Books: Madame de Treymes
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Edith Wharton >> Madame de Treymes
"You are the most delicate of suitors! But I understand your
feeling. Fanny also is extremely delicate: it was a great surprise
to us at first. Still, in this case--" Madame de Treymes
paused--"since she has no religious scruples, and she had no
difficulty in obtaining a separation, why should she fear any in
demanding a divorce?"
"I don't know that she does: but the mere fact of possible
opposition might be enough to alarm the delicacy you have observed
in her."
"Ah--yes: on her boy's account."
"Partly, doubtless, on her boy's account."
"So that, if my brother objects to a divorce, all he has to do is to
announce his objection? But, my dear sir, you are giving your case
into my hands!" She flashed an amused smile on him.
"Since you say you are Madame de Malrive's friend, could there be a
better place for it?"
As she turned her eyes on him he seemed to see, under the flitting
lightness of her glance, the sudden concentrated expression of the
ancestral will. "I am Fanny's friend, certainly. But with us family
considerations are paramount. And our religion forbids divorce."
"So that, inevitably, your brother will oppose it?"
She rose from her seat, and stood fretting with her slender boot-tip
the minute red pebbles of the path.
"I must really go in: my mother will never forgive me for deserting
her."
"But surely you owe me an answer?" Durham protested, rising also.
"In return for your purchases at my stall?"
"No: in return for the trust I have placed in you."
She mused on this, moving slowly a step or two toward the house.
"Certainly I wish to see you again; you interest me," she said
smiling. "But it is so difficult to arrange. If I were to ask you to
come here again, my mother and uncle would be surprised. And at
Fanny's--"
"Oh, not there!" he exclaimed.
"Where then? Is there any other house where we are likely to meet?"
Durham hesitated; but he was goaded by the flight of the precious
minutes. "Not unless you'll come and dine with me," he said boldly.
"Dine with you? _Au cabaret?_ Ah, that would be diverting--but
impossible!"
"Well, dine with my cousin, then--I have a cousin, an American lady,
who lives here," said Durham, with suddenly-soaring audacity.
She paused with puzzled brows. "An American lady whom I know?"
"By name, at any rate. You send her cards for all your charity
bazaars."
She received the thrust with a laugh. "We do exploit your
compatriots."
"Oh, I don't think she has ever gone to the bazaars."
"But she might if I dined with her?"
"Still less, I imagine."
She reflected on this, and then said with acuteness: "I like that,
and I accept--but what is the lady's name?"
VI
On the way home, in the first drop of his exaltation, Durham had
said to himself: "But why on earth should Bessy invite her?"
He had, naturally, no very cogent reasons to give Mrs. Boykin in
support of his astonishing request, and could only, marvelling at
his own growth in duplicity, suffer her to infer that he was really,
shamelessly "smitten" with the lady he thus proposed to thrust upon
her hospitality. But, to his surprise, Mrs. Boykin hardly gave
herself time to pause upon his reasons. They were swallowed up in
the fact that Madame de Treymes wished to dine with her, as the
lesser luminaries vanish in the blaze of the sun.
"I am not surprised," she declared, with a faint smile intended to
check her husband's unruly wonder. "I wonder _you_ are, Elmer.
Didn't you tell me that Armillac went out of his way to speak to you
the other day at the races? And at Madame d'Alglade's sale--yes, I
went there after all, just for a minute, because I found Katy and
Nannie were so anxious to be taken--well, that day I noticed that
Madame de Treymes was quite _empressee_ when we went up to her
stall. Oh, I didn't buy anything: I merely waited while the girls
chose some lampshades. They thought it would be interesting to take
home something painted by a real Marquise, and of course I didn't
tell them that those women _never_ make the things they sell at
their stalls. But I repeat I'm not surprised: I suspected that
Madame de Treymes had heard of our little dinners. You know they're
really horribly bored in that poky old Faubourg. My poor John, I see
now why she's been making up to you! But on one point I am quite
determined, Elmer; whatever you say, I shall _not_ invite the Prince
d'Armillac."
Elmer, as far as Durham could observe, did not say much; but, like
his wife, he continued in a state of pleasantly agitated activity
till the momentous evening of the dinner.
