The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 75

"Captain Roughsedge! They didn't tell me--"

"I want to speak to you," said the Vicar, peremptorily, to Mrs. Colwood; and he carried her off round the corner of the house.

Diana gazed after them, and Roughsedge thought he saw her totter.

"You look so ill!" he said, stooping over her. "Come and sit down."

His boyish nervousness and timidity left him. The strong man emerged and took command. He guided her to a garden seat, under a drooping lime. She sank upon the seat, quite unable to stand, beckoning him to stay by her.

So he stood near, reluctantly waiting, his heart contracting at the sight of her.

At last she recovered herself and sat up.

"It was some bad news," she said, looking at him piteously, and holding out her hand again. "It is too bad of me to greet you like this."

He took her hand, and his own self-control broke down. He raised it to his lips with a stifled cry.

"Don't!--don't!" said Diana, helplessly. "Indeed--there is nothing the matter--I am only foolish. It is so--so good of you to care." She drew her hand from his, raised it to her brow, and, drawing a long breath, pushed back the hair from her face. She was like a person struggling against some torturing restraint, not knowing where to turn for help.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "ROUGHSEDGE STOOD NEAR, RELUCTANTLY WAITING"]

But at the word "care" he pulled himself together. He sat down beside her, and plunged straight into his declaration. He went at it with the same resolute simplicity that he was accustomed to throw into his military duty, nor could she stop him in the least. His unalterable affection; his changed and improved prospects; a staff appointment at home if she accepted him; the Nigerian post if she refused him--these things he put before her in the natural manly speech of a young Englishman sorely in love, yet quite incapable of "high flights," It was very evident that he had pondered what he was to say through the days and nights of his exile; that he was doing precisely what he had always planned to do, and with his whole heart in the business. She tried once or twice to interrupt him, but he did not mean to be interrupted, and she was forced to hear it out.

At the end she gave a little gasp.

"Oh, Hugh!" His name, given him for the first time, fell so forlornly--it was such a breathing out of trouble and pity and despair--that his heart took another and a final plunge downward. He had known all through that there was no hope for him; this tone, this aspect settled it. But she stretched out her hands to him, tenderly--appealing.

"Hugh--I shall have to tell you--but I am ashamed."

He looked at her in silence a moment, then asked her why. The tears rose br.i.m.m.i.n.g in her eyes--her hands still in his.

"Hugh--I--I--have always loved Oliver Marsham--and I--cannot think of any one else. You know what has happened?"

He saw the sob swelling in her white throat.

"Yes!" he said, pa.s.sionately. "It is horrible. But you cannot go to him--you cannot marry him. He was a coward when he should have stood by you. He cannot claim you now."

She withdrew her hands.

"No!" The pa.s.sion in her voice matched his own. "But I would give the world if he could--and would!"

There was a pause. Steadily the woman gained upon her own weakness and beat it down. She resumed:

"I must tell you--because--it is the only way--for us two--to be real friends again--and I want a friend so much. The news of Oliver is--is terrible. The Vicar had just seen Mr. Lankester--who is staying there.

He is nearly blind--and the pain!" Her hand clinched--she threw her head back. "Oh! I can't speak of it! And it may go on for years. The doctors seem to be all at sea. They say he _ought_ to recover--but they doubt whether he will. He has lost all heart--and hope--he can't help himself.

He lies there like a log all day--despairing. And, please--what am _I_ doing here?" She turned upon him impetuously, her cheeks flaming. "They want help--there is no one. Mrs. Fotheringham hardly ever comes. They think Lady Lucy is in a critical state of health too. She won't admit it--she does everything as usual. But she is very frail and ill, and it depresses Oliver. And I am here!--useless--and helpless. Oh, why can't I go?--why can't I go?" She laid her face upon her arms, on the bench, hiding it from him; but he saw the convulsion of her whole frame.

Beside a pa.s.sion so absolute and so piteous he felt, his own claim shrink into nothingness--impossible, even, to give it voice again. He straightened himself in silence; with an effort of the whole man, the lover put on the friend.

"But you can go," he said, a little hoa.r.s.ely, "if you feel like that."

She raised herself suddenly.

