Madame De Treymes

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!”