The Inner Shrine Part 28

Derek, I see you as you are, a strong, simple, honest man. I admire you; I esteem you; I honor you; I'm grateful to you as a woman is rarely grateful to a man. And yet I'd rather be all you think me; I'd rather earn my bread as desperate women do earn it than be your wife."

They looked at each other long and steadily. When he spoke, his words were those she had invited, but they made her gasp as one gasps at that which suddenly takes one's breath.

"As you will," he said, briefly.

XV

As the pivot of events, Miss Lucilla van Tromp was beginning to feel the responsibilities of her position. Only a woman with an inexhaustible heart could have met as she did the demands for sympathy, of various shades, made by the chief partic.i.p.ants in the drama; while there was one phase of the action which called for a heroic display of conscience.

It was impossible now to contemplate Marion Grimston's peril without a grave sense of the duties imposed by friendship. Some people might stand by and see a girl wreck her happiness by giving her heart to an unworthy suitor, but Miss van Tromp was not among that number. It was, in fact, one of those junctures at which all her good instincts prompted her to say, "I ought to go and tell her." As a patriotic spinster, she held decided views on the question of marriage between American heiresses and impecunious foreign n.o.blemen--and, in her eyes, all foreign n.o.blemen were impecunious--in any case; but to see Marion Grimston become the victim of her parents' vulgar ambition gave to the subject a personal bearing which made her duty urgent. If ever there was a moment when a G.o.ddess in a machine could feel justified in descending, for active intervention, it was now. She had the less hesitation in doing so, owing to the fact that she had known Marion since her cradle; and between the two there had always existed the subtle tie which not seldom binds the widely diverse but essentially like-minded together. Accordingly, on a bright May morning, within a few days of the last meeting between Derek Pruyn and Diane Eveleth, she sallied forth to the fashionable quarter where Mrs. Bayford dwelt, coming home, some two hours later, with a considerably extended knowledge of the possibilities inherent in human nature.

The tale Miss Lucilla told was that which had already been many times repeated, each narrator lending to it the color imparted by his own views of life. As now set forth, it became the story of a girl sought in marriage by a man who has inflicted mortal wrong upon an innocent young woman. With unconscious art Miss Lucilla placed Marion Grimston herself in the centre of the piece, making the subsidiary characters revolve around her. This situation brought with it a double duty: the one explicit in righting the oppressed, the other implicit--for Miss Lucilla balked at putting it too plainly into words--in punishing a wicked marquis.

The girl sat with head slightly bowed and rich color deepening. If she showed emotion at all, it was in her haughty stillness, as though she voluntarily put all expression out of her face until the recital was ended. The effect on Miss Lucilla, as they sat side by side on a sofa, was slightly disconcerting, so that she came to her conclusion lamely.

"Of course, my dear, I don't know his side of the story, or what he may have to say in self-defence. I'm only telling you what I've heard, and just as I heard it."

"I dare say it's quite right."

The brevity and suggested cynicism of this reply produced in Miss Lucilla a little shock.

"Oh! Then, you think--?"

"There would be nothing surprising in it. It's the sort of thing that's always happening in Paris. It's one of the peculiarities of that society that you can never believe half the evil you hear of any one--not even if it's told you by the man himself. I might go so far as to say that, when it's told you by himself you're least of all inclined to credit it."

"But how dreadful!"

"Things are dreadful or not, according to the degree in which you're used to them. I've grown up in that atmosphere, and so I can endure it.

In fact, any other atmosphere seems to me to lack some of the necessary ingredients of air; just as to some people--to Napoleon, for instance--a woman who isn't rouged isn't wholly dressed."

"I know that's only your way of talking, dear. Oh, you can't shock _me_."

"At any rate, the way of talking shows you what I mean. I can quite understand how Monsieur de Bienville might have said that of Mrs.

Eveleth."

Lucilla's look of pain induced Miss Grimston promptly to qualify her statement.

"I said I could understand it; I didn't say I respected it. It's only what's been said of hundreds of thousands of women in Paris by hundreds of thousands of men, and in the place where they've said it it's taken with the traditional grain of salt. If all had gone as it was going at the time--if the Eveleths hadn't lost their money--if Mr. Eveleth hadn't shot himself--if Mrs. Eveleth had kept her place in French society--the story wouldn't have done her any harm. People would have shrugged their shoulders at it, and forgotten it. It's the transferring of the scene here, among you, that makes it grave. All your ideas are so different that what's bad becomes worse, by being carried out of its milieu.

Monsieur de Bienville must be made to understand that, and repair the wrong."

"You seem to think there's no question but that--there _is_ a wrong?"

"Oh, I suppose there isn't. There are so many cases of the kind. Mrs.