The festivity in question was restricted in numbers, either owing to
the difficulty of securing suitable guests, or from a desire not to
have it appear that Madame de Treymes' hosts attached any special
importance to her presence; but the smallness of the company was
counterbalanced by the multiplicity of the courses.
The national determination not to be "downed" by the despised
foreigner, to show a wealth of material resource obscurely felt to
compensate for the possible lack of other distinctions--this resolve
had taken, in Mrs. Boykin's case, the shape--or rather the multiple
shapes--of a series of culinary feats, of gastronomic combinations,
which would have commanded her deep respect had she seen them on any
other table, and which she naturally relied on to produce the same
effect on her guest. Whether or not the desired result was achieved,
Madame de Treymes' manner did not specifically declare; but it
showed a general complaisance, a charming willingness to be amused,
which made Mr. Boykin, for months afterward, allude to her among his
compatriots as "an old friend of my wife's--takes potluck with us,
you know. Of course there's not a word of truth in any of those
ridiculous stories."
It was only when, to Durham's intense surprise, Mr. Boykin hazarded
to his neighbour the regret that they had not been so lucky as to
"secure the Prince"--it was then only that the lady showed, not
indeed anything so simple and unprepared as embarrassment, but a
faint play of wonder, an under-flicker of amusement, as though
recognizing that, by some odd law of social compensation, the
crudity of the talk might account for the complexity of the dishes.
But Mr. Boykin was tremulously alive to hints, and the conversation
at once slid to safer topics, easy generalizations which left Madame
de Treymes ample time to explore the table, to use her narrowed gaze
like a knife slitting open the unsuspicious personalities about her.
Nannie and Katy Durham, who, after much discussion (to which their
hostess candidly admitted them), had been included in the feast,
were the special objects of Madame de Treymes' observation. During
dinner she ignored in their favour the other carefully-selected
guests--the fashionable art-critic, the old Legitimist general, the
beauty from the English Embassy, the whole impressive marshalling of
Mrs. Boykin's social resources--and when the men returned to the
drawing-room, Durham found her still fanning in his sisters the
flame of an easily kindled enthusiasm. Since she could hardly have
been held by the intrinsic interest of their converse, the sight
gave him another swift intuition of the working of those hidden
forces with which Fanny de Malrive felt herself encompassed. But
when Madame de Treymes, at his approach, let him see that it was for
him she had been reserving herself, he felt that so graceful an
impulse needed no special explanation. She had the art of making it
seem quite natural that they should move away together to the
remotest of Mrs. Boykin's far-drawn salons, and that there, in a
glaring privacy of brocade and ormolu, she should turn to him with a
smile which avowed her intentional quest of seclusion.
"Confess that I have done a great deal for you!" she exclaimed,
making room for him on a sofa judiciously screened from the
observation of the other rooms.
"In coming to dine with my cousin?" he enquired, answering her
smile.
"Let us say, in giving you this half hour."
"For that I am duly grateful--and shall be still more so when I know
what it contains for me."
"Ah, I am not sure. You will not like what I am going to say."
"Shall I not?" he rejoined, changing colour.
She raised her eyes from the thoughtful contemplation of her painted
fan. "You appear to have no idea of the difficulties."
"Should I have asked your help if I had not had an idea of them?"
"But you are still confident that with my help you can surmount
them?"
"I can't believe you have come here to take that confidence from
me?"
She leaned back, smiling at him through her lashes. "And all this I
am to do for your _beaux yeux?_"
"No--for your own: that you may see with them what happiness you are
conferring."
"You are extremely clever, and I like you." She paused, and then
brought out with lingering emphasis: "But my family will not hear of
a divorce."
She threw into her voice such an accent of finality that Durham, for
the moment, felt himself brought up against an insurmountable
barrier; but, almost at once, his fear was mitigated by the
conviction that she would not have put herself out so much to say so
little.
"When you speak of your family, do you include yourself?" he
suggested.
She threw a surprised glance at him. "I thought you understood that
I am simply their mouthpiece."
At this he rose quietly to his feet with a gesture of acceptance. "I
have only to thank you, then, for not keeping me longer in
suspense."
His air of wishing to put an immediate end to the conversation
seemed to surprise her. "Sit down a moment longer," she commanded
him kindly; and as he leaned against the back of his chair, without
appearing to hear her request, she added in a low voice: "I am very
sorry for you and Fanny--but you are not the only persons to be
pitied."
