The Inner Shrine Part 18

"Are you going to be married, father?"

The question could not be a surprise to him after the occurrence at the table, but he was not prepared to give an affirmative answer on the spur of the moment.

"What makes you ask?" he inquired, after a second's reflection.

"I heard what Mrs. Bayford said."

"And how should you feel if I were?"

"It would depend."

"On what?"

"On whether or not it was any one I liked."

"That's fair. And if it was some one whom you did like?"

"Then it would depend on whether or not it was--Diane."

"And if it was Diane?"

"I should be very glad."

"Why?"

She slipped her arm through his and snuggled up to him.

"Oh, for a lot of reasons. First, because I've always supposed you'd be getting married one day; and I've been terribly afraid you'd pick out some one I couldn't get along with."

"Have I ever shown any symptom to justify that alarm?"

"N--no; but you never can tell--with a man."

"Can you be any surer with a woman?"

"No; and that's one of my other reasons. I'm not very sure about myself."

"You don't mean that it's to be young Wap--?" he began, uneasily.

"I suppose it will have to be he--or some one else. They keep at me."

"And you don't know how long you may be able to hold out."

"I'm holding out as well as I can," she laughed, "but it can't go on forever. And then--if I do--"

"Well--what?"

"You'd be left all alone, and, of course, I should be worried about that--unless you--you--"

"Unless I married some one."

"No; not some one; no one--but Diane."

They were now at their own door, but before she sprang out she drew down his face to hers and kissed him.

IX

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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sume 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 grat.i.tude; 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sure me of that, because I could never have thought so.

If I want a.s.surance at all it's on other points."

"If I can explain them--"