The Splendid Folly Part 42

Presently the house door clanged, and a minute later Diana came into the room. She threw aside her furs and looked round hastily.

"Where's Max?" she asked sharply.

"Not concealed beneath the Chesterfield," volunteered Jerry flippantly.

Then, as he caught a hostile sparkle of irritation in her grey eyes, he added hastily, "He's in his study."

Diana nodded, and, without further remark, went away in search of her husband.

"Are you busy, Max?" she asked, pausing on the threshold of the room where he was working.

He rose at once, placing a chair for her with the chilly courtesy which he had accorded her since their last interview in this same room.

"Not too busy to attend to you," he replied. "Where will you sit? By the fire?"

Diana shook her head. She was a little flushed, and her eyes were bright with some suppressed excitement,

"No thanks," she replied. "I only came to tell you that I've been having a talk with Baroni about my voice, and--and that I've decided to begin singing again this winter--professionally, I mean. It seems a pity to waste any more time."

She spoke rapidly, and with a certain nervousness.

For an instant a look of acute pain leaped into Errington's eyes, but it was gone almost at once, and he turned to her composedly.

"Is that the only reason, Diana?" he said. "The waste of time?"

She was silent a moment, busying herself stripping off her gloves.

Presently she looked up, forcing herself to meet his gaze.

"No," she said steadily. "It isn't."

"May I know the--other reasons?"

Her lip curled.

"I should have thought they were obvious. Our marriage has been a mistake. It's a failure. And I can't bear this life any longer. . . .

I must have something to do."

CHAPTER XXI

THE OTHER WOMAN

Carlo Baroni's joy knew no bounds when he understood that Diana had definitely decided to return to the concert platform. His first action was to order her away for a complete change and rest, so she and Joan obediently packed their trunks and departed to Switzerland, where they forgot for a time the existence of such things as London fogs, either real or figurative, and threw themselves heart and soul into the winter sports that were going forward.

The middle of February found them once more in England, and Joan rejoined her father, while Diana went back to Lilac Lodge. She was greatly relieved to discover that the break had simplified several problems and made it much easier for her to meet her husband and begin life again on fresh terms. Max, indeed, seemed to have accepted the new _regime_ with that same mocking philosophy with which he invariably faced the problems of life--and which so successfully cloaked his hurt from prying eyes.

He was uniformly kind in his manner to his wife--with that light, half-cynical kindness which he had accorded her in the train on their first memorable journey together, and which effectually set them as far apart from each other as though they stood at the opposite ends of the earth.

Unreasonably enough, Diana bitterly resented this att.i.tude. Womanlike, she made more than one attempt to re-open the matter over which they had quarrelled, but each was skilfully turned aside, and the fact that after his one rejected effort at reconciliation, Max had calmly accepted the new order of things, added fuel to the jealous fire that burned within her. She told herself that if he still cared for her, if he were not utterly absorbed in Adrienne de Gervais, he would never have rested until he had restored the old, happy relations between them.

Instinctively she sought to dull the pain at her heart by plunging headlong into professional life. Her voice, thanks to the rest and change of her visit to Switzerland, had regained all its former beauty, and her return to the concert platform was received with an outburst of popular enthusiasm. The newspapers devoted half a column apiece to the subject, and several of them prophesied that it was in grand opera that Madame Diana Quentin would eventually find the setting best suited to her gifts.

"Mere concert work"--wrote one critic--"will never give her the scope which both her temperament and her marvellous voice demand."

And with this opinion Baroni cordially concurred. It was his ultimate ambition for Diana that she should study for grand opera, and she herself, only too thankful to find something that would occupy her thoughts and take her right out of herself, as it were, enabling her to forget the overthrow of her happiness, flung herself into the work with enthusiasm.

Gradually, as time pa.s.sed on, her bitter feelings towards Max softened a little. That light, half-ironical manner he had a.s.sumed brought back to her so vividly the Max Errington of the early days of their acquaintance that it recalled, too, a measure of the odd attraction he had held for her in that far-away time.

That he still visited Adrienne very frequently she was aware, but often, on his return from Somervell Street, he seemed so much depressed that she began at last to wonder whether those visits were really productive of any actual enjoyment. Possibly she had misjudged them--her husband and her friend--and it might conceivably be really only business matters which bound them together after all.

If so--if that were true--how wantonly she had flung away her happiness!

Late one afternoon, Max, who had been out since early morning, came in looking thoroughly worn out. His eyes, ringed with fatigue, held an alert look of strain and anxiety for which Diana was at a loss to account.

She was at the piano when he entered the room, idly trying over some MS.

songs that had been submitted by aspiring composers anxious to secure her interest.

"Why, Max," she exclaimed, genuine concern in her voice, as she rose from the piano. "How worried you look! What is the matter?"

"Nothing," he returned. "At least, nothing in which you can help," he added hastily. "Unless--"

"Unless what? Please . . . let me help . . . if I can." Diana spoke rather nervously. She was suddenly struck by the fact that the last few months had been responsible for a great change in her husband's appearance. He looked much thinner and older than formerly, she thought.

There were hara.s.sed lines in his face, and its worn contours and shadowed eyes called aloud to the compa.s.sionate womanhood within her, to the mother-instinct that involuntarily longs to heal and soothe.

"Tell me what I can do, Max?"

A smile curved his lips, half whimsical, half sad.

"You can do for me what you do for all the rest of the world--I won't ask more of you," he replied. "Sing to me."

Diana coloured warmly. The first part of his speech stung her unbearably.

"Sing to you?" she repeated.

"Yes. I'm very tired, and nothing is more restful than music." Then, as she hesitated, he added, "Unless, of course, I'm asking too much."

"You know you are not," she answered swiftly.

She resumed her place at the piano, and, while he lay back in his chair with closed eyes, she sang to him--the music of the old masters who loved melody, and into whose songs the bitterness and unrest of the twentieth century had not crept.

Presently, she thought, he slept, and very softly her hands strayed into the simple, sorrowful music of "The Haven of Memory," and a note of wistful appeal, not all of art, added a new depth to the exquisite voice.

How once your love But crowned and blessed me only, Long and long ago.

The refrain died into silence, and Diana, looking up, found Max's piercing blue eyes fixed upon her. He was not asleep, then, after all.

He smiled slightly as their glances met.

"Do you remember I once told you I thought 'The h.e.l.l of Memory' would be a more appropriate t.i.tle? . . . I was quite right."

"Max--" Diana's voice quavered and broke.