The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 73

"Dear Lady Niton!--I must."

"You sha'n't!--I tell you! I've got you a place in London--a, thousand times, better than your fool of an uncle could ever get you. Uncle, indeed! Read that letter!" She tossed him one from her bag.

Bobbie read, while Lady Niton stared hard at the girl. Presently Bobbie began to gasp.

"Well, upon my word!"--he put the letter down--"upon my word!"' He turned to his sweetheart. "Ettie!--you marry me in a month!--mind that!

Hang Berlin! I scorn their mean proposals. London requires me." He drew himself up. "But first" (he looked at Lady Niton, his flushed face twitching a little) "justice!" he said, peremptorily--"justice on the chief offender."

And walking across to her, he stooped and kissed her. Then he beckoned to Ettie to do the same. Very shyly the girl ventured; very stoically the victim, submitted. Whereupon, Bobbie subsided, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and a violent quarrel began immediately between him and Lady Niton on the subject of the part of London in which he and Ettie were to live. Fiercely the conflict waxed and waned, while the young girl's soft irrepressible laughter filled up all the gaps and like a rus.h.i.+ng stream carried away the detritus--the tempers and rancors and scorns--left by former convulsions.

Meanwhile, Diana and Sir James paced the garden. He saw that she was silent and absent-minded, and guessed uneasily at the cause. It was impossible that any woman of her type, who had gone through the experience that she had, should remain unmoved by the accounts now current as to Oliver Marsham's state.

As they returned across the lawn to the house the two lovers came out to meet them. Sir James saw the look with which Diana watched them coming.

It seemed to him one of the sweetest and one of the most piteous he had ever seen on a human face.

"I shall descend upon you next week," said Lady Niton abruptly, as Diana made her farewells. "I shall be at Tallyn."

Diana did not reply. The little _fiancee_ insisted on the right to take her to her pony-carriage, and kissed her tenderly before she let her go.

Diana had already become as a sister to her and Bobbie, trusted in their secrets and advising in their affairs.

Lady Niton, standing by Sir James, looked after her.

"Well, there's only one thing in the world that girl wants; and I suppose n.o.body in their senses ought to help her to it."

"What do you mean?"

She murmured a few words in his ear.

"Not a bit of it!" said Sir James, violently. "I forbid it. Don't you go and put anything of the sort into her head. The young man I mean her to marry comes back from Nigeria this very day."

"She won't marry him!"

"We shall see."

Diana drove home through lanes suffused with sunset and rich with autumn. There had been much rain through September, and the deluged earth steamed under the return of the sun. Mists were rising from the stubbles, and wrapping the woods in sleep and purple. To her the beauty of it all was of a mask or pageant--seen from a distance across a plain or through a street-opening--lovely and remote. All that was real--all that lived--was the image within the mind; not the great earth-show without.

As she pa.s.sed through the village she fell in with the Roughsedges: the doctor, with his wide-awake on the back of his head, a book and a bulging umbrella under his arm; Mrs. Roughsedge, in a new shawl, and new bonnet-strings, with a prodigal flutter of side curls beside her ample countenance. Hugh, it appeared, was expected by an evening train. Diana begged that he might be brought up to see her some time in the course of the following afternoon. Then she drove on, and Mrs. Roughsedge was left staring discontentedly at her husband.

"I think she _was_ glad, Henry?"

"Think it, my dear, if it does you any good," said the doctor, cheerfully.

When Diana reached home night had fallen--a moon-lit night, through which all the shapes and even the colors of day were still to be seen or divined in a softened and pearly mystery. Muriel Colwood was not at home. She had gone to town, on one of her rare absences, to meet some relations. Diana missed her, and yet was conscious that even the watch of those kind eyes would--to-night--have added to the pa.s.sionate torment of thought.

As she sat alone in the drawing-room after her short and solitary meal her nature bent and trembled under the blowing of those winds of fate, which, like gusts among autumn trees, have tested or strained or despoiled the frail single life since time began; winds of love and pity, of desire and memory, of anguish and of longing.

