FullReads

Upon this state of bewilderment, this sense of having entered a room in which the lights had suddenly been turned out, even Madame de Treymes’ intensely modern presence threw no illumination. He was conscious, as she smilingly rejoined him, not of her points of difference from the others, but of the myriad invisible threads by which she held to them; he even recognized the audacious slant of her little brown profile in the portrait of a powdered ancestress beneath which she had paused a moment in advancing. She was simply one particular facet of the solid, glittering impenetrable body which he had thought to turn in his hands and look through like a crystal; and when she said, in her clear staccato English, “Perhaps you will like to see the other rooms,” he felt like crying out in his blindness: “If I could only be sure of seeing anything here!” Was she conscious of his blindness, and was he as remote and unintelligible to her as she was to him? This possibility, as he followed her through the nobly-unfolding rooms of the great house, gave him his first hope of recoverable advantage. For, after all, he had some vague traditional lights on her world and its antecedents; whereas to her he was a wholly new phenomenon, as unexplained as a fragment of meteorite dropped at her feet on the smooth gravel of the garden-path they were pacing.

She had led him down into the garden, in response to his admiring exclamation, and perhaps also because she was sure that, in the chill spring afternoon, they would have its embowered privacies to themselves. The garden was small, but intensely rich and deep–one of those wells of verdure and fragrance which everywhere sweeten the air of Paris by wafts blown above old walls on quiet streets; and as Madame de Treymes paused against the ivy bank masking its farther boundary, Durham felt more than ever removed from the normal bearings of life.

His sense of strangeness was increased by the surprise of his companion’s next speech.

“You wish to marry my sister-in-law?” she asked abruptly; and Durham’s start of wonder was followed by an immediate feeling of relief. He had expected the preliminaries of their interview to be as complicated as the bargaining in an Eastern bazaar, and had feared to lose himself at the first turn in a labyrinth of “foreign” intrigue.

“Yes, I do,” he said with equal directness; and they smiled together at the sharp report of question and answer.

The smile put Durham more completely at his ease, and after waiting for her to speak, he added with deliberation: “So far, however, the wishing is entirely on my side.” His scrupulous conscience felt itself justified in this reserve by the conditional nature of Madame de Malrive’s consent.

“I understand; but you have been given reason to hope–“

“Every man in my position gives himself his own reasons for hoping,” he interposed with a smile.

“I understand that too,” Madame de Treymes assented. “But still–you spent a great deal of money the other day at our bazaar.”

“Yes: I wanted to have a talk with you, and it was the readiest–if not the most distinguished–means of attracting your attention.”

“I understand,” she once more reiterated, with a gleam of amusement.

“It is because I suspect you of understanding everything that I have been so anxious for this opportunity.”

She bowed her acknowledgement, and said: “Shall we sit a moment?” adding, as he drew their chairs under a tree: “You permit me, then, to say that I believe I understand also a little of our good Fanny’s mind?”

“On that point I have no authority to speak. I am here only to listen.”

“Listen, then: you have persuaded her that there would be no harm in divorcing my brother–since I believe your religion does not forbid divorce?”

“Madame de Malrive’s religion sanctions divorce in such a case as–“

“As my brother has furnished? Yes, I have heard that your race is stricter in judging such ecarts. But you must not think,” she added, “that I defend my brother. Fanny must have told you that we have always given her our sympathy.”