The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 8

"He is very critical," said Diana, evasively.

"Oh, Lord, much worse than that!" said Lady Niton, coolly. "He makes himself very unpopular. You should tell him so."

"That would be hardly my place." said Diana, flus.h.i.+ng a little.

Lady Niton stared at her a moment rather hard--then said: "But he's honey and balm itself compared to Isabel! The Marshams are old friends of mine, but I don't pretend to like Isabel Fotheringham at all. She calls herself a Radical, and there's no one insists more upon their birth and their advantages than she. Don't let her bully you--come to me if she does--I'll protect you."

Diana said vaguely that Mrs. Fotheringham had been very kind.

"You haven't had time to find out," said Lady Niton, grimly. She leaned back fanning herself, her queer white face and small black eyes alive with malice. "Did you ever see such a crew as we were at dinner? I reminded Oliver of the rhyme--'The animals went in two by two.'--It's always the way here. There's no _society_ in this house, because you can't take anything or any one for granted. One must always begin from the beginning. What can I have in common with that man Barton? The last time I talked to him, he thought Lord Grey--the Reform Bill Lord Grey--was a Tory--and had never heard of Louis Philippe. He knows nothing that _we_ know--and what do I care about his Socialist stuff?--Well, now--Alicia"--her tone changed--"do you admire Alicia?"

Diana, in discomfort, glanced through the archway, leading to the inner drawing-room, which framed the sparkling figure of Miss Drake--and murmured a complimentary remark.

"No!"--said Lady Niton, with emphasis; "no--she's not handsome--though she makes people believe she is. You'll see--in five years. Of course the stupid men admire her, and she plays her cards very cleverly; but--my dear!"--suddenly the formidable old woman bent forward, and tapped Diana's arm with her fan--"let me give you a word of advice.

Don't be too innocent here--or too amiable. Don't give yourself away--especially to Alicia!"

Diana had the disagreeable feeling of being looked through and through, physically and mentally; though at the same time she was only very vaguely conscious as to what there might be either for Lady Niton or Miss Drake to see.

"Thank you very much," she said, trying to laugh it off. "It is very kind of you to warn me--but really I don't think you need." She looked round her waveringly.

"May I introduce you to my friend? Mrs. Colwood--Lady Niton." For her glance of appeal had brought Mrs. Colwood to her aid, and between them they coped with this _enfant terrible_ among dowagers till the gentlemen came in.

"Here is Sir James Childe," said Lady Niton, rising. "He wants to talk to you, and he don't like me. So I'll go."

Sir James, not without a sly smile, discharged arrow-like at the retreating enemy, took the seat she had vacated.

"This is your first visit to Tallyn, Miss Mallory?"

The voice speaking was the _voix d'or_ familiar to Englishmen in many a famous case, capable of any note, any inflection, to which sarcasm or wrath, shrewdness or pathos, might desire to tune it. In this case it was gentleness itself; and so was the countenance he turned upon Diana.

Yet it was a countenance built rather for the sterner than the milder uses of life. A natural majesty expressed itself in the domed forehead, and in the fine head, lightly touched with gray; the eyes too were gray, the lips prominent and sensitive, the face long, and, in line, finely regular. A face of feeling and of power; the face of a Celt, disciplined by the stress and conflict of a non-Celtic world. Diana's young sympathies sprang to meet it, and they were soon in easy conversation.

Sir James questioned her kindly, but discreetly. This was really her first visit to Brooks.h.i.+re?

"To England!" said Diana; and then, on a little wooing, came out the girl's first impressions, natural, enthusiastic, gay. Sir James listened, with eyes half-closed, following every movement of her lips, every gesture of head and hand.

"Your parents took you abroad quite as a child?"

"I went with my father. My mother died when I was quite small."

Sir James did not speak for a moment. At last he said:

"But before you went abroad, you lived in London?"

"Yes--in Kensington Square."

Sir James made a sudden movement which displaced a book on a little table beside him. He stooped to pick it up.

"And your father was tired of England?"

Diana hesitated--

"I--I think he had gone through great trouble. He never got over mamma's death."

"Oh yes, I see," said Sir James, gently. Then, in another tone:

"So you settled on that beautiful coast? I wonder if that was the winter I first saw Italy?"

He named the year.

"Yes--that was the year," said Diana. "Had you never seen Italy before that?" She looked at him in a little surprise.

"Do I seem to you so old?" said Sir James, smiling. "I had been a very busy man, Miss Mallory, and my holidays had been generally spent in Ireland. But that year"--he paused a moment--"that year I had been ill, and the doctors sent me abroad--in October," he added, slowly and precisely. "I went first to Paris, and I was at Genoa in November."

"We must have been there--just about then! Mamma died in October. And I remember the winter was just beginning at Genoa--it was very cold--and I got bronchitis--I was only a little thing."

"And Oliver tells me you found a home at Portofino?"

Diana replied. He kept her talking; yet her impression was that he did not listen very much to what she said. At the same time she felt herself _studied_, in a way which made her self-conscious, which perhaps she might have resented in any man less polished and less courteous.

"Pardon me--" he said, abruptly, at a pause in the conversation. "Your name interests me particularly. It is Welsh, is it not? I knew two or three persons of that name; and they were Welsh."

Diana's look changed a little.

"Yes, it is Welsh," she said, in a hesitating, reserved voice; and then looked round her as though in search of a change of topic.

Sir James bent forward.

"May I come and see you some day at Beechcote?"

Diana flushed with surprise and pleasure.

"Oh! I should be so honored!"

"The honor would be mine," he said, with pleasant deference. "Now I think I see that Marsham is wroth with me for monopolizing you like this."

He rose and walked away, just as Marsham brought up Mr. Barton to introduce him to Diana.

Sir James wandered on into a small drawing-room at the end of the long suite of rooms; in its seclusion he turned back to look at the group he had left behind. His face, always delicately pale, had grown strained and white.

"Is it _possible_"--he said to himself--"that she knows nothing?--that that man was able to keep it all from her?"

He walked up and down a little by himself--pondering--the prey of the same emotion as had seized him in the afternoon; till at last his ear was caught by some hubbub, some agitation in the big drawing-room, especially by the sound of the girlish voice he had just been listening to, only speaking this time in quite another key. He returned to see what was the matter.

He found Miss Mallory the centre of a circle of spectators and listeners, engaged apparently in a three-cornered and very hot discussion with Mr. Barton, the Socialist member, and Oliver Marsham.

Diana had entirely forgotten herself, her shyness, the strange house, and all her alarms. If Lady Niton took nothing for granted at Tallyn, that was not, it seemed, the case with John Barton. He, on the contrary, took it for granted that everybody there was at least a good Radical, and as stoutly opposed as himself to the "wild-cat" and "Jingo" policy of the Government on the Indian frontier, where one of our perennial little wars was then proceeding. News had arrived that afternoon of an indecisive engagement, in which the lives of three English officers and some fifty men of a Sikh regiment had been lost. Mr. Barton, in taking up the evening paper, lying beside Diana, which contained the news, had made very much the remark foretold by Captain Roughsedge in the afternoon. It was, he thought, a pity the repulse had not been more decisive--so as to show all the world into what a hornet's nest the Government was going--"and a hornet's nest which will cost us half a million to take before we've done."