The Inner Shrine | Page 2

that
when George grew up she had been glad to resign them to his keeping,
taking what he told her was her income. As for Diane, her fortune was
so small as to be a negligible quantity in such housekeeping as they
maintained--a poverty of dot which had been the chief reason why her
noble kinsfolk had consented to her marriage with an American.
Looking round the splendid house, Mrs. Eveleth was aware that her
husband could never have lived in it, still less have built it; while she
wondered more than ever how George, who led the life of a Parisian
man of fashion, could have found the means of doing both.
Not that her anxiety centred on material things; they were too remote
from the general activities of her thought for that. She distilled her fear
out of the living atmosphere around her. She was no novice in this
brilliant, dissolute society, or in the meanings hidden behind its
apparently trivial concerns. Hints that would have had slight
significance for one less expert she found luminous with suggestion;

and she read by signs as faint as those in which the redskin detects the
passage of his foe across the grass. The odd smile with which Diane
went out! The dull silence in which George came home! The
manufactured conversation! The forced gayety! The startling pause!
The effort to begin again, and keep the tone to one of common
intercourse! The long defile of guests! The strangers who came, grew
intimate, and disappeared! The glances that followed Diane when she
crossed a room! The shrug, the whisper, the suggestive grimace, at the
mention of her name! All these were as an alphabet in which Mrs.
Eveleth, grown skilful by long years of observation, read what had
become not less familiar than her mother-tongue.
The fact that her misgivings were not new made it the more difficult to
understand why they had focussed themselves to-night into this great
fear. There had been nothing unusual about the day, except that she had
seen little of Diane, while George had remained shut up in his room,
writing letters and arranging or destroying papers. There had been
nothing out of the common in either of them--not even the frown of
care on George's forehead, or the excited light in Diane's eyes--as they
drove away in the evening, to dine at the Spanish Embassy. They had
kissed her tenderly, but it was not till after they had gone that it seemed
to her as if they had been taking a farewell. Then, too, other little
tokens suddenly became ominous; while something within herself
seemed to say, "The hour is at hand!"
The hour is at hand! Standing in the middle of one of the gorgeous
rooms, she repeated the words softly, marking as she did so their
incongruity to herself and her surroundings. The note of fatality jarred
on the harmony of this well-ordered life. It was preposterous, that she,
who had always been hedged round and sheltered by pomp and
circumstance, should now in her middle age be menaced with calamity.
She dragged herself over to one of the long mirrors and gazed at her
reflection pityingly.
The twitter of birds startled her with the knowledge that it was dawn.
From the Embassy George and Diane were to go on to two or three
great houses, but surely they should be home by this time! The

reflection meant the renewal of her fear. Where was her son? Was he
really with his wife, or had the moment come when he must take the
law into his own hands, after their French manner, to avenge himself or
her? She knew nothing about duelling, but she had the Anglo-Saxon
mother's dread of it. She had always hoped that, notwithstanding the
social code under which he lived, George would keep clear of any such
brutal senselessness; but lately she had begun to fear that the
conventions of the world would prove the stronger, and that the time
when they would do so was not far away.
Pulling back the curtains from one of the windows, she opened it and
stepped out on a balcony, where the long strip of the Quai d'Orsay
stretched below her, in gray and silent emptiness. On the swift,
leaden-colored current of the Seine, spanned here and there by ghostly
bridges, mysterious barges plied weirdly through the twilight. Up on
the left the Arc de Triomphe began to emerge dimly out of night, while
down on the right the line of the Louvre lay, black and sinister, beneath
the towers and spires that faintly detached themselves against the
growing saffron of the morning. High above all else, the domes of the
Sacred Heart were white with the rays of the unrisen sun, like those