She had dropped her light manner as she might have tossed aside her
fan, and he was startled at the intimacy of misery to which her look
and movement abruptly admitted him. Perhaps no Anglo-Saxon fully
understands the fluency in self-revelation which centuries of the
confessional have given to the Latin races, and to Durham, at any
rate, Madame de Treymes' sudden avowal gave the shock of a physical
abandonment.
"I am so sorry," he stammered--"is there any way in which I can be
of use to you?"
She sat before him with her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on his in
a terrible intensity of appeal. "If you would--if you would! Oh,
there is nothing I would not do for you. I have still a great deal
of influence with my mother, and what my mother commands we all do.
I could help you--I am sure I could help you; but not if my own
situation were known. And if nothing can be done it must be known in
a few days."
Durham had reseated himself at her side. "Tell me what I can do," he
said in a low tone, forgetting his own preoccupations in his genuine
concern for her distress.
She looked up at him through tears. "How dare I? Your race is so
cautious, so self-controlled--you have so little indulgence for the
extravagances of the heart. And my folly has been incredible--and
unrewarded." She paused, and as Durham waited in a silence which she
guessed to be compassionate, she brought out below her breath: "I
have lent money--my husband's, my brother's--money that was not
mine, and now I have nothing to repay it with."
Durham gazed at her in genuine astonishment. The turn the
conversation had taken led quite beyond his uncomplicated
experiences with the other sex. She saw his surprise, and extended
her hands in deprecation and entreaty. "Alas, what must you think of
me? How can I explain my humiliating myself before a stranger? Only
by telling you the whole truth--the fact that I am not alone in this
disaster, that I could not confess my situation to my family without
ruining myself, and involving in my ruin some one who, however
undeservedly, has been as dear to me as--as you are to--"
Durham pushed his chair back with a sharp exclamation.
"Ah, even that does not move you!" she said.
The cry restored him to his senses by the long shaft of light it
sent down the dark windings of the situation. He seemed suddenly to
know Madame de Treymes as if he had been brought up with her in the
inscrutable shades of the Hotel de Malrive.
She, on her side, appeared to have a startled but uncomprehending
sense of the fact that his silence was no longer completely
sympathetic, that her touch called forth no answering vibration; and
she made a desperate clutch at the one chord she could be certain of
sounding.
"You have asked a great deal of me--much more than you can guess. Do
you mean to give me nothing--not even your sympathy--in return? Is
it because you have heard horrors of me? When are they not said of a
woman who is married unhappily? Perhaps not in your fortunate
country, where she may seek liberation without dishonour. But
here--! You who have seen the consequences of our disastrous
marriages--you who may yet be the victim of our cruel and abominable
system; have you no pity for one who has suffered in the same way,
and without the possibility of release?" She paused, laying her hand
on his arm with a smile of deprecating irony. "It is not because you
are not rich. At such times the crudest way is the shortest, and I
don't pretend to deny that I know I am asking you a trifle. You
Americans, when you want a thing, always pay ten times what it is
worth, and I am giving you the wonderful chance to get what you most
want at a bargain."
Durham sat silent, her little gloved hand burning his coat-sleeve as
if it had been a hot iron. His brain was tingling with the shock of
her confession. She wanted money, a great deal of money: that was
clear, but it was not the point. She was ready to sell her
influence, and he fancied she could be counted on to fulfil her side
of the bargain. The fact that he could so trust her seemed only to
make her more terrible to him--more supernaturally dauntless and
baleful. For what was it that she exacted of him? She had said she
must have money to pay her debts; but he knew that was only a pre-
text which she scarcely expected him to believe. She wanted the
money for some one else; that was what her allusion to a
fellow-victim meant. She wanted it to pay the Prince's gambling
debts--it was at that price that Durham was to buy the right to
marry Fanny de Malrive.
Once the situation had worked itself out in his mind, he found
himself unexpectedly relieved of the necessity of weighing the
arguments for and against it. All the traditional forces of his
blood were in revolt, and he could only surrender himself to their
pressure, without thought of compromise or parley.
He stood up in silence, and the abruptness of his movement caused
Madame de Treymes' hand to slip from his arm.
