During the succeeding week Derek Pruyn, having practically announced an
engagement which did not exist, found himself in a somewhat ludicrous
situation. Too proud to extort a promise of secrecy from Mrs. Bayford,
he knew the value of his indiscretion--if indiscretion it were--to any
purveyor of tea-table gossip; and while Diane and he remained in the
same relative positions he was sure it was being bruited about, with his
own authority, that they were to become man and wife. It did not
diminish the absurdity of the situation that he was debarred from
proposing and settling the affair at once by the grotesque fact that he
actually had not time.
There was certainly little opportunity for lovemaking in those hurried
days of preparing for his long absence in South America. He was often
obliged to leave home by eight in the morning, rarely returning except
to go wearily to bed. Though nothing had been said to him, he had more
than one reason for suspecting that Mrs. Bayford was at work; and, at
the odd minutes when he saw Diane, it seemed to him as if her clearness
of look was extinguished by an expression of perplexity.
He would have reproached himself more keenly for his lack of energy in
overcoming obstacles had it not been for the fact that, owing to their
peculiar position as members of one household, and that household his,
he was planning to ask Diane to become his wife on that occasion when he
would also be bidding her adieu. She would thus be spared the
difficulties of a trying situation, while she would have the season of
his absence in which to adjust her mind to the revolution in her life.
He resolved to adhere to this intention, the more especially as a small
family dinner at Gramercy Park, from which he was to go directly to his
steamer, would give him the exact combination of circumstances he
desired.
When, after dinner, Miss Lucilla's engineering of the company allowed
him to find himself alone with Diane in the library, he made her sit
down by the fireside, while he stood, his arm resting on the
mantelpiece, as on the afternoon of their first serious interview, over
a year before. As on that other occasion, so, too, on this, she sat
erect, silent, expectant, waiting for him to speak. What was coming she
did not know; but she felt once more his commanding dominance, with its
power to ordain, prescribe, and regulate the conditions of her life.
"Doesn't this make you think of--our first long talk together?"
"I often think of it," Diane said, faintly, trying to assume that they
were entering on an ordinary conversation. "As you didn't agree with
me--"
"I do now," he said, quickly. "I see you were right, in everything. I
want to thank you for what you've done for Dorothea--and for me. I
didn't dream, a year ago, that the change in both of us could be so
great."
"Dorothea was a sweet little girl, to begin with--"
"Yes; but I don't want to talk about that now. She will express her own
sense of gratitude; but in the mean while I want to tell you mine. You
will understand something of its extent when I say that I ask you to be
my wife."
Diane neither spoke nor looked at him. The only sign she gave of having
heard him was a slight bowing of the head, as of one who accepts a
decree. The first few instants' stillness had the ineffable quality
which might spring from the abolition of time when bliss becomes
eternity. There was a space, not to be reckoned by any terrestrial
counting, during which each heart was caught up into wonderful spheres
of emotion--on his side the relief of having spoken, on hers the joy of
having heard; and though it passed swiftly it was long enough to give to
both the vision of a new heaven and a new earth. It was a vision that
never faded again from the inward sight of either, though the mists of
mortal error began creeping over it at once.
"If I take you by surprise--" he began, as he felt the clouds of reality
closing round him.
"No," she broke in, still without looking up at him; "I heard you
intended to ask me."
Though he made a little uneasy movement, he knew that this was precisely
what she might have been expected to say.
"I thought you had possibly heard that," he said, in her own tone of
quiet frankness, "and I want to explain to you that what happened was an
accident."
"So I imagined."
"If I spoke of you as my future wife, I must ask you to believe that it
was in the way of neither ill-timed jest nor foolish boast."
"You needn't assure me of that, because I could never have thought so.
If I want assurance at all it's on other points."
"If I can explain them--"
"I can almost explain them myself. What I require is rather in the way
of corroboration. Wasn't it much as the knight of old threw the mantle
of his protection over the shoulders of a distressed damsel?"
"I know what you mean; but I don't admit the justice of the simile."
"But if you did admit it, wouldn't it be something like what actually
occurred?"
"You're putting questions to me," he said, smiling down at her; "but you
haven't answered mine."
"I must beg leave to point out," she smiled, in return, "that you
haven't asked me one. You've only stated a fact--or what I presume to be
a fact. But before we can discuss it I ought to be possessed of certain
information; and you've put me in a position where I have a right to
demand it."
After brief reflection Derek admitted that. As nearly as he could recall
the incident at Mrs. Bayford's dinner-party, he recounted it.
