HAVING MADE A COPY OF THIS LETTER, SHE
CALLED SIMMONS AND FULTON AND GAVE
THEM THEIR INSTRUCTIONS " 264
"SINCE THE INNER SHRINE IS UNLOCKED--AT
LAST--I'LL GO IN" " 354
_THE INNER SHRINE_
_THE INNER SHRINE_
I
Though she had counted the strokes of every hour since midnight, Mrs.
Eveleth had no thought of going to bed. When she was not sitting bolt
upright, indifferent to comfort, in one of the stiff-backed, gilded
chairs, she was limping, with the aid of her cane, up and down the long
suite of salons, listening for the sound of wheels. She knew that George
and Diane would be surprised to find her waiting up for them, and that
they might even be annoyed; but in her state of dread it was impossible
to yield to small considerations.
She could hardly tell how this presentiment of disaster had taken hold
upon her, for the beginning of it must have come as imperceptibly as the
first flicker of dusk across the radiance of an afternoon. Looking back,
she could almost make herself believe that she had seen its shadow over
her early satisfaction in her son's marriage to Diane. Certainly she had
felt it there before their honeymoon was over. The four years that had
passed since then had been spent--or, at least, she would have said so
now--in waiting for the peril to present itself.
And yet, had she been called on to explain why she saw it stalking
through the darkness of this particular June night, she would have found
it difficult to give coherent statement to her fear. Everything about
her was pursuing its normally restless round, with scarcely a hint of
the exceptional. If life in Paris was working up again to that feverish
climax in which the season dies, it was only what she had witnessed
every year since the last days of the Second Empire. If Diane's gayety
was that of excitement rather than of youth, if George's depression was
that of jaded effort rather than of satiated pleasure, it was no more
than she had seen in them at other times. She acknowledged that she had
few facts to go upon--that she had indeed little more than the terrified
prescience which warns the animal of a storm.
There were moments of her vigil when she tried to reassure herself with
the very tenuity of her reasons for alarm. It was a comfort to think how
little there was that she could state with the definiteness of
knowledge. In all that met the eye George's relation to Diane was not
less happy than in the first days of their life together. If, on Diane's
part, the spontaneity of wedded love had gradually become the adroitness
of domestic tact, there was nothing to affirm it but Mrs. Eveleth's own
power of divination. If George submitted with a blinder obedience than
ever to each new extravagance of Diane's Parisian caprice, there was
nothing to show that he lived beyond his means but Mrs. Eveleth's
maternal apprehension. His income was undoubtedly large, and, for all
she knew, it justified the sumptuous style Diane and he kept up. Where
the purchasing power of money began and ended was something she had
never known. Disorder was so frequent in her own affairs that when
George grew up she had been glad to resign them to his keeping, taking
what he told her was her income. As for Diane, her fortune was so small
as to be a negligible quantity in such housekeeping as they maintained--a
poverty of _dot_ which had been the chief reason why her noble kinsfolk
had consented to her marriage with an American. Looking round the
splendid house, Mrs. Eveleth was aware that her husband could never
have lived in it, still less have built it; while she wondered more than
ever how George, who led the life of a Parisian man of fashion, could
have found the means of doing both.
Not that her anxiety centred on material things; they were too remote
from the general activities of her thought for that. She distilled her
fear out of the living atmosphere around her. She was no novice in this
brilliant, dissolute society, or in the meanings hidden behind its
apparently trivial concerns. Hints that would have had slight
significance for one less expert she found luminous with suggestion; and
she read by signs as faint as those in which the redskin detects the
passage of his foe across the grass. The odd smile with which Diane went
out! The dull silence in which George came home! The manufactured
conversation! The forced gayety! The startling pause! The effort to
begin again, and keep the tone to one of common intercourse! The long
defile of guests! The strangers who came, grew intimate, and
disappeared! The glances that followed Diane when she crossed a room!
The shrug, the whisper, the suggestive grimace, at the mention of her
name! All these were as an alphabet in which Mrs. Eveleth, grown skilful
by long years of observation, read what had become not less familiar
than her mother-tongue.