"How do I know that he wants me?--how do I know that he would even see me?"

Once more her cheeks were crimson. She had shown him her love unveiled; now he was to see her doubt--the shame that tormented her. He felt that it was to heal him she had spoken, and he could do nothing to repay her.

He could neither chide her for a quixotic self-sacrifice, which might never be admitted or allowed; nor protest, on Marsham's behalf, against it, for he knew, in truth, nothing of the man; least of all could he plead for himself. He could only sit, staring like a fool, tongue-tied; till Diana, mastering, for his sake, the emotion to which, partly also for his sake, she had given rein, gradually led the conversation back to safer and cooler ground. All the little involuntary arts came in by which a woman regains command of herself, and thereby of her companion.

Her hat tired her head; she removed it, and the beautiful hair underneath, falling into confusion, must be put in its place by skilled instinctive fingers, every movement answering to a similar self-restraining effort in the mind within. She dried her tears; she drew closer the black scarf round the shoulders of her white dress; she straightened the violets at her belt--Muriel's mid-day gift--till he beheld her, white and suffering indeed, but lovely and composed--queen of herself.

She made him talk of his adventures, and he obeyed her, partly to help her in the struggle he perceived, partly because in the position--beneath and beyond all hope--to which she had reduced him, it was the only way by which he could save anything out of the wreck. And she bravely responded. She could and did lend him enough of her mind to make it worth his while. A friend should not come home to her from perils of land and sea, and find her ungrateful--a n.i.g.g.ard of sympathy and praise.

So that when Dr. and Mrs. Roughsedge appeared, and Muriel returned with them, Mrs. Roughsedge, all on edge with anxiety, could make very little of what had--what must have--occurred. Diana, carved in white wax, but for the sensitive involuntary movements of lip and eyebrow, was listening to a description of an English emba.s.sy sent through the length and breadth of the most recently conquered province of Nigeria. The emba.s.sy took the news of peace and Imperial rule to a country devastated the year before by the most hideous of slave-raids. The road it marched by was strewn with the skeletons of slaves--had been so strewn probably for thousands of years. "One night my horse trod unawares on two skeletons--women--locked in each other's arms," said Hugh; "scores of others round them. In the evening we camped at a village where every able-bodied male had been killed the year before."

"Shot?" asked the doctor.

"Oh, dear, no! That would have been to waste ammunition. A limb was hacked off, and they bled to death."

His mother was looking at the speaker with all her eyes, but she did not hear a word he said. Was he pale or not?

Diana shuddered.

"And that is _stopped_--forever?" Her eyes were on the speaker.

"As long as our flag flies there," said the soldier, simply.

Her look kindled. For a moment she was the shadow, the beautiful shadow, of her old Imperialist self--the proud, disinterested lover of her country.

The doctor shook his head.

"Don't forget the gin, and the gin-traders on the other side, Master Hugh."

"They don't show their noses in the new provinces," said the young man, quietly; "we shall straighten that out too, in the long run--you'll see."

But Diana had ceased to listen. Mrs. Roughsedge, turning toward her, and with increasing foreboding, saw, as it were, the cloud of an inward agony, suddenly recalled, creep upon the fleeting brightness of her look, as the evening shade mounts upon and captures a sunlit hill-side.

The mother, in spite of her native optimism, had never cherished any real hope of her son's success. But neither had she expected, on the other side, a certainty so immediate and so unqualified. She saw before her no settled or resigned grief. The Tallyn tragedy had transformed what had been almost a recovered serenity, a restored and patient equilibrium, into something violent, tumultuous, unstable--prophesying action. But what--poor child!--could the action be?

"Poor Hugh!" said Mrs. Roughsedge to her husband on their return, as she stood beside him, in his study. Her voice was low, for Hugh had only just gone up-stairs, and the little house was thinly built.

The doctor rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and then looked round him for a cigarette.

"Yes," he said, slowly; "but he enjoyed his walk home."

"Henry!"

Hugh had walked back to the village with Mrs. Colwood, who had an errand there, and it was true that he had talked much to her out of earshot of his parents, and had taken a warm farewell of her at the end.

"Why am I to be 'Henry'-ed?"--inquired the doctor, beginning on his cigarette.