"You see," he explained, in summing up, "that, as a snobbish person, she
could hardly be expected to forgive you for forgetting her, when she had
been introduced to you four times in a season. She not unnaturally
fancied you forgot her on purpose, so to speak--"
"I suppose I did," she murmured, penitently.
"What?" he asked, with sudden curiosity. "Would you--"
"I wouldn't now. I used to then. Everybody did it, when people were
introduced to us whom we didn't want to know. I've done it when it
wasn't necessary even from that point of view--out of a kind of sport, a
kind of wantonness. I've really forgotten about Mrs. Bayford now--
everything except her face--but I dare say I remembered perfectly well,
at the time. It would have been nothing unusual if I had."
"In that case," he said, slowly, "you can't be surprised--"
"I'm not," she hastened to say. "If Mrs. Bayford retaliates, now that
she has the power, she's within her right--a right which scarcely any
woman would forego. It was perfectly natural for Mrs. Bayford to speak
ill of me; and it was equally natural for you to spring to my defence.
You'd have sprung to the defence of any one--"
"No, no," he interjected, hurriedly.
"Of any one whom you--respected, as I hope you respect me. You've
offered me," she went on, her eyes filling with sudden tears--"you've
offered me the utmost protection a man can give a woman. To tell you how
deeply I'm touched, how sincerely I'm grateful, is beyond my power; but
you must see that I can't avail myself of your kindness. Your very
willingness to repeat at leisure what you said in haste makes it the
more necessary that I shouldn't take advantage of your chivalry."
"Would that be your only reason for hesitating to become my wife?"
The deep, vibrant note that came into his voice sent a tremor through
her frame, and she looked about her for support. He himself offered it
by taking both her hands in his. She allowed him to hold them for a
second before withdrawing behind the intrenched position afforded by the
huge chair from which she had risen, and on the back of which she now
leaned.
"It's the reason that looms largest," she replied--"so large as to put
all other reasons out of consideration."
"Then you're entirely mistaken," he declared, coming forward in such a
way that only the chair stood between them. "It's true that at Mrs.
Bayford's provocation I spoke in haste, but it was only to utter the
resolution I had taken plenty of time to form. If I were to tell you how
much time, you'd be inclined to scorn me for my delay. But the truth is
I'm no longer a very young man; in comparison with you I'm not young at
all. You yourself, as a woman of the world, must readily understand that
at my age, and in my position, prudence is as honorable an element in
the offer I am making you as romance would be in a boy's. I make no
apology for being prudent. I state the fact that I've been so only that
you may know that I've tried to look at this question from every point
of view--Dorothea's as well as yours and mine. I took my time about it,
and long before I warned Mrs. Bayford that she was speaking of one who
was dear to me, my mind was made up. With such hopes as I had at heart
it would have been wrong to have allowed her to go on without a word of
warning."
"I can see that it would have that aspect."
"Then, if you can see that, you must see that I speak to you now in all
sincerity. My desire isn't new. I can truthfully say that, since the
first day I saw you, your eyes and voice have haunted me, and the
longing to be near you has never been absent from my heart. I'll be
quite frank with you and say that, before you came here, it was my
avowed intention not to marry again. Now I have no desire on earth--my
child apart--so strong as to win you for my wife. The year we've spent
under the same roof must have given you some idea of the man whom you'd
be marrying; and I think I can promise you that with your help he would
be a better man than in the past. Won't you say that I may hope for it?"
With arms supported by the high back of the chair and cheek on her
clasped hands, she gazed away into the dimness of the room, as if
waiting for him to continue; but during the silence that ensued it
seemed to Derek as if a shadow crossed her features, while her bright
look died out in a kind of wistfulness. She had, perhaps, been hoping
for a word he had not spoken--a word whose absence he had only covered
up by phrases.
"Well? Have you nothing to say to me?" he asked, when some minutes had
gone by.
"I'm thinking."
"Of what?"
"Of what you say about prudence. I like it. It seems to me I ought to be
prudent, too."
"Undoubtedly," he agreed, in the dry tone of one who assents to what he
finds slightly disagreeable.
"I mean," she said, quickly, "that I ought to be prudent for you--for us
all. There are a great many things to be thought of, things which people
of our age ought not to let pass unconsidered. Men _think_ the way
through difficulties, while women _feel_ it. I'm afraid I must ask for
time to get my instincts into play."
"Do you mean that you can't give me an answer to-night--before I go on
this long journey?"
"I couldn't give you an affirmative one."
"But you could say, No?"