The fact that her misgivings were not new made it the more difficult to
understand why they had focussed themselves to-night into this great
fear. There had been nothing unusual about the day, except that she had
seen little of Diane, while George had remained shut up in his room,
writing letters and arranging or destroying papers. There had been
nothing out of the common in either of them--not even the frown of care
on George's forehead, or the excited light in Diane's eyes--as they
drove away in the evening, to dine at the Spanish Embassy. They had
kissed her tenderly, but it was not till after they had gone that it
seemed to her as if they had been taking a farewell. Then, too, other
little tokens suddenly became ominous; while something within herself
seemed to say, "The hour is at hand!"
The hour is at hand! Standing in the middle of one of the gorgeous
rooms, she repeated the words softly, marking as she did so their
incongruity to herself and her surroundings. The note of fatality jarred
on the harmony of this well-ordered life. It was preposterous, that she,
who had always been hedged round and sheltered by pomp and circumstance,
should now in her middle age be menaced with calamity. She dragged
herself over to one of the long mirrors and gazed at her reflection
pityingly.
The twitter of birds startled her with the knowledge that it was dawn.
From the Embassy George and Diane were to go on to two or three great
houses, but surely they should be home by this time! The reflection
meant the renewal of her fear. Where was her son? Was he really with his
wife, or had the moment come when he must take the law into his own
hands, after their French manner, to avenge himself or her? She knew
nothing about duelling, but she had the Anglo-Saxon mother's dread of
it. She had always hoped that, notwithstanding the social code under
which he lived, George would keep clear of any such brutal
senselessness; but lately she had begun to fear that the conventions of
the world would prove the stronger, and that the time when they would do
so was not far away.
Pulling back the curtains from one of the windows, she opened it and
stepped out on a balcony, where the long strip of the Quai d'Orsay
stretched below her, in gray and silent emptiness. On the swift,
leaden-colored current of the Seine, spanned here and there by ghostly
bridges, mysterious barges plied weirdly through the twilight. Up on the
left the Arc de Triomphe began to emerge dimly out of night, while down
on the right the line of the Louvre lay, black and sinister, beneath the
towers and spires that faintly detached themselves against the growing
saffron of the morning. High above all else, the domes of the Sacred
Heart were white with the rays of the unrisen sun, like those of the
City which came down from God.
It was so different from the cheerful Paris of broad daylight that she
was drawing back with a shudder, when over the Pont de la Concorde she
discerned the approach of a motor-brougham.
Closing the window, she hurried to the stairway. It was still night
within the house, and the one electric light left burning drew forth
dull gleams from the wrought-metal arabesques of the splendidly sweeping
balustrades. When, on the ringing of the bell, the door opened and she
went down, she had the strange sensation of entering on a new era in her
life.
Though she recalled that impression in after years, for the moment she
saw nothing but Diane, all in vivid red, in the act of letting the
voluminous black cloak fall from her shoulders into the sleepy footman's
hands.
"Bonjour, petite mère!" Diane called, with a nervous laugh, as Mrs.
Eveleth paused on the lower steps of the stairs.
"Where is George?"
She could not keep the tone of anxiety out of her voice, but Diane
answered, with ready briskness:
"George? I don't know. Hasn't he come home?"
"You must know he hasn't come home. Weren't you together?"
"We were together till--let me see!--whose house was it?--till after the
cotillon at Madame de Vaudreuil's. He left me there and went to the
Jockey Club with Monsieur de Melcourt, while I drove on to the
Rochefoucaulds'."
She turned away toward the dining-room, but it was impossible not to
catch the tremor in her voice over the last words. In her ready English
there was a slight foreign intonation, as well as that trace of an Irish
accent which quickly yields to emotion. Standing at the table in the
dining-room where refreshments had been laid, she poured out a glass of
wine, and Mrs. Eveleth could see from the threshold that she drank it
thirstily, as one who before everything else needs a stimulant to keep
her up. At the entrance of her mother-in-law she was on her guard again,
and sank languidly into the nearest chair. "Oh, I'm so hungry!" she
yawned, pulling off her gloves, and pretending to nibble at a sandwich.
