Books: Madame de Treymes
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Edith Wharton >> Madame de Treymes
It was so unlike his conception of the way in which, under the most
adverse circumstances, Madame de Treymes would be likely to occupy
her time, that Durham was conscious of a note of scepticism in his
query.
"Poor thing--if you saw her you would feel nothing but pity. She is
suffering so horribly that I reproach myself for being happy under
the same roof."
Durham met this with a tender pressure of her hand; then he said,
after a pause of reflection: "I should like to see her."
He hardly knew what prompted him to utter the wish, unless it were a
sudden stir of compunction at the memory of his own dealings with
Madame de Treymes. Had he not sacrificed the poor creature to a
purely fantastic conception of conduct? She had said that she knew
she was asking a trifle of him; and the fact that, materially, it
would have been a trifle, had seemed at the moment only an added
reason for steeling himself in his moral resistance to it. But now
that he had gained his point--and through her own generosity, as it
still appeared--the largeness of her attitude made his own seem
cramped and petty. Since conduct, in the last resort, must be judged
by its enlarging or diminishing effect on character, might it not be
that the zealous weighing of the moral anise and cummin was less
important than the unconsidered lavishing of the precious ointment?
At any rate, he could enjoy no peace of mind under the burden of
Madame de Treymes' magnanimity, and when he had assured himself that
his own affairs were progressing favourably, he once more, at the
risk of surprising his betrothed, brought up the possibility of
seeing her relative.
Madame de Malrive evinced no surprise. "It is natural, knowing what
she has done for us, that you should want to show her your sympathy.
The difficulty is that it is just the one thing you _can't_ show
her. You can thank her, of course, for ourselves, but even that at
the moment--"
"Would seem brutal? Yes, I recognize that I should have to choose my
words," he admitted, guiltily conscious that his capability of
dealing with Madame de Treymes extended far beyond her
sister-in-law's conjecture.
Madame de Malrive still hesitated. "I can tell her; and when you
come back tomorrow--"
It had been decided that, in the interests of discretion--the
interests, in other words, of the poor little future Marquis de
Malrive--Durham was to remain but two days in Paris, withdrawing
then with his family till the conclusion of the divorce proceedings
permitted him to return in the acknowledged character of Madame de
Malrive's future husband. Even on this occasion, he had not come to
her alone; Nannie Durham, in the adjoining room, was chatting
conspicuously with the little Marquis, whom she could with
difficulty be restrained from teaching to call her "Aunt Nannie."
Durham thought her voice had risen unduly once or twice during his
visit, and when, on taking leave, he went to summon her from the
inner room, he found the higher note of ecstasy had been evoked by
the appearance of Madame de Treymes, and that the little boy,
himself absorbed in a new toy of Durham's bringing, was being bent
over by an actual as well as a potential aunt.
Madame de Treymes raised herself with a slight start at Durham's
approach: she had her hat on, and had evidently paused a moment on
her way out to speak with Nannie, without expecting to be surprised
by her sister-in-law's other visitor. But her surprises never wore
the awkward form of embarrassment, and she smiled beautifully on
Durham as he took her extended hand.
The smile was made the more appealing by the way in which it lit up
the ruin of her small dark face, which looked seared and hollowed as
by a flame that might have spread over it from her fevered eyes.
Durham, accustomed to the pale inward grief of the inexpressive
races, was positively startled by the way in which she seemed to
have been openly stretched on the pyre; he almost felt an indelicacy
in the ravages so tragically confessed.
The sight caused an involuntary readjustment of his whole view of
the situation, and made him, as far as his own share in it went,
more than ever inclined to extremities of self-disgust. With him
such sensations required, for his own relief, some immediate
penitential escape, and as Madame de Treymes turned toward the door
he addressed a glance of entreaty to his betrothed.
Madame de Malrive, whose intelligence could be counted on at such
moments, responded by laying a detaining hand on her sister-in-law's
arm.
"Dear Christiane, may I leave Mr. Durham in your charge for two
minutes? I have promised Nannie that she shall see the boy put to
bed."
Madame de Treymes made no audible response to this request, but when
the door had closed on the other ladies she said, looking quietly at
Durham: "I don't think that, in this house, your time will hang so
heavy that you need my help in supporting it."
Durham met her glance frankly. "It was not for that reason that
Madame de Malrive asked you to remain with me."
"Why, then? Surely not in the interest of preserving appearances,
since she is safely upstairs with your sister?"
"No; but simply because I asked her to. I told her I wanted to speak
to you."
"How you arrange things! And what reason can you have for wanting to
speak to me?"
He paused for a moment. "Can't you imagine? The desire to thank you
for what you have done."
She stirred restlessly, turning to adjust her hat before the glass
above the mantelpiece.
