Book: The Inner Shrine

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"I'm not sure of what you mean by a byword. I acknowledge that I braved
public opinion, and that much ill was said of me--often, more than I
deserved."

"Isn't it true that your name was connected with that of a man called
Lalanne, and that he was killed in a duel on your account?"

"It's true that Monsieur Lalanne made love to me; it's also true that he
was killed in a duel; but it's not true that it was on my account. The
instance is an excellent illustration of the degree to which the true
and the false are mixed in Parisian gossip--perhaps in all gossip--and a
woman's reputation blasted. Unhappily for me, I felt myself young and
strong enough to be indifferent to reputation. I treated it with the
neglect one often bestows upon one's health--not thinking that there
would come a day of reckoning."

"If there had been only one such case it might have been allowed to
pass; but what do you say of De Cretteville? what of De Melcourt? what
of Lord Wendover?"

"I have nothing to say but this: that for such scandal I've a rule, from
which I have no intention of departing even now: I neither tell it, nor
listen to it, nor contradict it. If it pleases the Marquis de Bienville
to repeat it, and you to give it credence, I can't stoop to correct it,
even in my own defence."

"God knows I'm not delving into scandal, Diane. If I bring up these
miserable names, it's only that you may have the opportunity to right
yourself."

"It's an opportunity impossible for me to use. If I were to attempt to
unravel the strand of truth from the web of falsehood, it would end in
your condemning me the more. The canons of conduct in France are so
different from those in America that what is permissible in one country
is heinous in the other. In the same way that your young girls shock our
conceptions of propriety, our married women shock yours. It would be
useless to defend myself in your eyes, because I should be appealing to
a standard to which I was never taught to conform."

"I thought I had taken that into consideration. I'm not entirely
ignorant of the conditions under which you've lived, and I meant to have
allowed for them. But isn't it true that you exceeded the very wide
latitude recognized by public opinion, even in a place like Paris?"

"I didn't take public opinion into account. I was reckless of its
injustice, as I was careless of its applause. I see now, however, that
indifference to either brings its punishment."

"Those are abstract ideas, and I'm trying to deal with concrete facts.
Isn't it true that George Eveleth was a rich man when you married him,
and that your extravagance ruined him?"

"It helped to ruin him. I plead guilty to that. I had no knowledge of
the value of money; but I don't offer that as an excuse."

"Isn't it true that the Marquis de Bienville was your lover, and that
you were thinking of deserting your husband to go with him?"

"It's true that the Marquis de Bienville asked me to do so, and that I
was rash enough to turn him into ridicule. I shouldn't have done it if I
had known that there was a man in the world capable of taking such a
revenge upon a woman as he took on me."

"What revenge?"

"The revenge you're executing at this minute. He said--what very few
men, thank God, will say of a woman, even when it's true, and what it
takes a dastard to say when it's not true. Even in the case of the
fallen woman there's a chivalrous human pity that protects her; while
there's something more than that due to the most foolish of our sex who
has not fallen. I took it for granted that, at the worst, I could count
on that, until I met your friend. His cup of vengeance will be full when
he learns that he has given you the power to insult me."

"I don't mean to insult you," he said, in a dogged voice, "but I mean,
if possible, to know the truth."

"I'm not concealing it. I'm ready to tell you anything."

"Then, tell me this: isn't it the case that when George Eveleth
discovered your relations with Bienville, he challenged him?"

"It's the case that he challenged him, not because of what he
discovered, but of what Monsieur de Bienville said."

"At their encounter, didn't Bienville fire into the air--?"

"I've never heard so."

"And didn't George Eveleth fall from a self-inflicted shot?"

"No. He died at the hand of the Marquis de Bienville."

"So you told me once before, though you didn't tell me the man's name.
But, Diane, aren't you convinced in your heart that George Eveleth knew
that which made his life no longer worth the living?"

"Do you mean that he knew something--about me?"

"Yes--about you."

"That's the most cruel charge Monsieur de Bienville has invented yet."

"Suppose he didn't invent it? Suppose it was a fact?"

"Have you any purpose in subjecting me to this needless torture?"

"I have a purpose, and I'm sorry if it involves torture; but I assure
you it isn't needless. I must get to the bottom of this thing. I've
asked you to marry me; and I must know if my future wife--"

"But I'm not--your future wife."

