Chapter 11

Again the young man attempted the ceremonious by apologizing for the informality of his surroundings and the state of his dress; but again he faltered before the haggard glare in Derek's eyes.

"I want to talk to you," Pruyn said, abruptly. Bienville made a gesture of mingled politeness and astonishment.

"Certainly; but shall we not sit down while we do it? Will you smoke? Here are cigarettes, but you probably prefer a cigar."

Educated in England, like many young Frenchmen of the upper classes, Bienville spoke English fluently and with little accent.

"I want to talk to you," Derek said again. He took no notice of the proffered seat, and they remained standing, as they were, with the round table, bestrewn with letters, between them. "You remember," Derek continued, speaking with difficulty--"you remember the story you told me on the voyage--about a woman?"

Bienville nodded. He had a sudden presentiment of what was coming.

"I must tell you that on the night before I sailed for South America, three months ago, I asked that woman to be my wife."

"In that case," Bienville said, promptly, and with a tranquillity he did not feel, "I withdraw my statements."

"Withdrawal isn't enough. You must tell me they were not true."

Bienville remained silent for a minute. He was beginning to realize the firmness of the ground he stood on. His instinct for self-preservation was strong, and he had confidence in his dexterous use of the necessary weapons.

"You must give me time to reflect on that," he said, after a pause.

"Why do you need time? If the thing isn't true, you've only got to say so."

"It's not quite so easy as that. You can't cut every difficulty with a sword, as they did the Gordian knot. One may go far in defence of a woman's honor, but there are boundaries which even a gallant man cannot pass; and, before I speak, I must see where they lie."

"I want the truth. I want no defence of a woman's honor--"

"Ah, but I do. That's the difference."

"Damn your difference! You didn't think much of a woman's honor when you began your infernal tales."

"Did you, when you let me go on?"

"No. That's where I share your crime. That's all that keeps me from striking you now."

"I let that pass. I know how you feel. I know just how hard it is for you. I've been in something like your situation myself. No man can have much to do with a woman without being put there in one way if not another. It's because I do understand you that I share your pain--and support your insults."

The tremor in his voice, coupled with the dignity of his bearing, carried a certain degree of conviction, so that when Derek spoke again it was less fiercely.

"Then I understand you to confirm what you told me on board ship?"

"On the contrary; you understand me to take it back. Why shouldn't that be enough for you--without asking further questions?"

"Because I'm not here to go through formalities, but to seek for facts."

"Precisely; and yet, wouldn't it be wise, under the circumstances, not to be too exacting? If I do my best for you--"

"It isn't a question of doing your best, but of telling me the truth."

"I can quite see that it might strike you in that way; but you'll pardon me, I know, if I see it from another point of view. No man in my situation would consider it a matter of telling you the truth, so much as of coming to the aid of a lady whose good name he had unwittingly imperilled. My supreme duty is there; and I'm willing to do it to the utmost of my power. I am willing to withdraw everything I have ever uttered that could tell against her. Can you ask me to do more?"

"Yes; I can ask you to deny it."

"Isn't that already a form of denial?"

"No; it's a form of affirmation."

"That's because you choose to take it so. It's because you prefer to go behind my words, and ascribe to me motives which, for all you know, I do not possess."

"I've nothing to do with your motives; my aim is to get at the truth."

"Since you have nothing to do with my motives," Bienville said, with a slight lifting of the brows, "you'll permit me, I am sure, to be equally indifferent to your aims. I tell you what I am prepared to do; but what is it to me whether you are satisfied or not? I am sorry to--to--inconvenience the lady; but as for you--!"

With a snap of the fingers he turned and strolled to the window, where he stood, looking out, with his back toward his guest. It was significant of their tension of feeling and concentration of mind that both gesture and attitude went unnoted by both. Derek remained silent and motionless, his slower mind trying to catch up with the Frenchman's nimble adroitness. He had not yet done so when Bienville turned and spoke again.