"If you pressed the matter--if you insisted--that's what I should have
to say."
"Why?"
"That would be--my secret."
"Is it that you think you couldn't love me?"
For the first time the color came to her cheek and surged up to her
temples, not suddenly or hotly, but with the semi-diaphanous lightness
of roseate vapor mounting into winter air. As he came nearer, rounding
the protective barrier of the arm-chair, she retreated.
"I should have to solve some other questions before I could answer
that," she said, trying to meet his eyes with the necessary steadiness.
"Couldn't I help you?"
She shook her head.
"Then couldn't you consider it first?"
"A woman generally does consider it first, but she speaks about it
last."
"But you could tell me the result of what you think, as far as you've
drawn conclusions?"
"No; because whatever I should say you would find misleading. If you're
in earnest about what you say to-night, it would be better for us both
that you should give me time."
"I'm willing to do that. But you speak as if you had a doubt of me."
"I've no doubt of you; I've only a doubt about myself. The woman you've
known for the last twelve months isn't the woman other people have known
in the years before that. She isn't the Diane Eveleth of Paris any more
than she is the Diane de la Ferronaise of the hills of Connemara, or of
the convent at Auteuil. But I don't know which is the real woman, or
whether the one who now seems to me dead mightn't rise again."
"I shouldn't be afraid of her."
"But I should. You say that because you didn't know her; and I couldn't
let you marry me without telling you something of what she was."
"Then tell me."
"No, not now; not to-night. Go on your long journey, and come back. When
it's all over, I shall be sure--sure, that is, of myself--sure on the
point about which I'm so much in doubt, as to whether or not the other
woman could return."
"I should be willing to run the risk," he said, with a short laugh,
"even if she did."
"But I shouldn't be willing to let you. You forget she ruined one rich
man; she might easily ruin another."
"That would depend very much upon the man."
"No man can cope with a woman such as I was only a few years ago. You
can put fetters on a criminal, and you can quell a beast to submission,
but you can't bind the subtle, mischievous woman-spirit, bent on doing
harm. It's more ruthless than war; it's more fatal than disease. You,
with your large, generous nature, are the very man for it to fasten on,
and waste him, like a fever."
She moved back from him, close to the bookshelves against the wall. The
eyes which Derek had always seen sad and lustreless glowed with a fire
like the amber's.
"You must understand that I couldn't allow myself to do the same thing
twice," she hurried on, "and, if I married you, who knows but what I
might? I'm not a bad woman by nature, but I think I must need to be held
in repression. You'd be giving me again just those gifts of money,
position, and power which made me dangerous."
"Suppose you were to let me guard against that?" he said.
"You couldn't. It would be like fighting a poisonous vapor with the
sword. The woman's spell, whether for good or ill, is more subtle and
more potent than anything in the universe but the love of God."
"I can believe that, and still be willing to trust myself to yours," he
answered, gravely. "I know you, and honor you as men rarely do the women
they marry, until the proof of the years has tried them. In your case
the trial has come first. I've watched you bear it--watched you more
closely than you've ever been aware of. I've stood by, and seen you
carry your burden, when it was harder than you imagine not to take my
part in it. I've looked on, and seen you suffer, when it was all I could
do to keep from saying some word of sympathy you might have resented.
But, Diane," he cried, his voice taking on a strange, peremptory
sharpness, "I can't do it any longer! My power of standing still, while
you go on with your single-handed fight, is at an end. If ever God sent
a man to a woman's aid, He has sent me to yours; and you must let me do
what I'm appointed for. You must come to me for comfort in your
loneliness. You must come to me for care in your necessity. I have both
care and comfort for you here; and you must come."
Without moving toward her he stood with open arms.
"Come!" he cried again, commandingly.
The tears coursed down her cheeks, but she gave no sign of obeying him,
except to drag one hand from the protecting bookcase ledge, to which she
seemed to cling.
"Come, Diane!" he repeated! "Come to me!"
The other hand fell to her side, while she gazed at him piteously, as
though in reluctant submission to his will.
"Come!" he said once more, in a tone of authority mingled with appeal.
Drawn by a force she had no power to withstand, she took one slow,
hesitating step toward him.
"I haven't yielded," she stammered. "I haven't consented. I can't
consent--yet."
"No, dearest, no," he murmured, with arms yearning to her as she
approached him; "nevertheless--come!"
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?"
[Illustration: DRAWN BY FRANK
CRAIG DIANE PROPPED THE CABLEGRAM IN A CONSPICUOUS PLACE]
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.