.

  The tear gathered and fell down
her thin cheek. “It’s you who are punishing me now. I tell you I’m false to the core. Look back and see what I’ve done to you!”

  He stood silent, with his eyes fixed on the ground. Then he took one of her hands and raised it to his lips.

  “You poor, good woman!” he said gravely.

  Her hand trembled as she drew it away. “You’re going to her—straight from here?”

  “Yes—straight from here.”

  “To tell her everything—to renounce your hope?”

  “That is what it amounts to, I suppose.”

  She watched him cross the room and lay his hand on the door.

  “Ah, you poor, good man!” she said with a sob.

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