"Why should we quarrel? What should we gain by doing that? You and I are two men of the world, to whom human nature is as an open book. What do you expect me to do? What do you expect me to say? What more did you think to call forth from me when you came here this morning? Do me justice. Am I not going as far as a man can go when I say that I blot out of my memory the cursed evenings you and I spent together in cursed talk? That doesn't cover the ground, you think; but would any other form of words cover it any better? Would you believe me the more, whatever set of speeches I might adopt? Would you not always have in the back of your mind your expressive English phrase, that I was lying like a gentleman? You know best what you can do, as I know best what I can do; but is it not true that we have arrived at a point where the less that is spoken in words on either side, the better it will be for us all?"

When he had finished, Bienville turned again toward the window, leaning his head wearily against the frame. Derek stood a minute longer watching him. Then, as if accepting the assertion that there was nothing more that could be said, he went quietly, with bent head, from the room.

* * * * *

He was down in the street before he became fully conscious that, among the confused, strangled cries of pain within him, that which was loudest and most imploring was a wailing self-reproach. It was a self-reproach with a strain of pleading in it, akin to that with which a mother blames herself for the failings of her son, seizing on any one else's wrong to palliate the guilt of the accused. He had injured Diane himself! He had pried into her past, and laid bare her sins, and stripped her life of that covering of secrecy which no human existence could do without, least of all his own.

He walked on with bowed head, his eyes blind to the May sunshine, his ears deaf to the city's joyous, energetic uproar, his mind closed to the fact that important business affairs were awaiting his attention. His feet strayed toward Gramercy Park, directed not so much by volition as by the primary man-instinct to be near some sweet, sympathetic woman in the hour of pain. Lucilla and he had, grown up in one family as boy and girl together, and there were moments when he found near her the peace he could get nowhere else in the world.

He pushed by the footman who admitted him and walked straight to the room where Lucilla was generally to be found. Though he could scarcely be surprised to see Diane sitting by her, he stopped on the threshold, with signs of embarrassment, and made as though he would withdraw. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities of such a moment, Miss Lucilla looked appealingly at Diane, who rose.

"Don't go, Mr. Pruyn," she said, forcing herself to show firmness. "You arrive very opportunely. I have just asked my mother-in-law to come to my aid in some of the things we discussed last night. Won't you do me the justice to hear her?"

She crossed the room to where Mrs. Eveleth appeared on the threshold, and, taking her by the hand, led her to the chair which Pruyn placed for her.

"I'd better go, Diane dear," Miss Lucilla whispered, tremblingly.

"Please don't," Diane insisted. "I'd much rather have you stay. I've no secrets from Miss Lucilla," she added, speaking to Derek. "I need a woman friend; and I've found one."

"You couldn't find a better," Pruyn murmured, while Miss Lucilla slipped her arm around Diane's waist, rather to steady herself than to support her friend.

"Miss Lucilla knows everything that you know, petite mère," Diane continued, turning to where her mother-in-law sat, slightly bowed, her extended hand resting on her cane, like some graceful Sibyl. "She knows everything that you know, and she knows one thing more. She knows what some cruel people say was the way in which--George died."

Diane uttered the last two words in a kind of sob, and Mrs. Eveleth looked up, startled.

"George--died?" she questioned, slowly, with a look of wonder.

Diane nodded, unable, for the minute, to speak.

"But we know how--he died."

"Mr. Pruyn tells me that we don't."

"I beg you not to put it in that way," Derek said, hurriedly. "I repeated only what was told me, and what was afterward verified. Do you not think we can spare Mrs. Eveleth what must be so painful?"

"There's no need to spare me, Mr. Pruyn. I think I've reached the point to which old people often come--where they can't feel any more."

"Oh, mother, don't say that," Diane wailed, with a curiously childlike cry. She had never before called Mrs. Eveleth mother, and the word sounded strangely in this room which had not heard it since Miss Lucilla was a little girl. "My mother would rather know," she declared, almost proudly, speaking again to Pruyn, "than be kept in ignorance of something in which she could help me so much."