"Do sit down," she went on, as Mrs. Eveleth remained standing. "I should
think you'd be hungry, too."
"Aren't you surprised to see me sitting up, Diane?"
"I wasn't, but I can be, if that's my cue," Diane laughed.
At the nonchalance of the reply Mrs. Eveleth was, for a second, half
deceived. Was it possible that she had only conjured up a waking
nightmare, and that there was nothing to be afraid of, after all?
Possessing the French quality of frankness to an unusual degree, it was
difficult for Diane to act a part at any time. With all her Parisian
finesse her nature was as direct as lightning, while her glance had that
fulness of candor which can never be assumed. Looking at her now, with
her elbows on the table, and the sandwich daintily poised between the
thumb and forefinger of her right hand, it was hard to connect her with
tragic possibilities. There were pearls around her neck and diamonds in
her hair; but to the wholesomeness of her personality jewels were no
more than dew on the freshness of a summer morning.
"I thought you'd be surprised to find me sitting up," Mrs. Eveleth began
again; "but the truth is, I couldn't go to bed while--"
"I'm glad you didn't," Diane broke in, with an evident intention to keep
the conversation in her own hands. "I'm not in the least sleepy. I could
sit here and talk till morning--though I suppose it's morning now.
Really the time to live is between midnight and six o'clock. One has a
whole set of emotions then that never come into play during the other
eighteen hours of the day. They say it's the minute when the soul comes
nearest to parting with the body, so I suppose that's the reason we can
see things, during the wee sma' hours, by the light of the invisible
spheres."
"I should be quite content with the light of this world--"
"Oh, I shouldn't," Diane broke in, with renewed eagerness to talk
against time. "It's like being content with words, and having no need of
music. It's like being satisfied with photographs, and never wanting
real pictures."
"Diane," Mrs. Eveleth interrupted, "I insist that you let me speak."
"Speak, petite mère? What are you doing but speaking now? I'm scarcely
saying a word. I'm too tired to talk. If you'd spent the last eight or
ten hours trying to get yourself down to the conversational level of
your partners, you'd know what I've been through. We women must be made
of steel to stand it. If you had only seen me this evening--"
"Listen to me, Diane; don't joke. This is no time for that."
"Joke! I never felt less like joking in my life, and--"
She broke off with a little hysterical gasp, so that Mrs. Eveleth got
another chance.
"I know you don't feel like joking, and still less do I. There's
something wrong."
"Is there? What?" Diane made an effort to recover herself. "I hope it
isn't indiscreet to ask, because I need the bracing effect of a little
scandal."
"Isn't it for you to tell me? You're concealing something of which--"
"Oh, petite mère, is that quite honest? First, you say there's something
wrong; and then, when I'm all agog to hear it, you saddle me with the
secret. That's what you call in English a sell, isn't it? A sell! What a
funny little word! I often wonder who invents the slang. Parrots pass it
along, of course, but it must take some cleverness to start it. And
isn't it curious," she went on, breathlessly, "how a new bit of slang
always fills a vacant place in the language? The minute you hear it you
know it's what you've always wanted. I suppose the reason we're obliged
to use the current phrase is because it expresses the current need. When
the hour passes, the need passes with it, and something new must be
coined to meet the new situation. I should think a most interesting book
might be written on the Psychology of Slang, and if I wasn't so busy
with other things--"
"Diane, I entreat you to answer me. Where is George?"
"Why, I must have forgotten to tell you that he went to the Jockey Club
with Monsieur de Melcourt--"
"You did tell me so; but that isn't all. Has he gone anywhere else?"
"How should I know, petite mère? Where should he go but come home?"
"Has he gone to fight a duel?"
The question surprised Diane into partially dropping her mask. For an
instant she was puzzled for an answer.