Only her dog kept her company. Sometimes she rose out of restlessness, and moved about the room, and the dog's eyes would follow her, dumbly dependent. The room was dimly lit; in the mirrors she saw now and then the ghostly pa.s.sage of some one who seemed herself and not herself. The windows were open to a misty garden, waiting for moonrise; in the house all was silence; only from the distant road and village came voices sometimes of children, or the sounds of a barrel-organ, fragmentary and shrill.

Loneliness ached in her heart--spoke to her from the future. And five miles away Oliver, too, was lonely--and in pain. _Pain_!--the thought of it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a man already crushed and helpless--gave her no respite. The tears ran down her cheeks as she moved to and fro, her hands at her breast.

Yet she was helpless. What could she do? Even if he were free from Alicia, even if he wished to recall her, how could he--maimed and broken--take the steps that could alone bring her to his side? If their engagement had subsisted, horror, catastrophe, the approach of death itself, could have done nothing to part them. Now, how was a man in such a plight to ask from a woman what yet the woman would pay a universe to give? And in the face of the man's silence, how could the woman speak?

No!--she began to see her life as the Vicar saw it: pledged to large causes, given to drudgeries--necessary, perhaps n.o.ble, for which the happy are not meant. This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers much longer. If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden, surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the world rang in her ears--wild voices!--speaking universal, terrible, representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close, close to her heart. No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she best could. Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own youth, grief for her parents. She must turn to the poor in that mood she had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself--the mood of one seeking an opiate, an anaesthetic. The scrubbing of hospital floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of them deaden thought--these were what she turned to as the only means by which life could be lived.

Oliver!--No hope for him?--at thirty-six! His career broken--his ambition defeated. Nothing before him but the decline of power and joy; nights of barren endurance, separating days empty and tortured; all natural pleasures deadened and destroyed; the dying down of all the hopes and energies that make a man.

She threw herself down beside the open window, burying her face on her knees. Would they never let her go to him?--never let her say to him: "Oliver, take me!--you did love me once--what matters what came between us? That was in another world. Take my life--crush out of it any drop of comfort or of ease it can give you! Cruel, cruel--to refuse! It is mine to give and yours to spend!"

Juliet Sparling's daughter. There was the great consecrating, liberating fact! What claim had she to the ordinary human joys? What could the ordinary standards and expectations of life demand from her?

Nothing!--nothing that could stem this rush of the heart to the beloved--the forsaken and suffering and overshadowed beloved. Her future?--she held it dross--apart from Oliver. Dear Sir James!--but he must learn to bear it--to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for herself. What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but just this: to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver--to bring him the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love? And if it were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena, where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and throw herself blindly into the fight. Perhaps some heavenly voice might still speak through it; perhaps, beyond its jar, some ineffable reunion might dawn--

"First a peace out of pain--then a light--then thy breast!..."

She trembled through and through. Restraining herself, she rose, and went to her locked desk, taking from it the closely written journal of her father's life, which had now been for months the companion of her thoughts, and of the many lonely moments in her days and nights. She opened on a pa.s.sage tragically familiar to her:

"It is an April day. Everything is very still and balmy.

clouds are low, yet suffused with sun. They seem to be tangled among the olives, and all the spring green and flowering fruit trees are like embroidery on a dim yet s.h.i.+ning background of haze, silvery and glistening in the sun, blue and purple in the shadows. The beach-trees in the olive garden throw up their pink spray among the s.h.i.+mmering gray leaf and beside the gray stone walls. Warm breaths steal to me over the gra.s.s and through the trees; the last brought with it a strong scent of narcissus. A goat tethered to a young tree in the orchard has reared its front feet against the stem, and is nibbling at the branches. His white back s.h.i.+nes amid the light spring shade.

"Far down through the trees I can see the sparkle of the waves--beyond, the broad plain of blue; and on the headland, a mile away, white foam is das.h.i.+ng.

"It is the typical landscape of the South, and of spring, the landscape, with only differences in detail, of Theocritus or Vergil, or the Greek anthologists, those most delicate singers of nature and the South. From the beginning it has filled man with the same joy, the same yearning, the same despair.

"In youth and happiness we _are_ the spring--the young green--the blossom--the plas.h.i.+ng waves. Their life is ours and one with ours.