"Oh, as for what I have done--!"
"Don't speak as if you regretted it," he interposed.
She turned back to him with a flash of laughter lighting up the
haggardness of her face. "Regret working for the happiness of two
such excellent persons? Can't you fancy what a charming change it is
for me to do something so innocent and beneficent?"
He moved across the room and went up to her, drawing down the hand
which still flitted experimentally about her hat.
"Don't talk in that way, however much one of the persons of whom you
speak may have deserved it."
"One of the persons? Do you mean me?"
He released her hand, but continued to face her resolutely. "I mean
myself, as you know. You have been generous--extraordinarily
generous."
"Ah, but I was doing good in a good cause. You have made me see that
there is a distinction."
He flushed to the forehead. "I am here to let you say whatever you
choose to me."
"Whatever I choose?" She made a slight gesture of deprecation. "Has
it never occurred to you that I may conceivably choose to say
nothing?"
Durham paused, conscious of the increasing difficulty of the
advance. She met him, parried him, at every turn: he had to take his
baffled purpose back to another point of attack.
"Quite conceivably," he said: "so much so that I am aware I must
make the most of this opportunity, because I am not likely to get
another."
"But what remains of your opportunity, if it isn't one to me?"
"It still remains, for me, an occasion to abase myself--" He broke
off, conscious of a grossness of allusion that seemed, on a closer
approach, the real obstacle to full expression. But the moments were
flying, and for his self-esteem's sake he must find some way of
making her share the burden of his repentance.
"There is only one thinkable pretext for detaining you: it is that I
may still show my sense of what you have done for me."
Madame de Treymes, who had moved toward the door, paused at this and
faced him, resting her thin brown hands on a slender sofa-back.
"How do you propose to show that sense?" she enquired.
Durham coloured still more deeply: he saw that she was determined to
save her pride by making what he had to say of the utmost
difficulty. Well! he would let his expiation take that form,
then--it was as if her slender hands held out to him the fool's cap
he was condemned to press down on his own ears.
"By offering in return--in any form, and to the utmost--any service
you are forgiving enough to ask of me."
She received this with a low sound of laughter that scarcely rose to
her lips. "You are princely. But, my dear sir, does it not occur to
you that I may, meanwhile, have taken my own way of repaying myself
for any service I have been fortunate enough to render you?"
Durham, at the question, or still more, perhaps, at the tone in
which it was put, felt, through his compunction, a vague faint chill
of apprehension. Was she threatening him or only mocking him? Or was
this barbed swiftness of retort only the wounded creature's way of
defending the privacy of her own pain? He looked at her again, and
read his answer in the last conjecture.
"I don't know how you can have repaid yourself for anything so
disinterested--but I am sure, at least, that you have given me no
chance of recognizing, ever so slightly, what you have done."
She shook her head, with the flicker of a smile on her melancholy
lips. "Don't be too sure! You have given me a chance and I have
taken it--taken it to the full. So fully," she continued, keeping
her eyes fixed on his, "that if I were to accept any farther service
you might choose to offer, I should simply be robbing you--robbing
you shamelessly." She paused, and added in an undefinable voice: "I
was entitled, wasn't I, to take something in return for the service
I had the happiness of doing you?"
Durham could not tell whether the irony of her tone was
self-directed or addressed to himself--perhaps it comprehended them
both. At any rate, he chose to overlook his own share in it in
replying earnestly: "So much so, that I can't see how you can have
left me nothing to add to what you say you have taken."
"Ah, but you don't know what that is!" She continued to smile,
elusively, ambiguously. "And what's more, you wouldn't believe me if
I told you."
"How do you know?" he rejoined.
"You didn't believe me once before; and this is so much more
incredible."
He took the taunt full in the face. "I shall go away unhappy unless
you tell me--but then perhaps I have deserved to," he confessed.
She shook her head again, advancing toward the door with the evident
intention of bringing their conference to a close; but on the
threshold she paused to launch her reply.
"I can't send you away unhappy, since it is in the contemplation of
your happiness that I have found my reward."
IX
The next day Durham left with his family for England, with the
intention of not returning till after the divorce should have been
pronounced in September.
To say that he left with a quiet heart would be to overstate the
case: the fact that he could not communicate to Madame de Malrive
the substance of his talk with her sister-in-law still hung upon him
uneasily. But of definite apprehensions the lapse of time gradually
freed him, and Madame de Malrive's letters, addressed more
frequently to his mother and sisters than to himself, reflected, in
their reassuring serenity, the undisturbed course of events.