"Men who fight duels," she said, at last, "don't generally tell their
wives beforehand."
"But did George tell you?"
Again Diane hesitated before speaking.
"What a queer question!" was all she could find to say.
"It's a question I have a right to ask."
"But have I a right to answer?"
"If you don't answer, you leave me to infer that he has."
"Of course I can't keep you from inferring, but isn't that what they
call meeting trouble half-way?"
"I must meet trouble as it comes to me."
"But not before it comes. That's my point."
"It has come. It's here. I'm sure of it. He's gone to fight. You know
it. You've sent him. Oh, Diane, if he comes to harm his blood will be on
your head."
Diane shrugged her shoulders, and took another sandwich.
"I don't see that. In the first place, it's quite unlikely there'll be
any blood at all--or more than a very little. One of the things I admire
in men--our men, especially--is the maximum of courage with which they
avenge their honor, coupled with the minimum of damage they work in
doing it. It must require a great deal of skill. I know I should never
have the nerve for it. I should kill my man every time he didn't kill
me. But they hardly ever do."
"How can you say that? Wasn't Monsieur de Cretteville killed? And
Monsieur Lalanne?"
"That makes two cases. I implied that it happens sometimes--generally by
inadvertence. But it isn't likely to do so in this instance--at least
not to George. He's an excellent shot--and I believe it was to be
pistols."
"Then it's true! Oh, my God, I know I shall lose him!"
Mrs. Eveleth flung her cane to the floor and dropped into a seat,
leaning on the table and covering her face with her hands. For a minute
she moaned harshly, but when she looked up her eyes were tearless.
"And this is my reward," she cried, "for the kindness I've shown you!
After all, you are nothing but a wanton."
Diane kept her self-control, but she grew pale.
"That's odd," was all she permitted herself to say, delicately flicking
the crumbs from her fingertips; "because it was to prove the contrary
that George called Monsieur de Bienville out."
"Bienville! You've stooped to _him?_"
"Did I say so?" Diane asked, with a sudden significant lifting of the
head.
"There's no need to say so. There must have been something--"
"There was something--something Monsieur de Bienville invented."
"Wasn't it a pity for him to go to the trouble of invention--?"
"When he could have found so much that was true," Diane finished, with
dangerous quietness. "That's what you were going to say, isn't it?"
"You have no right to ascribe words to me that I haven't uttered. I
never said so."
"No; that's true; I prefer to say it for you. It's safer, in that it
leaves me nothing to resent."
"Oh, what shall I do! What shall I do!" Mrs. Eveleth moaned, wringing
her hands. "My boy is gone from me. He will never come back. I've always
been sure that if he ever did this, it would be the end. It's my fault
for having brought him up among your foolish, hot-headed people. He will
have thrown his life away--and for nothing!"
"No; not that," Diane corrected; "not even if the worst comes to the
worst."
"What do you mean? If the worst comes to the worst, he will have
sacrificed himself--"
"For my honor; and George himself would be the first to tell you that
it's worth dying for."
Diane rose as she spoke, Mrs. Eveleth following her example. For a brief
instant they stood as if measuring each other's strength, till they
started with a simultaneous shock at the sharp call of the telephone
from an adjoining room. With a smothered cry Diane sprang to answer it,
while Mrs. Eveleth, helpless with dread, remained standing, as though
frozen to the spot.
"Oui--oui--oui," came Diane's voice, speaking eagerly. "Oui, c'est bien
Madame George Eveleth. Oui, oui. Non. Je comprends. C'est Monsieur de
Melcourt. Oui--oui--Dites-le-moi tout de suite--j'insiste--Oui--oui.
Ah-h-h!"
The last, prolonged, choking exclamation came as the cry of one who
sinks, smitten to the heart. Mrs. Eveleth was able to move at last. When
she reached the other room, Diane was crouched in a little heap on the
floor.
"He's dead? He's dead?" the mother cried, in frenzied questioning.
But Diane, with glazed eyes and parted lips, could only nod her head in
affirmation.