A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and he protested with a slight smile: “Oh, but my married sister is the black sheep of the family—the rest of us never sank as low as that.”
“Low? I think it’s beautiful—fresh and innocent and simple. I remember going to such a place once. They have early dinner—rather late—and go off in buckboards over terrible roads, and bring back golden rod and autumn leaves, and read nature books aloud on the piazza; and there is always one shy young man in flannels—only one—who has come to see the prettiest girl (though how he can choose among so many!) and who takes her off in a buggy for hours and hours—” She paused and summed up with a long sigh: “It is fifteen years since I was in America.”
“And you’re still so good an American.”
“Oh, a better and better one every day!”
He hesitated. “Then why did you never come back?”
Her face altered instantly, exchanging its retrospective light for the look of slightly shadowed watchfulness which he had known as most habitual to it.
“It was impossible—it has always been so. My husband would not go; and since—since our separation—there have been family reasons.”
Durham sighed impatiently. “Why do you talk of reasons? The truth is, you have made your life here. You could never give all this up!” He made a discouraged gesture in the direction of the Place de la Concorde.
“Give it up! I would go tomorrow! But it could never, now, be for more than a visit. I must live in France on account of my boy.”
Durham’s heart gave a quick beat. At last the talk had neared the point toward which his whole mind was straining, and he began to feel a personal application in her words. But that made him all the more cautious about choosing his own.
“It is an agreement—about the boy?” he ventured.
“I gave my word. They knew that was enough,” she said proudly; adding, as if to put him in full possession of her reasons: “It would have been much more difficult for me to obtain complete control of my son if it had not been understood that I was to live in France.”
“That seems fair,” Durham assented after a moment’s reflection: it was his instinct, even in the heat of personal endeavour, to pause a moment on the question of “fairness.” The personal claim reasserted itself as he added tentatively: “But when he is brought up—when he’s grown up: then you would feel freer?”
She received this with a start, as a possibility too remote to have entered into her view of the future. “He is only eight years old!” she objected.
“Ah, of course it would be a long way off?”
“A long way off, thank heaven! French mothers part late with their sons, and in that one respect I mean to be a French mother.”
“Of course—naturally—since he has only you,” Durham again assented.
He was eager to show how fully he took her point of view, if only to dispose her to the reciprocal fairness of taking his when the time came to present it. And he began to think that the time had now come; that their walk would not have thus resolved itself, without excuse or pretext, into a tranquil session beneath the trees, for any purpose less important than that of giving him his opportunity.
He took it, characteristically, without seeking a transition. “When I spoke to you, the other day, about myself—about what I felt for you—I said nothing of the future, because, for the moment, my mind refused to travel beyond its immediate hope of happiness. But I felt, of course, even then, that the hope involved various difficulties—that we can’t, as we might once have done, come together without any thought but for ourselves; and whatever your answer is to be, I want to tell you now that I am ready to accept my share of the difficulties.” He paused, and then added explicitly: “If there’s the least chance of your listening to me, I’m willing to live over here as long as you can keep your boy with you.”
II
Whatever Madame de Malrive’s answer was to be, there could be no doubt as to her readiness to listen. She received Durham’s words without sign of resistance, and took time to ponder them gently before she answered in a voice touched by emotion: “You are very generous—very unselfish; but when you fix a limit—no matter how remote—to my remaining here, I see how wrong it is to let myself consider for a moment such possibilities as we have been talking of.”
“Wrong? Why should it be wrong?”
“Because I shall want to keep my boy always! Not, of course, in the sense of living with him, or even forming an important part of his life; I am not deluded enough to think that possible. But I do believe it possible never to pass wholly out of his life; and while there is a hope of that, how can I leave him?” She paused, and turned on him a new face, a face in which the past of which he was still so ignorant showed itself like a shadow suddenly darkening a clear pane. “How can I make you understand?” she went on urgently. “It is not only because of my love for him—not only, I mean, because of my own happiness in being with him; that I can’t, in imagination, surrender even the remotest hour of his future; it is because, the moment he passes out of my influence, he passes under that other—the influence I have been fighting against every hour since he was born!—I don’t mean, you know,” she added, as Durham, with bent head, continued to offer the silent fixity of his attention, “I don’t mean the special personal influence—except inasmuch as it represents something wider, more general, something that encloses and circulates through the whole world in which he belongs. That is what I meant when I said you could never understand! There is nothing in your experience—in any American experience—to correspond with that far-reaching family organization, which is itself a part of the larger system, and which encloses a young man of my son’s position in a network of accepted prejudices and opinions. Everything is prepared in advance—his political and religious convictions, his judgments of people, his sense of honour, his ideas of women, his whole view of life. He is taught to see vileness and corruption in every one not of his own way of thinking, and in every idea that does not directly serve the religious and political purposes of his class. The truth isn’t a fixed thing: it’s not used to test actions by, it’s tested by them, and made to fit in with them. And this forming of the mind begins with the child’s first consciousness; it’s in his nursery stories, his baby prayers, his very games with his playmates! Already he is only half mine, because the Church has the other half, and will be reaching out for my share as soon as his education begins. But that other half is still mine, and I mean to make it the strongest and most living half of the two, so that, when the inevitable conflict begins, the energy and the truth and the endurance shall be on my side and not on theirs!”
She paused, flushing with the repressed fervour of her utterance, though her voice had not been raised beyond its usual discreet modulations; and Durham felt himself tingling with the transmitted force of her resolve. Whatever shock her words brought to his personal hope, he was grateful to her for speaking them so clearly, for having so sure a grasp of her purpose.
Her decision strengthened his own, and after a pause of deliberation he said quietly: “There might be a good deal to urge on the other side—the ineffectualness of your sacrifice, the probability that when your son marries he will inevitably be absorbed back into the life of his class and his people; but I can’t look at it in that way, because if I were in your place I believe I should feel just as you do about it. As long as there was a fighting chance I should want to keep hold of my half, no matter how much the struggle cost me. And one reason why I understand your feeling about your boy is that I have the same feeling about you: as long as there’s a fighting chance of keeping my half of you—the half he is willing to spare me—I don’t see how I can ever give it up.” He waited again, and then brought out firmly: “If you’ll marry me, I’ll agree to live out here as long as you want, and we’ll be two instead of one to keep hold of your half of him.”