"That remains to be seen. I can come to no decision--"

"But I can."

"That must wait. The point before us is this: Did, or did not, George
Eveleth kill himself?"

"He did not."

"You must understand that it would prove nothing if he did."

"It would prove, or go far to prove, what you said just now--that I had
made his life not worth the living."

"His money troubles may have counted for something in that. What it
would do is this: it would help to corroborate Bienville's word
against--yours."

"Fortunately there are means of proving that I'm right. I can't tell you
exactly what they are; but I know that, in France, when people die the
registers tell just what they died of."

"I've already sent for the necessary information. I've done even more
than that. I couldn't wait for the slow process of the mails. I cabled
this morning to Grimston, one of my Paris partners, to wire me the cause
of George Eveleth's death, as officially registered. This is his reply."

He held up the envelope Diane had placed on the desk earlier in the
evening.

"Why don't you open it?" she asked, in a whisper of suspense.

"I've been afraid to. I've been afraid that it would prove him right in
the one detail in which I'm able to put his word to the test. I've been
hoping against hope that you would clear yourself; but if this is in his
favor--"

"Open it," she pleaded.

With the silver dagger she had laid ready to his hand he ripped up the
envelope, and drew out the paper.

"Read it," he said, passing it to her, without unfolding it.

Though it contained but one word, Diane took a long time to decipher it.
For minutes she stared at it, as though the power of comprehension had
forsaken her. Again and again she lifted her eyes to his, in sheer
bewilderment, only to drop them then once more on the all but blank
sheet in her hand. At last it seemed as if her fingers had no more
strength to hold it, and she let it flutter to the floor.

"He was right?"

The question came in a hoarse undertone, but Diane had no voice in which
to reply. She could only nod her head in dumb assent.

It grew late, and Derek Pruyn still sat in the position in which Diane
had left him. His hands rested clinched on the desk before him, while
his eyes stared vacantly at the cluster of electric lights overhead. He
was living through the conversations with Bienville on shipboard. He
began with the first time he had noticed the tall, brown-eyed,
black-bearded young Frenchman on the day when they sailed out of the
harbor of Rio de Janeiro. He passed on to their first interchange of
casual remarks, leaning together over the deck-rail, and watching the
lights of Para recede into the darkness. It was in the hot, still evenings
in the Caribbean Sea that, smoking in neighboring deck-chairs, they had
first drifted into intimate talk, and the young man had begun to unburden
himself. They had been distinctly interesting to Derek, these glimpses
of a joyous, idle, light-o'-love life, with a tragic element never very
far below its surface, so different from his own gray career of
business. They not only beguiled the tedious nights, but they opened up
vistas of romance to an imagination growing dull before its time, in the
seriousness of large practical affairs. In proportion as the young
Frenchman showed himself willing to narrate, Derek became a sympathetic
listener. As Bienville told of his pursuit, now of this fair face, and
now of that, Derek received the impression of a chase, in which the
hunted engages not of necessity, but, like Atalanta, in sheer glee of
excitement. Like Atalanta, too, she was apt to over-estimate her speed,
and to end in being caught.

It was not till after he had recounted a number of _petites histoires_,
more or less amusing, that Bienville came to what he called "_l'affaire
la plus serieuse de ma vie,_" while Derek drank in the tale with all the
avidity the jealous heart brings to the augmentation of its pain. To the
idealizing purity of his conception of Diane any earthly failing on her
part became the extremity of sin. He had placed her so high that when
she fell it was to no middle flight of guilt; as to the fallen angel,
there was no choice for her, in his estimation, between heaven and the
nether hell.

Outwardly he was an ordinary passenger, smoking quietly in a deck-chair,
in order to pass the time between dinner and the hour for "turning in."
His voice, as he plied Bienville with questions, betrayed his emotions
no more than the darkened surface of the sea gave evidence of the raging
life within its depths. To Bienville himself, during these idle, balmy
nights, there was a threefold inspiration, which in no case called for
strict exactitude of detail. There was, first, the pleasure of talking
about himself; there was, next, the desire to give his career the
advantage of a romantic light; and there was, thirdly, the
story-teller's natural instinct to hold his hearer spellbound. The little
more or the little less could not matter to a man whom he didn't know, in
talking about a woman whose name he hadn't given; while, on the other
hand, there was the satisfaction, to which the Latin is so sensitive, of
showing himself a lion among ladies.

