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 f.a.n.n.y was so rea.s.sured, 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sed between them now would go to the root of the matter.
The first thing that pa.s.sed 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 const.i.tuted _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 circ.u.mstances 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 f.a.n.n.y?"
"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 pa.s.sed, I felt it a kind of loyalty not to leave you in ignorance?"