The Inner Shrine

Chapter X

Notwithstanding the fact that she had wept in his arms--wept as women weep who are brave in the hour of trial, only to break down in the moment of relief--Diane would give Derek Pruyn no other answer. She could not consent--yet. With this reply he was obliged to sail away, getting what comfort he might from its implications.

During the three months of his absence Diane took knowledge of herself, appraising her strength and probing her weakness. She was too honest not to own that there were desires in her nature which leaped into newness of life at the thought that there might again be means to support them. Diane de la Ferronaise was not dead, but sleeping. Her love of luxury and pleasure--her joy in jewels, equipage, and dress--her woman's elemental weaknesses, second only to the instinct for maternity--all these, grown lethargic from hunger, were ready to awake again at the mere possibility of food. She was forced to confront the fact that, with the same opportunities, she had it in her to go back to the same life. It was a humiliating fact, but it stared her in the face, that experience had shown her a creature for a man to be afraid of. Derek Pruyn had seen her subdued by circumstances, as the panther is subdued by famine; but it was not yet proved that the savage, preying thing was tamed.

There was only one force that would tame her; but there was that force, and Diane knew that she had submitted to its domination. From weeks of tortuous self-examination she emerged into this knowledge, as one comes out of a labyrinthine cavern into sunshine. Even here in the open, however, was a problem still to solve. Could she marry the man who had never told her that he loved her, even though she herself loved him? Had she the power to give herself without stint, while asking of him only what he chose to offer her? Would she, who had made men serve her, with little more than smiles for their reward, be content to serve in her own turn, getting nothing but a half-loaf for her heart's sustenance? She asked herself these questions, but put off answering them--waiting for him to force decision on her.

So the rest of the winter passed, and by the time Derek came back the hyacinths were fading from the gardens and parks, and the tulips were coming into bloom. To both Diane and Dorothea spring was bringing a new motive for looking forward together with a new comprehension of the human heart's capacity for joy.

Perhaps no day of their patient waiting was so long in passing as that on which it was announced to them that Derek Pruyn had landed that afternoon. He had sent word that he could not come home at once, as business required his immediate presence at the office. Having already exhausted their ingenuity in adorning the house, and putting everything he could possibly want in the place where he could most easily find it, there was nothing to do but to sit through the long hours in an impatience which even Diane found it difficult to disguise. The visits of the postman were welcomed as affording the additional task of arranging Derek's letters on the desk in the small, book-lined room specially devoted to his use; and when, in the evening, a cablegram arrived, Diane herself propped it in a conspicuous place, with a tiny silver dagger, for opening the envelope, beside it. The act, with its suggestion of intimate life, gave her a stealthy pleasure; and when Dorothea glided in and caught her sitting in Derek's own chair at the desk, she blushed like a school-girl detected in a crime. It was perhaps this acknowledgment of weakness that enabled Dorothea to speak out, and say what had been for some time on her mind.

"Diane," she asked, dropping among the cushions of a divan, "are you going to marry father?"

Diane felt the color receding from her face as suddenly as it had come, while she gained time in which to collect her astonished wits by putting the silver dagger down beside the telegram with needless exactitude before attempting a response.

"Do you remember what Sir Walter Scott said, in the days when the authorship of Waverley was still a secret, to the indiscreet people who asked him if he had written it? 'No,' he answered; 'but if I had I should give you the same reply.'"

"That means, I suppose, that you don't want to tell me?"

"It might be taken to imply something of the sort."

"As a matter of fact, I suppose it would be more delicate on my part not to ask you."

"I won't attempt to contradict you there."

"I shouldn't do it if I didn't wish you were going to marry him. I've wanted it a long time; but I want it more than ever now."

"Why more than ever now?"

"Because I expect to be married before very long myself."

"May I venture to inquire to which of the many--"

"To none of the many. There's never, really, been more than one."

"And his name--?"

"Is Carli Wappinger."

"Oh, Dorothea!"

"That's just it. That's why I want you to marry father. I want to put a stop to the 'Oh, Dorotheas!' and you're the only person in the world who can help me do it."

"How?"

"I don't have to tell you that. It's one of the reasons why I rely on you so thoroughly that you always know exactly what to do without having to receive suggestions. I put myself in your hands entirely."

"You mean that you're going to marry a man to whom your father will be bitterly opposed, and you expect me to win his joyful benediction."

"That's about it," Dorothea sighed, from the depth of her cushions.

"Of course, I must be grateful to you, dear, for this display of confidence; but you won't be surprised if I find it rather overwhelming."

"I shall be very much surprised, indeed. I've never seen you find anything overwhelming yet; and you've been put in some difficult situations. You only have to live things in order to make other people take them for granted. You've never done anything to specially please father, and yet he listens to you as if you were an oracle. It's the same way with me. If any one had told me two years ago that I should ever come to praying for a stepmother I should have thought them crazy; and yet I have come to it, just because it's you."

After that it was not unnatural that Diane should go and sit on the divan beside Dorothea for any exchange of such confidences as could not be conveniently made from a distance. If she admitted anything on her own part, it was by implication rather than by direct assertion, and though she did not promise in words to come to the aid of the youthful lovers, she allowed the possibility that she would do so to be assumed.

So, in soft, whispered, broken confessions the evening slipped away more rapidly than the day had done, and by ten o'clock they knew he must be near. The last touch of welcome came when they passed from room to room, lighting up the big house in cheerful readiness for its lord's inspection. When all was done Dorothea stationed herself at a window near the street; while Diane, with a curious shrinking from what she had to face, took her seat in the remotest and obscurest corner in the more distant of the two drawingrooms. When the sound of wheels, followed by a loud ring at the bell, told her that he was actually at the door, she felt faint from the violence of her heart's beating.

Dorothea danced into the hail, with a cry and a laugh which were stifled in her father's embrace. Diane rose instinctively, waiting humbly and silently where she stood. At their parting she had torn herself, weeping and protesting, from his arms; but when he came in to find her now, he would see that she had yielded. The door was half open through which he was to pass--never again to leave her!

"Diane is in there."

It was Dorothea's voice that spoke, but the reply reached the far drawing-room only as a murmur of deep, inarticulate bass.

"What's the matter, father?"

Dorothea's clear voice rose above the noise of servants moving articles of luggage in the hall; but again Diane heard nothing beyond a confused muttering in answer. She wondered that he did not come to her at once, though she supposed there was some slight prosaic reason to prevent his doing so.

"Father"--Dorothea's voice came again, this time with a distinct note of anxiety--"father, you don't look well. Your eyes are bloodshot."

"I'm quite well, thank you," was the curt reply, this time perfectly audible to Diane's ears. "Simmons, you fool, don't leave those steamer rugs down here!"

Diane had never heard him speak so to a servant, and she knew that something had gone amiss. Perhaps he was annoyed that she had not come to greet him. Perhaps it was one of the duties of her position to receive him at the door. She had known him to give way occasionally to bursts of anger, in which a word from herself had soothed him. Leaving her place in the corner, she was hurrying to the hall, when again Dorothea's voice arrested her.

"Aren't you going in to see Diane?"

"No."

From where she stood, just within the door, Diane knew that he had flung the word over his shoulder as he went up the hail toward the stairway. He was going to his room without speaking to her. For an instant she stood still from consternation, but it was in emergencies like this that her spirit rose. Without further hesitation she passed out into the hall, just as Derek Pruyn turned at the bend in the staircase, on his way upward. For a brief second, as, standing below, she lifted her eyes to his in questioning, their glances met; but, on his part, it was without recognition.