"You refuse?" she exclaimed; and he answered with a bow: "Only
because of the return you propose to make me."
She stood staring at him, in a perplexity so genuine and profound
that he could almost have smiled at it through his disgust.
"Ah, you are all incredible," she murmured at last, stooping to
repossess herself of her fan; and as she moved past him to rejoin
the group in the farther room, she added in an incisive undertone:
"You are quite at liberty to repeat our conversation to your
friend!"
VII
Durham did not take advantage of the permission thus strangely flung
at him: of his talk with her sister-in-law he gave to Madame de
Malrive only that part which concerned her.
Presenting himself for this purpose, the day after Mrs. Boykin's
dinner, he found his friend alone with her son; and the sight of the
child had the effect of dispelling whatever illusive hopes had
attended him to the threshold. Even after the governess's descent
upon the scene had left Madame de Malrive and her visitor alone, the
little boy's presence seemed to hover admonishingly between them,
reducing to a bare statement of fact Durham's confession of the
total failure of his errand.
Madame de Malrive heard the confession calmly; she had been too
prepared for it not to have prepared a countenance to receive it.
Her first comment was: "I have never known them to declare
themselves so plainly--" and Durham's baffled hopes fastened
themselves eagerly on the words. Had she not always warned him that
there was nothing so misleading as their plainness? And might it not
be that, in spite of his advisedness, he had suffered too easy a
rebuff? But second thoughts reminded him that the refusal had not
been as unconditional as his necessary reservations made it seem in
the repetition; and that, furthermore, it was his own act, and not
that of his opponents, which had determined it. The impossibility of
revealing this to Madame de Malrive only made the difficulty shut in
more darkly around him, and in the completeness of his
discouragement he scarcely needed her reminder of his promise to
regard the subject as closed when once the other side had defined
its position.
He was secretly confirmed in this acceptance of his fate by the
knowledge that it was really he who had defined the position. Even
now that he was alone with Madame de Malrive, and subtly aware of
the struggle under her composure, he felt no temptation to abate his
stand by a jot. He had not yet formulated a reason for his
resistance: he simply went on feeling, more and more strongly with
every precious sign of her participation in his unhappiness, that he
could neither owe his escape from it to such a transaction, nor
suffer her, innocently, to owe hers.
The only mitigating effect of his determination was in an increase
of helpless tenderness toward her; so that, when she exclaimed, in
answer to his announcement that he meant to leave Paris the next
night: "Oh, give me a day or two longer!" he at once resigned
himself to saying: "If I can be of the least use, I'll give you a
hundred."
She answered sadly that all he could do would be to let her feel
that he was there--just for a day or two, till she had readjusted
herself to the idea of going on in the old way; and on this note of
renunciation they parted.
But Durham, however pledged to the passive part, could not long
sustain it without rebellion. To "hang round" the shut door of his
hopes seemed, after two long days, more than even his passion
required of him; and on the third he despatched a note of goodbye to
his friend. He was going off for a few weeks, he explained--his
mother and sisters wished to be taken to the Italian lakes: but he
would return to Paris, and say his real farewell to her, before
sailing for America in July.
He had not intended his note to act as an ultimatum: he had no wish
to surprise Madame de Malrive into unconsidered surrender. When,
almost immediately, his own messenger returned with a reply from
her, he even felt a pang of disappointment, a momentary fear lest
she should have stooped a little from the high place where his
passion had preferred to leave her; but her first words turned his
fear into rejoicing.
"Let me see you before you go: something extraordinary has
happened," she wrote.
What had happened, as he heard from her a few hours later--finding
her in a tremor of frightened gladness, with her door boldly closed
to all the world but himself--was nothing less extraordinary than a
visit from Madame de Treymes, who had come, officially delegated by
the family, to announce that Monsieur de Malrive had decided not to
oppose his wife's suit for divorce. Durham, at the news, was almost
afraid to show himself too amazed; but his small signs of alarm and
wonder were swallowed up in the flush of Madame de Malrive's
incredulous joy.
"It's the long habit, you know, of not believing them--of looking
for the truth always in what they _don't_ say. It took me hours and
hours to convince myself that there's no trick under it, that there
can't be any," she explained.
"Then you _are_ convinced now?" escaped from Durham; but the shadow
of his question lingered no more than the flit of a wing across her
face.
