The Inner Shrine Part 7

He touched a bell, and a young man entered. On directions from the banker the clerk left the room, taking the bag with him; while Diane, feeling that her errand had been largely accomplished, rose to leave.

"You can't go without the receipt for your securities. How do you know I'm not stealing them from you? What right would you have to claim them when you came again? Sit down now and tell me something more about yourself."

Half smiling, half tearfully, Diane complied. Before the clerk returned she had given a brief outline of her life, agreeing in all but the tone of telling with much of what Mr. Grimston had stated half an hour earlier.

"It has been all my fault," she declared, as the young man re-entered.

"There's been n.o.body to blame but me."

"I see that well enough," the old man agreed, and once more she prepared to depart.

"Look at your receipt. Compare it with the list there on the desk."

Diane obeyed, though her eyes swam so that she could not tell one word from another. "Is it all right? Then so much the better. You'll find me at the same time to-morrow--if you're not late."

"Since you won't let me thank you, I must go without doing so," she began, tremulously, "but I a.s.sure you--"

"You needn't a.s.sure me of anything, but just come again to-morrow."

She smiled through the mist over her eyes, and bowed.

"I shall not be--late," was all she ventured to say, and turned to leave him.

She had reached the door, and half opened it, when she heard his voice behind her.

"Stay! Just a minute! I'd like to shake hands with you, young woman."

Diane turned and allowed him to take her hand in a grip that hurt her.

She was so astounded by the suddenness of the act, as well as by the rapidity with which he closed the door behind her, that her tears did not actually fall until she found herself in the public department of the bank, outside.

IV

On board the _Picardie_, steaming to New York, Mrs. Eveleth and Diane were beginning to realize the gravity of the step they had taken. As long as they remained in Paris, battling with the sordid details of financial downfall, America had seemed the land of hope and reconstruction, where the ruined would find to their hands the means with which to begin again. The illusion had sustained them all through the first months of living on little, and stood by them till the very hour of departure. It faded just when they had most need of it--when the last cliffs of France went suddenly out of sight in a thick fog-bank of nothingness; and the cold, empty void, through which the steamer crept cautiously, roaring from minute to minute like a leviathan in pain, seemed all that the universe henceforth had to offer them. They would have been astonished to know that, beyond the fog, Fate was getting the New World ready for their reception, by creating among the rich those misfortunes out of which not infrequently proceed the blessings of the poor.

When that excellent aged lady, Miss Regina van Tromp, sister to the well-known Paris banker, was felled by a stroke of apoplexy, the personal calamity might, by a mind taking all things into account, have been considered balanced by the circ.u.mstance that it was affording employment to some refined woman of reduced means, capable of taking care of the invalid. It had the further advantage that, coming suddenly as it did, it absorbed the attention of Miss Lucilla van Tromp, the sick lady's companion and niece, who became unable henceforth to give to the household of her cousin, Derek Pruyn, that general supervision which a kindly old maid can exercise in the home of a young and prosperous widower. Were Destiny on the lookout for still another opening, she could have found it in the fact that Miss Dorothea Pruyn, whose father's discipline came by fits and starts, while his indulgence was continuous, had reached a point in motherless maidenhood where, according to Miss Lucilla, "something ought to be done." There was thus unrest, and a straining after new conditions, in that very family toward which Mrs.

Eveleth's imagination turned from this dreary, leaden sea as to a possible haven.

Since the wonderful morning when the banker had brought her the news of her little inheritance her thoughts had dwelt much on Van Tromps and Pruyns, as representatives of that old New York clan with which she deigned to claim alliance; and she found no small comfort in going over, again and again, the details of the interview which had brought her once more into contact with her kin. James van Tromp, she informed Diane, as they lay covered with rugs in their steamer-chairs, had been gruff in manner, but kind in heart, like all the Van Tromps she had ever heard of. He had not scrupled to dwell upon her past extravagance, but he had tempered his remarks by commending her resolution to return to her old home and friends. In the matter of friends, he a.s.sured her, she would find herself with very few. She would be forgotten by some and ignored by others; while those who still took an interest in her would resent the fact that in the days of her prosperity she had neglected them. In any case, she must have the meekness of the suppliant. As her means at most would be small, she must be grateful if any of her relatives would take her without wages, as a sort of superior lady's maid, and save her the expense of board and lodging.

"And so you see, dear," she finished, humbly, "it's going to be all right. George thought of me; and far more than any money, I value that.

James van Tromp said that this sum had been placed in his hands some time ago to be specially used for me, and I couldn't help understanding what that meant. When my boy saw the disaster coming he did his best to protect me; and it will be my part now to show that he did enough."

If Diane listened to these familiar remarks, it was only to take a dull satisfaction in the working of her scheme; but Mrs. Eveleth's next words startled her into sudden attention.

"Haven't I heard you say that you knew James van Tromp's nephew, Derek Pruyn?"

"I did know him," Diane answered, with a trace of hesitation.

"You knew him well?"

"Not exactly; it was different from--well."

"Different? How? Did you meet him often?"

"Never often; but when we did meet--"

The possibilities implied in Diane's pause induced Mrs. Eveleth to turn in her chair and look at her.

"You've never told me about that."

"There wasn't much to tell. Don't you know what it is to have met, just a few times in your life, some one who leaves behind a memory out of proportion to the degree of the acquaintance? It was something like that with this Mr. Pruyn."

"Where was it? In Paris?"

"I met him first in Ireland. He was staying with some friends of ours the last year mamma and I lived at Kilrowan. What I remember about him was that he seemed so young to be a widower--scarcely more than a boy."

"Is that all?"

"It's very nearly all; but there _is_ something more. He said one day when we were talking intimately--we always seemed to talk intimately when we were together--that if ever I was in trouble, I was to remember him."

"How extraordinary!"

"Yes, it was. I reminded him of it when we met again. That was the year I was going out with Marie de Nohant, just before George and I were married."

"And what did he say then?"

"That he repeated the request."

"Extraordinary!" Mrs. Eveleth commented again. "Are you going to do anything about it?"

"I've thought of it," Diane admitted, "but I don't believe I can."

"Wouldn't it be a pity to neglect so good an opportunity?"

"It might rather be a pity to avail one's self of it. There are things in life too pleasant to put to the test."

"He might like you to do it. After all, he's a connection."

Not caring to continue the subject, Diane murmured something about feeling cold, and rose for a little exercise. Having advanced as far forward as she could go, she turned her back upon her fellow-pa.s.sengers, stretched in mute misery in their chairs or huddled in cheerful groups behind sheltering projections, and stood watching the dip and rise of the steamer's bow as it drove onward into the mist. Whither was she going, and to what? With a desperate sense of her ignorance and impotence, she strained her eyes into the white, dimly translucent bank, from which stray drops repeatedly lashed her face, as though its vaporous wall alone stood between her and the knowledge of her future.

If she could have seen beyond the fog and carried her vision over the intervening leagues of ocean, so as to look into a large, old-fashioned New York house in Gramercy Park, she would have found Derek Pruyn and Lucilla van Tromp discussing one of the cardinal points on which that future was to turn.

That it was not an amusing conversation would have been clear from the agitation of Derek's manner as he strode up and down the room, as well as from the rigidity with which his cousin, usually a limp person, held herself erect, in the att.i.tude of a woman who has no intention of retiring from the stand she has taken.

"You force me to speak more plainly than I like, Derek," she was saying, "because you make yourself so obtuse. You seem to forget that years have a way of pa.s.sing, and that Dorothea is no longer a very little girl."