Eveleth is probably neither more nor less than one of the many Frenchwomen of her rank in life who like to skate out on the thin edge of excitement without any intention of going through. There are always women like my aunt Bayford to think the worst of people of that sort, and to say it."

"And yet I don't see how that justifies Monsieur de Bienville."

"It doesn't justify; it only explains. Responsibility presses less heavily on the individual when it's shared."

"But wouldn't the person--you'll forgive me, dear, won't you, if I'm going too far?--wouldn't the person who has to take his part in that kind of responsibility be a doubtful keeper of one's happiness?"

Miss Grimston, half lowering her eyes, looked at her visitor with slumberous suspension of expression, and made no reply.

"If a man isn't good--" Miss Lucilla began again, tremblingly.

"No man is perfect."

"True, dear; and yet are there not certain qualities which we ought to consider as essentials--?"

"Monsieur de Bienville has those qualities for me."

"But surely, dear, you can't mean--?"

"Yes, I do mean."

The avowal was made quietly, with the still bearing of one who gives a few drops of confession out of deep oceans of reserve. Miss Lucilla gazed at her in astonishment. That her parents should sacrifice her was not surprising; but that she should be willing to sacrifice herself went beyond the limits of thought. The revelation that Marion could actually love the man was so startling that it shocked her out of her timidity, loosening the strings of her eloquence and unsealing the sources of her maternal tenderness. There was nothing original in Miss Lucilla's subsequent line of argument. It was the old, oft-uttered, futile appeal to the head, when the heart has already spoken. It premised the possibility of placing one's affections where one cannot give one's respect, regardless of the fact that the thing is done a thousand times a day. It reasoned, it predicted, it implored, with an effect no more disintegrating on the girl's decision than moonbeams make upon a mountain. Through it all, she sat and listened with the veiled eyes and mysterious impa.s.sivity which gave to her personality a curiously incalculable quality, as of a force presenting none of the ordinary phenomena by which to measure or compute it.

It was not till Miss Lucilla touched on the subject of honor that she obtained any sign of the effect she was producing. It was no more, on Marion's part, than an uneasy movement, but it betrayed its cause. Miss Lucilla pressed her point with renewed insistence, and presently two big tears hung on the long, black lashes and rolled down.

"I should like to see Mrs. Eveleth."

Like the hasty raising and dropping of a curtain on some jealously guarded view, the words gave to Miss Lucilla but a fleeting glimpse of what was pa.s.sing in the obscure recesses of the girl's heart; but she determined to make the most of it by fixing, there and then, the day and hour when, without apparently forcing the event, the two might come face to face on the neutral ground of Gramercy Park.

It was a meeting that, when it took place, would have been attended with embarra.s.sment had not both young women been practised in the ways of their little world. Progress in mutual understanding was made the easier by the existence, on both sides, of the European view of life, with its fusion of interests, its softness of outline, its give and take of toleration, in contradistinction to the sharp, clear, insistent American demands for a certain line of conduct and no other. Five minutes had not gone by in talk before each found in the other's presence that sense of repose which comes from similar habits of thought and a common native idiom. Whatever grounds for difference they might find, they were, at least, ranged on the same side in that battle which the two hemispheres half unconsciously wage upon each other as to the main purposes of life.

Thus they were able to approach their subject without that first preliminary shock which makes it difficult for races to agree; and thus, too, Marion Grimston found herself, before she was aware of it, pouring out to Diane Eveleth that heart which, in response to Miss Lucilla's tender pleading, had been dumb.

They sat in the big, sombre library where, only a few days before, Diane had seen Derek Pruyn turn his back on her, without even a gesture of farewell. On the long mahogany table the red azalea was in almost pa.s.sionate luxuriance of blossom; while through the open window faint odors of lilac came from Miss Lucilla's bit of garden.

"I don't want you to think him worse than you're obliged to," Marion said, as though in defence of the stand her heart had taken. "I've been told that very few men possess the two kinds of courage--the moral and the physical. Savonarola had the one and Nelson had the other; but neither of them had both. And of the two, for me, the physical is the essential. I can't help it. If I had to choose between a soldier and a saint, I'd take the soldier. When the worst is said of Monsieur de Bienville, it must be admitted that he's brave."

"I've always understood that he was a good rider and a good shot," Diane admitted. "I've no doubt that in battle he would conduct himself like a hero."

The girl's head went up proudly, and from the languorous eyes there came one splendid flash before the lids fell over them again.

"I know he would; and when a man has that sort of courage he's worth saving."

"You admit, then, that he needs to be--saved?" Again the heavy lids were lifted for one brief, search-light glance.

"Yes; I admit that. I believe he has wronged you. I can't tell you how I know it; but I do. It's to tell you so that I've asked you to come here.

I hoped to make you see, as I do, that he's capable of doing it without appreciating the nature of his crime. If we could get him to see that--"

"Then--what?"

"He'd make you reparation."