The Splendid Folly Part 48

Diana spoke again nervously.

"Are you--angry with me?"

"Angry!" The Russian almost spat out the word. "Angry! Don't you see what you're doing?"

"What I'm doing?" repeated Diana. "What am I doing?"

Olga replied with a grim incisiveness.

"You're killing Max--that's all. This--this is going to break him--break him utterly."

There was a long silence, and the dewy dusk of the night, shaken into pearly mist where the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns illumined it, seemed to close round the two women, like a filmy curtain, shutting them off from the chattering throng in the adjoining room.

Presently a cart rattled past in the street below, rasping the tense silence.

Diana lifted her head.

"I didn't know!" she said helplessly. "I didn't know! . . ."

"And yet you professed to love him!" Olga spoke consideringly, an element of contemptuous wonder in her voice.

The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana's mind.

"_You don't know what love means!_"

Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls wheeling above it, and Max--Max standing tall and straight beside her, with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love illimitable in his eyes.

"You don't know what love means!"

The words penetrated to her innermost consciousness, cleaving their way sheer through the fog of doubt and mistrust and pride as the sharp blade of the surgeon's knife cuts deep into a festering wound. And before their clarifying, essential truth, Diana's soul recoiled in dumb dismay.

No, she hadn't known what love meant--love, which, with an exquisite unreasonableness, believes when there is ground for doubt--hadn't understood it as even this cynical, bitter-tongued Russian understood it. And she recognised the scorn on Olga's white, contemptuous face as the unlovely sheath of an ideal of love immeasurably beyond her own achieving.

The vision of Culver Point faded away, and an impalpable wall of darkness seemed to close about her. Dimly, as though it were some one else's voice speaking, she heard herself say slowly:--

"I thought I loved him." Then, after a pause, "Will you go? Please go. I should like to be . . . quiet . . . a little while."

For a moment Olga gazed down at her, eagerly, almost hungrily, as though silently beseeching her. Then, still silently, she went away.

Diana sat very still. Above her, the gay-coloured Chinese lanterns swayed to and fro in the little breeze that drifted up the street, and above again, far off in the sombre sky, the stars looked down--pitiless, unmoved, as they have looked down through all the ages upon the pigmy joys and sufferings of humanity.

For the first time Diana was awake to the limitations she had set to love.

The meeting with her husband had shaken her to the very foundations of her being, the shock of his changed appearance sweeping away at a single blow the whole fabric of artificial happiness that she had been trying to build up.

She had thought that the wound in her heart would heal, that she could teach herself to forget the past. And lo! At the first sight of his face the old love and longing had reawakened with a strength she was powerless to withstand.

The old love, but changed into something immeasurably more than it had ever been before, and holding in its depths a finer understanding. And with this clearer vision came a sudden new knowledge--a knowledge fraught with pain and yet bearing deep within it an unutterable sense of joy.

Max had cared all the time--cared still! It was written in the lines of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut mouth. Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married life, despite his inexplicable friends.h.i.+p for Adrienne, despite all that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger understanding which had come to her, that through it all he had loved her. With an absolute certainty of conviction, she knew that it was her hand which had graved those fresh lines about his mouth, brought that look of calm sadness to his eyes, and the realisation held a strange mingling of exquisite joy and keen anguish.

She hid her face in her hands, hid it from the stars and the shrouding dark, tremulously abashed at the wonderful significance of love.

She almost laughed to think how she had allowed so small a thing as the secret which Max could not tell her to corrode and eat into the heart of happiness. Looking back from the standpoint she had now gained, it seemed so pitifully mean and paltry, a profanation of the whole inner, hidden meaning of love.

So long as she and Max cared for each other, nothing else mattered, nothing in the whole world. And the long battle between love and pride--between love, that had turned her days and nights into one endless ache of longing to return to Max, and pride, that had barred the way inflexibly--was over, done with.

Love had won, hands down. She would go back to Max, and all thought that it might be weak-minded of her, humiliating to her self-respect, was swept aside. Love, the great teacher, had brought her through the dark places where the lesser G.o.ds hold sway, out into the light of day, and she knew that to return to Max, to give herself afresh to him, would be the veritable triumph, of love itself.

She would go back, back to the shelter of his love which had been waiting for her all the time, unswerving and unreproaching. She had read it in his eyes when they had met her own an hour ago.

"I want you---body and soul I want you!" he had told her there by the cliffs at Culver.

And she had not given him all her soul. She had kept back that supreme belief in the beloved which is an integral part of love. But now, now she would go to him and give with both hands royally--faith and trust, blindly, as love demanded.

She smiled a little. Happiness and the haven of Max's arms seemed very near her just then.

She was very silent as she and Olga Lermontof drove home together from the Emba.s.sy, but just at the last, when the limousine stopped at Baroni's house, she leaned closer to Olga in the semi-darkness, and whispered a little breathlessly:--

"I'm going back to him, Olga."

Somehow the mere putting of it into words seemed to give it substance, convert it into an actual fact that could be talked about, just like the weather, or one's favourite play, or any other commonplace matter which can be spoken of because it has a knowledgeable existence. And the Russian's quick "Thank G.o.d!" set the seal of a.s.suredness upon it.

"Yes--thank G.o.d," answered Diana simply.

The car, which was to take the accompanist on to Brutton Square, slipped away down the lamp-lit street, and Diana fled upstairs to her room.

She must be alone--alone with her thoughts. She no longer dreaded the night and its quiet solitude. It was a solitude pervaded by a deep, abiding peace, the anteroom of happiness.

To-morrow she would go to Max, and tell him that love had taught her belief and faith--all that he had asked of her and that she had so failed to give.

She lay long awake, gazing into the dark, dreamily conscious of utter peace and calm. To-morrow . . . to-morrow . . . Freely her eyes closed and she slept. Once she stirred and smiled a little in her sleep while the word "Max" fluttered from between her lips, almost as though it had been a prayer.

CHAPTER XXV

BREAKING-POINT

When Diana woke the following morning it was to a drowsy sense of utter peace and content. She wondered vaguely what had given rise to it.

Usually, when she came back to the waking world, it was with a shrinking almost akin to terror that a new day had begun and must be lived through--twelve empty, meaningless hours of it.

As full consciousness returned, the remembrance of yesterday's meeting with Max, and of all that had succeeded it, flashed into her mind like a sudden ray of sunlight, and she realised that what had tinged her thoughts with rose-colour was the quiet happiness, bred of her determination to return to her husband, which had lain stored at the back of her brain during the hours of unconsciousness.

She sat up in bed, vividly, joyously awake, just as her maid came in with her breakfast tray.