"What is it?" Mrs. Eveleth asked, eagerly.

Then Diane told her. It had been stated, so she said, that George had not fallen in her defence, but by his own hand--to escape her; and there was no one in the world but his own mother to give this monstrous calumny the lie. During the recital Mrs. Eveleth sat with clasped hands, but with head sinking lower at each word. Once she murmured something which only Miss Lucilla was near enough to hear:

"Then that's why they wouldn't let me look at him in his coffin."

"He did love me, didn't he?" Diane cried. "He was happy with me, wasn't he, mother dear? He understood me, and upheld me, and defended me, whatever I did. He didn't want to leave me. He knew I should never have cared for the loss of the money--that we could have faced that together. Tell them so, mother; tell them."

For the first time since he had known her Derek saw Diane forget her reserve in eager pleading. She stepped forward from Miss Lucilla's embrace, standing before Mrs. Eveleth with palms opened outward, in an attitude of petition. The older woman did not raise her head nor speak.

"He was happy with me," Diane insisted. "I made him happy. I wasn't the best wife he could have had, but he was satisfied with me as I was, in spite of my imperfections. He was worried sometimes, especially toward--toward the last; but he wasn't worried about me, was he, mother dear?"

Still the mother did not speak nor raise her head. Diane took a step nearer and began again.

"I didn't know we were living beyond our means. I didn't know what was going on around me. I reproach myself for that. A wiser woman _would_ have known; but I was young, and foolish, and very, very happy. I didn't know I was ruining George, though I'm ready to take all the responsibility for it now. But he never blamed me, did he, mother? never, by a word, never by a look. Oh, speak, and tell them!"

Her voice came out with a sharp note of anxiety, in which there was an inflection almost of fear; but when she ceased there was silence.

"Petite mère," she cried, "aren't you going to say anything?"

The bowed head remained bowed; the only sign came from the trembling of the extended hand, resting on the top of the stick.

"If you don't speak," Diane cried again, "they'll think it's because you don't want to."

If there was a response to this, it was when the head bent lower.

"Mother," Diane cried, in alarm, "I've no one in the world to speak a word for me but you. If you don't do it, they'll believe I drove George to his death--they'll say I was such a woman that he killed himself rather than live with me any longer."

Suddenly Mrs. Eveleth raised her head and looked round upon them all. Then she staggered to her feet.

"Take me away!" she said, in a dead voice, to Lucilla van Tromp. "Help me! Take me away! I can't bear any more!" Leaning on Miss Lucilla's arm, she advanced a step and paused before Diane, who stood wide-eyed, and awe-struck rather than amazed, at the magnitude of this desertion. "May God forgive you, Diane," she said, quietly, passing on again. "I try to do so; but it's hard."

While Derek's eyes were riveted on Diane, she stood staring vacantly at the empty doorway through which Mrs. Eveleth and Miss Lucilla had passed on their way up-stairs. This abandonment was so far outside the range of what she had considered possible that there seemed to be no avenues to her intelligence through which the conviction of it could be brought home. She gazed as though her own vision were at fault, as though her powers of comprehension had failed her.

Derek, on his part, watched her, with the fascination with which we watch a man performing some strange feat of skill--from whom first one support, and then another, and then another, falls away, until he is left with nothing to uphold him, perilously, frightfully alone.

When at length the knowledge of what had occurred came over her, Diane looked round the familiar room, as though to bring her senses back out of the realm of the incredible. When her eyes rested on him it was simply to include him among the common facts of earth after this excursion into the impossible. She said nothing, and her face was blank; but the little gesture of the hands--the little limp French gesture: the sudden lift, the sudden drop, the soft, tired sound, as the arms fell against the sides--implied fatality, finality, inexplicability, and an infinite weariness of created things.