Moreover, he had boasted of his achievements so often that he had come
to believe in them long before giving Derek the detailed account of his
victory on the gleaming Caribbean seas. On his part, Derek had found no
difficulty in crediting that which was related with apparent fidelity to
fact, and which filled up, in so remarkable a manner, the empty spaces
between the mysterious, broken hints Diane had at various times given
him of her own inner life. The one story helped to tell the other as
accurately as the fragments of an ancient stele, when put together, make
up the whole inscription. The very independence of the sources from
which he drew his knowledge negatived the possibility of doubt. There
was but one way in which Diane could have put herself right with him:
she could have swept the charge aside, with a serene contemptuousness of
denial. Had she done so, her assertion would have found his own
eagerness to believe in her ready to meet it half-way. As it was, alas!
her admissions had been damning. Where she acknowledged the smoke, there
surely must have been the fire! Where she owned to so much culpability,
there surely must have been the entire measure of guilt!

For the time being, he forgot Bienville, in order to review the
conversation of the last half-hour. Diane had not carried herself like a
woman who had nothing with which to reproach herself; and that a woman
should be obliged to reproach herself at all was a humiliation to her
womanhood. In the midst of this gross world, where the man's soul
naturally became stained and coarsened, hers should retain the celestial
beauty with which it came forth from God. That, in his opinion, was her
duty; that was her instinct; that was the object with which she had been
placed on earth. A woman who was no better than a man was an error on
the part of nature; and Diane--oh, the pity of it!--had put herself down
on the man's level with a naivete which showed her unconscious of ever
having been higher up. She had confessed to weaknesses, as though she
were of no finer clay than himself, and spoke of being penitent, when
the tragedy lay in the fact that a woman should have anything to repent
of.

The minutes went by, but he sat rigid, with hands clinched before him,
and eyes fixed in a kind of hypnotic stare on the cluster of lights,
taking no account of time or place. Throughout the house there was the
stillness of midnight, broken only by the rumble of a carriage or the
clatter of a motor in the street. The silence was the more ghostly owing
to the circumstance that throughout the empty rooms lights were still
flaring uselessly, welcoming his return. Presently there came a
sound--faint, soft, swift, like the rustle of wings, or a weird spirit
footfall. Though it was scarcely audible, it was certain that something
was astir.

With a start Derek came back from the contemplation of his intolerable
pain to the world of common happenings. He must see what could be moving
at this unaccustomed hour; but he had barely risen in his place when he
was disturbed by still another sound, this time louder and heavier, and
characterized by a certain brusque finality. It was the closing of a
door; it was the closing of the large, ponderous street-door. Some one
had left the house.

In a dozen strides he was out in the hail and on the stairway. There, on
the landing, where an hour or two ago he had turned to look down upon
Diane, stood Dorothea in her night-dress--a little white figure, scared
and trembling.

"Oh, father, Diane has gone away!"

For some seconds he stared at her blankly, like a man who puzzles over
something in a strange language. When he spoke, at last, his voice came
with a forced harshness, from which the girl shrank back, more terrified
than before:

"She was quite right to go. You run back to bed."




XII


From the shelter of the little French hostelry in University Place,
Diane wrote, on the following morning, to Miss Lucilla van Tromp,
telling her as briefly and discreetly as possible what had occurred.
While withholding names and suppressing the detail which dealt with the
manner of her husband's death, she spoke with her characteristic
frankness, stating her case plainly. Though she denied the main charge,
she repeated the admissions Derek had found so fatal, and accepted her
share of all responsibility.

"Mr. Pruyn is not to blame," she wrote. "From many points of view he is
as much the victim of circumstances as I am. I have to acknowledge
myself in fault; and yet, if I were more so, my problem would be easier
to solve. There are conditions in which it is scarcely less difficult to
discern the false from the true than it is to separate the foul current
from the pure, after their streams have run together; and I cannot
reproach Mr. Pruyn if, looking only on the mingled tides, he does not
see that they flow from dissimilar sources. Though I left his house
abruptly, it was not because he drove me forth; it was rather because I
feel that, until I have regained some measure of his respect, I cannot
be worthy in his eyes--nor in my own--to be under one roof with his
daughter."

