The Inner Shrine Part 16

That night he found himself impelled by his sense of honor as a gentleman to write a letter of apology for the indignity she had been exposed to while in his house. When it had gone he considered it insufficient, and only the reflection that he ought to have business in town next day kept him from following it up with a second note.

Arrived in New York, where the city was burning as if under a sun-gla.s.s, he found his chief subject for consideration to be the choice of a club at which to lunch. There, in the solitude of the deserted smoking-room, where the heat was tempered, the glare shut out, and the very footfall subdued, he thought of the little hotel in University Place. Because human society had mysterious unwritten laws, the woman he loved was forced to steal away from the freshness and peace of green fields and sweeping river, to take refuge amid the noisome ugliness from which, in spite of her courage, her exquisite nature must shrink. He, whose needs were simple, as his tastes were comparatively coa.r.s.e, could command the sybaritic luxury of a Roman patrician, while she, who could not lift her hand without betraying the habits of inborn refinement, was exposed not only to vulgar contact, but to a squalor of discomfort as odious as vice. The thought was a humiliation. Even if he had not loved her, it would have seemed almost the duty of a man of honor to step in between her and the cruel pathos of her lot.

It was a curious reflection that it was the very fact that he did love her which held him back. Could he have turned toward Paradise and said to the sweet soul waiting for him there, "This woman has need of me, but you alone reign in my heart," he would have felt more free to act. But the time when that would have been possible had gone by. Anything he might do now would be less for her need than his own; and his own he could endure if loyalty to his past demanded it. None the less was it necessary to find a way in which to come to Diane's immediate relief; and by the time he had finished his cigar he thought he had discovered it.

"Having been obliged to run up to town," he explained, when she had received him in the little hotel parlor, "I've dropped in to tell you that I'm going away for a few weeks into Canada."

"Isn't it rather hot weather for travelling?" she asked, with that clear, smiling gaze which showed him at once that she had seen through his pretext for coming.

"It won't be hot where I'm going--up into the valley of the Metapedia."

"It's rather a sudden decision, isn't it?"

"N--no. I generally try to get a little sport some time during the year."

"Naturally you know your own intentions best. I only happen to remember that you said, yesterday morning, you hoped not to leave Rhinefields till the middle of next month."

"Did I say that? I must have been dreaming?"

"Very likely you were. Or perhaps you're dreaming now."

"Not at all; in fact, I'm particularly wide awake. I see things so clearly that I've looked in to tell you some of them. You must get out of this stifling hole and go back to Rhinefields at once."

"I don't like that way of speaking of a place I've become attached to.

It isn't a stifling hole; it's a clean little inn, where the service is the very law of kindness. The art may be of a period somewhat earlier than the primitive," she laughed, looking round at the highly colored chromos of lake and mountain scenery hanging on the walls, "and the furniture may not be strictly in the style of Louis Quinze, but the host and hostess treat me as a daughter, and every garcon is my slave."

"I can quite understand that; but all the same it's no fit place for you."

"I suppose the fittest place for any one is the place in which he feels at home."

"Don't say that," he begged, with sudden emotion in his voice.

"I think I ought to say it," she insisted, "first of all because it's true; and then because you would feel more at ease about me if you knew just how it's true."

"You know that I'm not at ease about you."

"I know you think I must be discontented with my lot, when--in a certain sense--I'm not at all so. I don't pretend that I prefer working for a living to having money of my own; but I've found this"--she hesitated, as if thinking out her phrase--"I've found that life grows richer as it goes on, in whatever way one has to live it. It's as if the streams that fed it became more numerous the farther one descended from the height."

"I'm glad you're able to say that--"

"I can say it very sincerely; and I lay stress upon it, because I know you're kind enough to be worried about me. I wish I could make you understand how little reason there is for it, though you mustn't think that I'm not touched by it, or that I mistake its motive. I've come to see that what I've often heard, and used scarcely to believe, is quite true, that American men have an att.i.tude toward women entirely different from that of our men. Our men probably think more about women than any other men in the world; but they think of them as objects of prey--with joys and sorrows not to be taken seriously. You, on the contrary, are willing to put yourself to great inconvenience for me, merely because I am a woman."

"Not merely because of that," Derek permitted himself to say.

"We needn't weigh motives as if they were golddust. When we have their general trend we have enough. I only want you to see that I understand you, while I must ask you not to be hurt if I still persist in not availing myself of your courtesy. I wish you wouldn't question me any more about it, because there are situations in which one cheapens things by the very effort to put them into words. If you were a woman, you'd comprehend my feeling--"

"Let us a.s.sume that I do, as it is. I have still another suggestion to make. Admitting that I stay at Rhinefields, why can't you ask your mother-in-law to come and make you a couple of weeks' visit there?"

For a moment Diane forgot the restraint she made it a habit to impose upon herself in the new conditions of her life, and slipped back into the spontaneous manner of the past.

"How tiresome you are! I never knew any one but a child twist himself in so many directions to get his own way."

"You see, I'm accustomed to having my own way. You ought not to think of resisting me."

"I'm not resisting you; I'm only eluding your grasp. There's one great obstacle to what you've just been good enough to propose: my mother-in-law couldn't come. Miss Lucilla van Tromp couldn't spare her.

