Madame de Treymes | Page 6

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