* * * * *

To Miss Lucilla, in her ignorance of the world, it seemed, as she read
on, as if the foundations of the great deep had been broken up and the
windows of heaven opened. That such things happened in romances, she had
read; that they were not unknown in real life, even in New York, she had
heard it whispered; but that they should crop up in her own immediate
circle was not less wonderful than if the night-blooming cereus had
suddenly burst into flower in her strip of garden. Miss Lucilla owned to
being shocked, to being grieved, to being puzzled, to being stunned; but
she could not deny the thrill of excitement at being caught up into the
whirl of a real love-affair.

When the first of the morning's duties in the sickroom were over she
waylaid Mrs. Eveleth in a convenient spot and told her tale. She did not
read the letter aloud, finding its phraseology at times too blunt; but,
with those softening circumlocutions of which good women have the
secret, she conveyed the facts. There was but one short passage which
she quoted just as Diane had written it:

"'I am sure my mother-in-law will stand by me, and bear me out. She
alone knows the sort of life I led with her son, and I am convinced that
she will see justice done me.'"

Mrs. Eveleth listened silently, with the still look of pain that belongs
to those growing old in the expectation of misfortune.

"I've been afraid something would happen," was her only comment.

"But surely, dear Mrs. Eveleth, you don't think any of it can be true!"

The elder woman began moving toward the door.

"So many things have been true, dear, that I hoped were not!"

This answer, given from the threshold, left Miss Lucilla not more aghast
than disappointed. It brought into the romance features which no single
woman can afford to contemplate. She would have entered into the affairs
of a wronged heroine with enthusiastic interest; but what was to be done
with those of a possibly guilty one? She was so ready for the unexpected
that as she stood at a back window, looking into the garden, it was
almost a surprise not to find the night-blooming cereus really lifting
its exotic head among the stout spring shoots of the peonies. With the
vague feeling that the Park might prove more fruitful ground for the
phenomenon, she moved to a front window, where she was not long
unrewarded. If it was not the night-blooming cereus that drove up in the
handsome, open automobile, turning into the Park, it was something
equally portentous; for Mrs. Bayford had already played a part in
Diane's drama, and was now, presumably, about to enter on the scene
again. Miss Lucilla drew back, so as to be out of sight, while keeping
her visitors in view. For a minute she hoped that Marion Grimston
herself might be minded to make her a call, for she liked the handsome
girl, whose outspoken protests against the shams of her life agreed with
her own more gentle horror of pretension. Marion, wreathed in veils,
was, however, at the steering-wheel, and, as she guided the huge machine
to the curbstone, showed no symptoms of wishing to alight. Beside her
was Reggie Bradford, a large, fat youth, whose big, good-natured laugh
almost called back echoes from the surrounding houses. As the car
stopped he lumbered down from his perch, and helped Mrs. Bayford to
descend. When he had clambered back to his place again the great vehicle
rolled on. It was plain now to Miss Lucilla that a new act of the piece
was about to begin, and she hurried back to the library in order to be
in her place before the rising of the curtain. For Miss Lucilla's
callers there was always an immediate subject of conversation which had
to be exhausted before any other topic could be touched upon; and Mrs.
Bayford tackled it at once, asking the questions and answering them
herself, so as to get it out of the way.

"Well, how is Regina? Very much the same, of course. I don't suppose
you'll see any change in her now, until it's for the worse. Poor thing!
one could almost wish, in her own interests, that our Heavenly Father
would think fit to take her to Himself. Now, I want to talk to you about
something serious."

Mrs. Bayford made herself comfortable in a deep, low chair, with her
feet on a footstool.

"I suppose you've never guessed," she asked, at last, "why Marion has
been with me all this time?"

"I did guess," Miss Lucilla admitted, with a faint blush, "but I don't
know that I guessed right."

"I expect you did. No one could see as much of her as you've done
without knowing she had a love-affair."

"That's what I thought."

"It's been a great trial," Mrs. Bayford sighed, "and it isn't over yet.
In fact, I don't know but what it's only just beginning."

"Wasn't he--desirable?"