"But in age and grief? There is no resentment, I think; no anger, as though a mourner resented the gayety around him; but, rather, a deep and melancholy wonder at the chasm that has now revealed itself between our life and nature. What does the breach mean?--the incurable dissonance and alienation? Are we greater than nature, or less? Is the opposition final, the prophecy of man's ultimate and hopeless defeat at the hands of nature?--or is it, in the Hegelian sense, the mere development of a necessary conflict, leading to a profounder and intenser unity? The old, old questions--stock possessions of the race, yet burned anew by life into the blood and brain of the individual.

"I see Diana in the garden with her nurse. She has been running to and fro, playing with the dog, feeding the goat.

Now I see her sitting still, her chin on her hands, looking out to sea. She seems to droop; but I am sure she is not tired. It is an att.i.tude not very natural to a child, especially to a child so full of physical health and vigor; yet she often falls into it.

"When I see it I am filled with dread. She knows nothing, yet the cloud seems to be upon her. Does she already ask herself questions--about her father--about this solitary life?

"Juliet was not herself--not in her full sane mind--when I promised her. That I know. But I could no more have refused the promise than water to her dying lips. One awful evening of fever and hallucination I had been sitting by her for a long time. Her thoughts, poor sufferer, had been full of _blood_--it is hard to write it--but there is the truth--a physical horror of blood--the blood in which her dress--the dress they took from her, her first night in prison--was once steeped. She saw it everywhere, on her hands, the sheets, the walls; it was a nausea, an agony of brain and flesh; and yet it was, of course, but a mere symbol and shadow of the manifold agony she had gone through. I will not attempt to describe what I felt--what the man who knows that his neglect and selfishness drove her the first steps along this infernal road must feel to his last hour.--But at last we were able--the nurse and I--to soothe her a little. The nightmare lifted, we gave her food, and the nurse brushed her poor brown hair, and tied round it, loosely, the little black scarf she likes to wear. We lifted her on her pillows, and her white face grew calm, and so lovely--though, as we thought, very near to death. Her hair, which was cut in prison, had grown again a little--to her neck, and could not help curling. It made her look a child again--poor, piteous child!--so did the little scarf, tied under her chin--and the tiny proportions to which all her frame had shrunk.

"She lifted her face to mine, as I bent over her, kissed me, and asked for you. You were brought, and I took you on my knee, showing you pictures, to keep you quiet. But every other minute, almost, your eyes looked away from the book to her, with that grave considering look, as though a question were behind the look, to which your little brain could not yet give shape. My strange impression was that the question was there--in the mind--fully formed, like the Platonic 'ideas' in heaven; but that, physically, there was no power to make the word-copy that could have alone communicated it to us. Your mother looked at you in return, intently--quite still. When you began to get restless, I lifted you up to kiss her; you were startled, perhaps, by the cold of her face, and struggled away. A little color came into her cheeks; she followed you hungrily with her eyes as you were carried off; then she signed to me, and it was my hand that brushed away her tears.

"Immediately afterward she began to speak, with wonderful will and self-control, and she asked me that till you were grown up and knowledge became inevitable, I should tell you nothing. There was to be no talk of her, no picture of her, no letters. As far as possible, during your childhood and youth, she was to be to you as though she had never existed.

What her thought was exactly she was too feeble to explain; nor was her mind strong enough to envisage all the consequences--to me, as well as to you--of what she proposed.

No doubt it tortured her to think of you as growing up under the cloud of her name and fate, and with her natural and tragic impetuosity she asked what she did.

"'One day--there will come some one--who will love her--in spite of me. Then you and he--shall tell her.'

"I pointed out to her that such a course would mean that I must change my name and live abroad. Her eyes a.s.sented, with a look of relief. She knew that I had already developed the tastes of the nomad and the sun-wors.h.i.+pper, that I was a student, happy in books and solitude; and I have no doubt that the picture her mind formed at the moment of some such hidden life together, as we have actually led, you and I, since her death, soothed and consoled her. With her intense and poetic imagination, she knew well what had happened to us, as well as to herself.