"I am convinced because the facts are there to reassure me.
Christiane tells me that Monsieur de Malrive has consulted his
lawyers, and that they have advised him to free me. Maitre
Enguerrand has been instructed to see my lawyer whenever I wish it.
They quite understand that I never should have taken the step in
face of any opposition on their part--I am so thankful to you for
making that perfectly clear to them!--and I suppose this is the
return their pride makes to mine. For they _can_ be proud
collectively--" She broke off and added, with happy hands
outstretched: "And I owe it all to you--Christiane said it was your
talk with her that had convinced them."
Durham, at this statement, had to repress a fresh sound of
amazement; but with her hands in his, and, a moment after, her whole
self drawn to him in the first yielding of her lips, doubt perforce
gave way to the lover's happy conviction that such love was after
all too strong for the powers of darkness.
It was only when they sat again in the blissful after-calm of their
understanding, that he felt the pricking of an unappeased distrust.
"Did Madame de Treymes give you any reason for this change of
front?" he risked asking, when he found the distrust was not
otherwise to be quelled.
"Oh, yes: just what I've said. It was really her admiration of
_you_--of your attitude--your delicacy. She said that at first she
hadn't believed in it: they're always looking for a hidden motive.
And when she found that yours was staring at her in the actual words
you said: that you really respected my scruples, and would never,
never try to coerce or entrap me--something in her--poor
Christiane!--answered to it, she told me, and she wanted to prove to
us that she was capable of understanding us too. If you knew her
history you'd find it wonderful and pathetic that she can!"
Durham thought he knew enough of it to infer that Madame de Treymes
had not been the object of many conscientious scruples on the part
of the opposite sex; but this increased rather his sense of the
strangeness than of the pathos of her action. Yet Madame de Malrive,
whom he had once inwardly taxed with the morbid raising of
obstacles, seemed to see none now; and he could only infer that her
sister-in-law's actual words had carried more conviction than
reached him in the repetition of them. The mere fact that he had so
much to gain by leaving his friend's faith undisturbed was no doubt
stirring his own suspicions to unnatural activity; and this sense
gradually reasoned him back into acceptance of her view, as the most
normal as well as the pleasantest he could take.
VIII
The uneasiness thus temporarily repressed slipped into the final
disguise of hoping he should not again meet Madame de Treymes; and
in this wish he was seconded by the decision, in which Madame de
Malrive concurred, that it would be well for him to leave Paris
while the preliminary negotiations were going on. He committed her
interests to the best professional care, and his mother, resigning
her dream of the lakes, remained to fortify Madame de Malrive by her
mild unimaginative view of the transaction, as an uncomfortable but
commonplace necessity, like house-cleaning or dentistry. Mrs. Durham
would doubtless have preferred that her only son, even with his hair
turning gray, should have chosen a Fanny Frisbee rather than a Fanny
de Malrive; but it was a part of her acceptance of life on a general
basis of innocence and kindliness, that she entered generously into
his dream of rescue and renewal, and devoted herself without
after-thought to keeping up Fanny's courage with so little to spare
for herself.
The process, the lawyers declared, would not be a long one, since
Monsieur de Malrive's acquiescence reduced it to a formality; and
when, at the end of June, Durham returned from Italy with Katy and
Nannie, there seemed no reason why he should not stop in Paris long
enough to learn what progress had been made.
But before he could learn this he was to hear, on entering Madame de
Malrive's presence, news more immediate if less personal. He found
her, in spite of her gladness in his return, so evidently
preoccupied and distressed that his first thought was one of fear
for their own future. But she read and dispelled this by saying,
before he could put his question: "Poor Christiane is here. She is
very unhappy. You have seen in the papers--?"
"I have seen no papers since we left Turin. What has happened?"
"The Prince d'Armillac has come to grief. There has been some
terrible scandal about money and he has been obliged to leave France
to escape arrest."
"And Madame de Treymes has left her husband?"
"Ah, no, poor creature: they don't leave their husbands--they can't.
But de Treymes has gone down to their place in Brittany, and as my
mother-in-law is with another daughter in Auvergne, Christiane came
here for a few days. With me, you see, she need not pretend--she can
cry her eyes out."
"And that is what she is doing?"