"Oh yes; very much so, and is so still. It wasn't that. He was all that
any one could wish--old family, position, title, good looks,
everything."

"But if Marion liked him, and he liked her--?"

"I could explain it to you better if you knew more about men."

"I do know a--a little," Miss Lucilla ventured to assert, shyly.

"There is a case in which a little is not enough. You've got to
understand a man's capacity for loving one woman and being fascinated by
another. I think they call it double consciousness."

"I don't think it's very honorable," Miss Lucilla declared, in
disapproval.

"A man doesn't stop to think of honor, my dear, when he's in a grand
passion. Bienville has honor written in his very countenance, but this
was an occasion when he couldn't get it into play. It was perfectly
tragic. He had already spoken to Robert Grimston in the manliest
way--told all about himself--found out how much Marion would have as
her _dot_--and got permission to pay her his addresses--when all came
to nothing because of another woman."

With this as an introduction it was natural that Mrs. Bayford should go
on to repeat the oft-told tale in its entirety, lending it a light that
no one had given to it yet. With the information she already possessed
from Diane's letter it was impossible for Lucilla not to recognize all
the characters as readily as Derek Pruyn had done, while she had the
advantage over him of knowing Marion Grimston's place in the action. It
was a dreadful story, and if Miss Lucilla was not more profoundly
shocked it was because Mrs. Bayford, by overshooting the mark, rendered
it incredible. None the less she agreed with Mrs. Bayford on the main
point she had come to urge, that Diane, on one side, and Marion and
Bienville, on the other, should be kept, if possible, from meeting.

"Not that I think," Mrs. Bayford went on, "that Raoul--that's his
name--would ever take up with her again. Still, you never can tell;
I've seen such cases. A fire will often blaze up when you think it's
out. And now that everything is going so smoothly it would be a
thousand pities to throw any obstacle in the way."

"Everything is going smoothly, then? I'm glad of that, for Marion's
sake."

"Yes; it's practically a settled thing. When it seemed likely that he
would return to France by way of New York, Robert Grimston wrote me to
say that if anything happened it would have his full consent. Things
move rapidly in Paris, and the whole episode is as much a part of the
past as last year's styles. Then, too, everybody there knows now that
Raoul didn't kill George Eveleth; and, of course, that removes a certain
unpleasant thought that some people might have about him."

"Have you seen him yet?"

"I heard from him this morning. He asked if he could call on Marion and
me this afternoon. You can guess what was my reply."

The nature of this having been made clear, Mrs. Bayford went on to
express her fears as to the complications which might arise from the
chance meeting of Bienville and Derek on the steamer, of which the
former had given her information in his note. Nothing would be more
natural now than for Derek to invite Marion and Bienville to dinner; and
there would be Diane!

"I think I can relieve your mind on that point," Miss Lucilla said,
trying to choose her words cautiously. "There would be no danger of
their meeting Mrs. Eveleth just now, as she has left Dorothea for the
present."

There was so much satisfaction to Mrs. Bayford in knowing that, as far
as Diane was concerned, the coast was comparatively clear, that she
gathered up her skirts and departed. After she had gone, Miss Lucilla's
sense of being the pivot of a romantic plot was heightened by the
appearance of Diane. She came in with her usual air of confidence in her
ability to meet the world, and if her pale face showed traces of tears
and sleeplessness, its expression was, if anything, more courageous. Had
it not been for this brave show Miss Lucilla would have wanted to
embrace her and hold her hands, but, as it was, she could only retire
shyly into herself, as in the presence of one too strong to need the
support of friends.

"No; don't call my mother-in-law yet," Diane pleaded, as Miss Lucilla
was about to touch a bell. "I want to talk to you first, and tell you
things I couldn't say in writing."

Then the story was told again, and from still another point of view.
Once more Diane acknowledged the weaknesses of conduct she had confessed
already, but Miss Lucilla was a woman and understood her speech.

"I knew you'd believe in me," Diane said, half sobbing, as she ended her
tale. "I knew you'd understand that one can be a foolish woman without
having been a wicked one. Mr. Pruyn would not have been so hard on me if
he had thought of that."

"Shall I go and tell him?"

"No; it's too late. The wrong that's been done needs a more radical
remedy than you or I could bring to it. Bienville has lied, and I must
force him to retract. Nothing else can help me."

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