XIV

"Do you think he did--shoot himself?"

They continued to stand staring into each other's eyes--the width of the room between them. A red azalea on the long mahogany table, strewn with books, separated them by its fierce splash of color. The apathy of Diane's voice was not that of worn-out emotion, but of emotion which finds no adequate tones. The very way in which her inquiry ignored all other subjects between them had its poignancy.

"What do _you_ think?"

"Oh, I suppose he did. Every one says so; then why shouldn't it be true? If it were, it would only be of a piece with all the rest."

"I reminded you last night that he had other troubles besides--besides--"

"Besides those I may have caused him."

"If you like to put it so. He might have been driven to a desperate act by loss of fortune."

"Leaving me to face poverty alone. No; I can't think so ill of him as that. If you suggest it by way of offering me consolation, you're making a mistake. Of the two, I'd rather think of him as seeking death from horror--horror of me--than from simple cowardice."

"It would be no new thing in the history of money troubles; and it would relieve you of the blame."

"To fasten it on him. I see what you mean; but I prefer not to accept that kind of absolution. If there's any consolation left to me, it's in the pride of having been the wife of an honorable man. Don't take it away from me as long as there's any other explanation possible. I see you're puzzled; but you'd have to be a wife to understand me. Accuse me of any crime you like; take it for granted that I've been guilty of it; only don't say that he deserted me in that way. Let me keep at least the comfort of his memory."

"I want you to keep all the comfort you can get, Diane. God forbid that I should take from you anything in which you find support. So far am I from that, that I come to offer you--what I have to offer."

There was a minute's silence before she replied:

"I don't know what that is."

"My name."

There was another minute's silence, during which she looked at him hardly.

"What for?"

"I should think you'd see."

"I don't. Will you be good enough to explain?"

"Is that necessary? Is this a minute in which to bandy words?"

"It's a minute in which I may be permitted to ask the meaning of your--generosity."

"It isn't generosity. I'm saying nothing new. I've come only for an answer to the question I asked you before going to South America, three months ago."

"Oh, but I thought that question had answered itself."

"Then perhaps it has--in that, whatever reply you might have given me under other conditions, now you must accept me."

"You mean, I must accept--your name."

"My name, and all that goes with it."

"How could you expect me to do that, after what happened last night?"

"What happened last night shall be--as though it had not happened."

"Could you ever forget it?"

"I didn't say I should forget it. I suppose I couldn't do that any more than you. I said it should be as though it hadn't been."

"And what about Dorothea?"

"That must be as it may."

"You mean that Dorothea would have to take her chance."

"She needn't know anything about it--yet."

"You couldn't keep it from her forever."

"No. But she'll probably marry soon. After that she'll understand things better."

"That is, she'll understand the position in which you've been placed--that you could hardly have acted otherwise."

"I don't want to go into definitions. There are times in life when words become as dangerous as explosives. Let us do what we see to be our obvious duty, without saying too much about it."

"Isn't it your first duty to protect your child?"

"My first duty, as I see it now, is to protect you."

"I don't see much to be gained by shielding one person when you expose another. What happens to me is a small matter compared with the consequences to her."

"Your influence hasn't hurt her in the past; why should it do so now?"

"You forget that there are other things besides my influence. Her whole position, her whole life, would be changed, if she had for a mother--if you had for a wife--a notorious woman like me."

"There are situations where the child must follow the parent."

"But there are none, as far as I know, in which the parent must sacrifice the child."

"I don't agree with you. There are moments in which we must act in a certain definite manner, no matter what may be the outcome. Don't let us talk of it any more, Diane. You must know as well as I that there is but one thing for us to do."

"You mean, of course, that I must marry you."

"You must give me the right to take care of you."

"Because it's a duty that no one else would assume. That's what it comes to, isn't it?"