As a matter of fact, she--Miss Lucilla--asked me to go to Newport and stay with her all the time Dorothea is with the Prouds; but I declined the invitation. You see now that I don't lack cool and comfortable quarters because I couldn't get them."

"I see," he nodded. "You evidently prefer--this."

"I'll tell you what I prefer: I prefer a breathing-s.p.a.ce in which to commune with my own soul."

"You could commune with your own soul at Rhinefields."

"No, I couldn't. It's an exercise that requires not only solitude and seclusion, but a certain withdrawal from the world. If I were in France, I should go and spend a fortnight in my old convent at Auteuil; but in this country the nearest approach I can make to that is to be here where I am. After all that has happened in the last year and more, I am trying to find myself again, so to speak--I'm trying to re-establish my ident.i.ty with the Diane de la Ferronaise, who seems to me to have faded back into the distant twilight of time. Won't you let me do it in my own way, and ask me no more questions? Yes; I see by your face that you will; and we can be friends again. Now," she added, briskly, springing up and touching a bell, "you're going to have some of my iced coffee.

I've taught them to make it, just as I used to have it at the Mauconduit--that was our little place near Compiegne--and I know you'll find it refreshing."

It was half an hour later, while he was taking leave of her, that a thought occurred to him which promised to be fruitful of new resources.

"Very well," he declared, as they were parting, "if you persist in staying here, I, too, shall persist in looking in whenever I come to town--which will have to be pretty often just now--to see that you're not down with some sort of fever."

"But," she laughed, "I thought you were going away--to Canada?"

"I'm not obliged to; and you've rather succeeded in dissuading me."

"Then let me succeed in dissuading you from everything. Don't come here again--please don't."

"I certainly shall."

"I'm generally out."

"In that case I shall stay till you come in."

"Of course I can't keep you from doing that. I will only say that the American man I've had in mind for the past few months--wouldn't."

The fact that he did not go back to University Place, either on this or any subsequent occasion when she thought it well to withdraw there, emphasized his helplessness to aid her. By the time autumn returned, and the household was once more settled in town, he had grown aware that between Diane and himself there was an impalpable wall of separation, which he could no more pa.s.s than he could transcend the veil between material existence and the Unseen World. He began to perceive that what he had called detachment of manner, more or less purposely maintained, was in reality an element in the situation which from the beginning had precluded friendship. Diane and he could not be friends in any of the ordinary senses of the word. As employer and employed their necessary dealings might be friendly; but to anything more personal, under the present arrangement, there was attached the impossible condition of stepping off from terra firma into s.p.a.ce.

The obvious method of putting their mutual relationship on a basis richer in future potentialities Derek still felt himself unable to adopt of his own initiative act. The vow which bound him to his dead wife was one from which circ.u.mstances--and not merely his own fiat--must absolve him; but as winter advanced it seemed to him that life had begun to speak on the subject with a voice of imperative command.

It was the middle of January, when a small, accidental happening drew all his growing but still debatable intentions into one sharp point of resolution. It was such an afternoon as comes rarely, even in the exhilarating winter of New York--an afternoon when the unfathomable blue of the sky overhead runs through all the gamut of tones from lavender to indigo; when the air has the living keenness of that which the Spirit first breathed into the nostrils of man; when the rapture of the heart is that of neither pa.s.sion, wine, nor nervous excitement, but comes nearer the exaltation of deathless youth in a deathless world than anything else in a temporary earth. It was a day on which even the jaded heart is in the mood to begin all over again, in renewed pursuit of the happiness which up to now has been elusive. To Derek, whose heart was by no means jaded, it was a day on which the instinctive hope of youth, which he supposed he had outlived, proved itself of one essence with the conscious pa.s.sion of maturity.

When, as he walked homeward along Fifth Avenue, he overtook Diane, also making her way homeward, the happy occurrence seemed but part of the general radiance permeating life. The chance meeting on the neutral ground of out-of-doors took Diane by surprise; and before she had time to put up her guards of reserve she had betrayed her youth in a shy heightening of color. Under the protection of the cheerful, slowly moving crowd she felt at liberty to drop for a minute the subdued air of his daughter's paid companion, and in her replies to what he said she spoke with some of her old gayety of verve. It was an unfortunate moment in which to yield to this temptation, for it was, perhaps, the only occasion since her coming to New York on which she was closely observed.

Engrossed as they were, the one with the other, they had insensibly relaxed their pace, becoming mere strollers on the outside edge of the throng. The sense of being watched came to both of them at once, and, looking up at the same moment, they saw, approaching at a snail's pace, an open Victoria, in which were two ladies, to whom they were objects of plainly expressed interest. The elder was an insignificant little woman, who looked as though she were being taken out by her costly furs, while the younger was a girl of some two or three and twenty, of a type of beauty that would have been too imperious had it not been toned down by that air which to the unintelligent means boredom, though the wise know it to spring from something gone amiss in life. Both ladies kept their eyes fixed so exclusively on Diane that they had almost pa.s.sed before remembering to salute Derek with a nod.

"I've seen those ladies somewhere," Diane observed, when they had gone by.

"I dare say. They've probably seen you, too. The elder is Mrs. Bayford, sister of Mr. Grimston, my uncle's partner in Paris. The girl is Marion Grimston, his daughter."

"I remember perfectly now. They used to come to our charity sales, and--and--anything of that kind."