There was to Durham something peculiarly touching--as of an
involuntary confession of almost unbearable loneliness--in the way
she had regained, with her re-entry into the clear air of American
associations, her own fresh trustfulness of view. Once she had
accustomed herself to the surprise of finding her divorce unopposed,
she had been, as it now seemed to Durham, in almost too great haste
to renounce the habit of weighing motives and calculating chances.
It was as though her coming liberation had already freed her from
the garb of a mental slavery, as though she could not too soon or
too conspicuously cast off the ugly badge of suspicion. The fact
that Durham's cleverness had achieved so easy a victory over forces
apparently impregnable, merely raised her estimate of that
cleverness to the point of letting her feel that she could rest in
it without farther demur. He had even noticed in her, during his few
hours in Paris, a tendency to reproach herself for her lack of
charity, and a desire, almost as fervent as his own, to expiate it
by exaggerated recognition of the disinterestedness of her
opponents--if opponents they could still be called. This sudden
change in her attitude was peculiarly moving to Durham. He knew she
would hazard herself lightly enough wherever her heart called her;
but that, with the precious freight of her child's future weighing
her down, she should commit herself so blindly to his hand stirred
in him the depths of tenderness. Indeed, had the actual course of
events been less auspiciously regular, Madame de Malrive's
confidence would have gone far toward unsettling his own; but with
the process of law going on unimpeded, and the other side making no
sign of open or covert resistance, the fresh air of good faith
gradually swept through the inmost recesses of his distrust.
It was expected that the decision in the suit would be reached by
mid-September; and it was arranged that Durham and his family should
remain in England till a decent interval after the conclusion of the
proceedings. Early in the month, however, it became necessary for
Durham to go to France to confer with a business associate who was
in Paris for a few days, and on the point of sailing for Cherbourg.
The most zealous observance of appearances could hardly forbid
Durham's return for such a purpose; but it had been agreed between
himself and Madame de Malrive--who had once more been left alone by
Madame de Treymes' return to her family--that, so close to the
fruition of their wishes, they would propitiate fate by a scrupulous
adherence to usage, and communicate only, during his hasty visit, by
a daily interchange of notes.
The ingenuity of Madame de Malrive's tenderness found, however, the
day after his arrival, a means of tempering their privation.
"Christiane," she wrote, "is passing through Paris on her way from
Trouville, and has promised to see you for me if you will call on
her today. She thinks there is no reason why you should not go to
the Hotel de Malrive, as you will find her there alone, the family
having gone to Auvergne. She is really our friend and understands
us."
In obedience to this request--though perhaps inwardly regretting
that it should have been made--Durham that afternoon presented
himself at the proud old house beyond the Seine. More than ever, in
the semi-abandonment of the _morte saison_, with reduced service,
and shutters closed to the silence of the high-walled court, did it
strike the American as the incorruptible custodian of old prejudices
and strange social survivals. The thought of what he must represent
to the almost human consciousness which such old houses seem to
possess, made him feel like a barbarian desecrating the silence of a
temple of the earlier faith. Not that there was anything venerable
in the attestations of the Hotel de Malrive, except in so far as, to
a sensitive imagination, every concrete embodiment of a past order
of things testifies to real convictions once suffered for. Durham,
at any rate, always alive in practical issues to the view of the
other side, had enough sympathy left over to spend it sometimes,
whimsically, on such perceptions of difference. Today, especially,
the assurance of success--the sense of entering like a victorious
beleaguerer receiving the keys of the stronghold--disposed him to a
sentimental perception of what the other side might have to say for
itself, in the language of old portraits, old relics, old usages
dumbly outraged by his mere presence.
On the appearance of Madame de Treymes, however, such considerations
gave way to the immediate act of wondering how she meant to carry
off her share of the adventure. Durham had not forgotten the note on
which their last conversation had closed: the lapse of time serving
only to give more precision and perspective to the impression he had
then received.
Madame de Treymes' first words implied a recognition of what was in
his thoughts.
"It is extraordinary, my receiving you here; but _que voulez vous?_
There was no other place, and I would do more than this for our dear
Fanny."
Durham bowed. "It seems to me that you are also doing a great deal
for me."
"Perhaps you will see later that I have my reasons," she returned
smiling. "But before speaking for myself I must speak for Fanny."
She signed to him to take a chair near the sofa-corner in which she
had installed herself, and he listened in silence while she
delivered Madame de Malrive's message, and her own report of the
progress of affairs.
"You have put me still more deeply in your debt," he said, as she
concluded; "I wish you would make the expression of this feeling a
large part of the message I send back to Madame de Malrive."
She brushed this aside with one of her light gestures of
deprecation. "Oh, I told you I had my reasons. And since you are
here--and the mere sight of you assures me that you are as well as
Fanny charged me to find you--with all these preliminaries disposed
of, I am going to relieve you, in a small measure, of the weight of
your obligation."
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 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."