"I repeat that I don't want to discuss it--"

"You must let me point out that some amount of discussion is needed. If we didn't have it before marriage, we should have it afterward, when it would be worse. You won't think I'm boasting if I say that I think my vision is a little keener than yours, and that I see what you'd be doing more clearly than you do yourself. You know me--or you think you know me--as a guilty woman, homeless, penniless, and without a friend in the world. You don't want to leave me to my fate, and there's no way of helping me but one. That way you're prepared to take, cost what it will. I admire you for it; I thank you for it; I know you would do it like a man. But it's just because you _would_ do it like a man--because you _are_ doing it like a man--that your kindness is far more cruel than scorn. No woman, not the weakest, not the worst, among us, would consent to be taken as you're offering to take me. A man might bring himself to accept that kind of pity; but a woman--never! You said just now that you had come to offer me--what you had to offer; but surely I'm not fallen so low as to have to take it."

"I said I offered you my name and all that goes with it. I would try to tell you what it is, only that I find something in our relative positions transcending words. But since you need words--since apparently you prefer plainness of speech--I'll tell you something: I saw Bienville this morning."

She looked up with a new expression, verging on that of curiosity.

"And--?"

"Since then," he continued, "I've become even more deeply conscious than I was before of the ineradicable nature of what I feel for you."

"Ah?"

"I've come to see that, whatever may have happened, whatever you may be, I want you as my wife."

"Do you mean that you would overlook wrongdoing on my part, and--and--care for me, just the same?"

"I mean that life isn't a conceivable thing to me without you; I mean that no considerations in the world have any force as against my desire to get you. Whatever your life has been, I subscribe to it. Listen! When I saw Bienville this morning he withdrew what he said on shipboard--as nearly as possible, without giving himself the lie, he denied it--and yet, Diane, and yet I knew his first story was--the truth. No, don't shrink. Don't cry out. Let me go on. I swear to God that it makes no difference. I see the whole thing from another point of view. I'll not only take you as you are, but I want you as you are. I give you my honor, which is dearer than my life--I give you my child, who is more precious than my honor. Everything--everything is cheap, so long as I can win you. Don't shrink from me, Diane. Don't look at me like that--"

"How can I help shrinking from anything so base?"

Her voice rose scarcely above a whisper, but it checked the movement with which, after the minutes of almost motionless confrontation, he came toward her with eager arms.

"Base?" he echoed, offended.

"Yes--base. That a man should care for a woman whom he thinks to be bad is comprehensible; that he should wish to make her his wife is credible; that he should hope to lift her out of her condition is admirable; but that he should descend from his own high plane to stay on hers is despicably weak; while to drag down with him a girl in the very flower of her purity is a crime without a name."

The dark flush showed how quickly his haughty spirit responded to the flicker of the lash.

"If you choose to put that interpretation of my words--" he began, indignantly.

"I don't; but it's the interpretation they deserve. There's almost no indignity that can be uttered which you haven't heaped upon me; and of them all this last is the hardest to be borne. I bear it; I forgive it; because it convinces me of what I've been afraid of all along--that I'm a woman who throws some sort of evil influence over men. Even you are not exempt from it--even you! Oh, Derek, go away from me! If you won't do it for your own sake, do it for Dorothea's. I won't do battle with Bienville's accusations now. Perhaps I may never do battle with them at all. What does it matter whether he tells the truth or lies? The pressing thing just now is that you should be saved--"

"Thank you; I can take care of myself. Let's have no more fine splitting of moral hairs. Let us settle the thing, and be done with it. There's one big fact before us, and only one. You can't do without me; I can't do without you. It's a crisis at which we've the right to think only of ourselves and thrust every one else outside."

"Wait!" she cried, as he advanced once more upon her. "Wait! Let me tell you something. You mustn't be hard on me for saying it. You asked just now for my answer to your question of three months ago. My answer is--"

"Diane!" he said, lifting his hand in warning. "Be careful. Don't speak in a hurry. I'm not in a mood to plead or argue any longer. What you say now will be--the irrevocable word."