The Testing of Diana Mallory, Mrs. Humphry Ward [e book reader online TXT] 📗

pocket, and was walking bareheaded. In the glow of the evening air his strong manhood seemed to gain an added force and vitality. He moved beside her, magnified and haloed, as it were, by the dusk and the sunset. Yet his effect upon her was no mere physical effect of good looks and a fine stature. It was rather the effect of a personality which strangely fitted with and evoked her own--of that congruity, indeed, from which all else springs.

She laughed at his confession.

"I hear also that you are the best shot in the neighborhood." "Who has been talking to you about me?" he asked, with a slight knitting of the brows.

"Mr. Ferrier--a little."

He gave an impatient sigh, so disproportionate to the tone of their conversation, that Diana looked at him in sudden surprise.

"Haven't you often wondered how it is that the very people who know you best know you least?"

The question was impetuously delivered. Diana recalled Mr. Forbes's remarks as to dissensions behind the scenes. She stepped cautiously.

"I thought Mr. Ferrier knew everything!"

"I wish he knew something about his party--and the House of Commons!" cried Marsham, as though a passion within leaped to the surface.

The startled eyes beside him beguiled him further.

"I didn't mean to say anything indiscreet--or disloyal," he said, with a smile, recovering himself. "It is often the greatest men who cling to the old world--when the new is clamoring. But the new means to be heard all the same."

Diana's color flashed.

"I would rather be in that old world with Mr. Ferrier than in the new with Mr. Barton!"

"What is the use of talking of preferences? The world is what it is--and will be what it will be. Barton is our master--Ferrier's and mine. The point is to come to terms, and make the best of it."

"No!--the point is--to hold the gate!--and die on the threshold, if need be."

They had come to a stile. Marsham had crossed it, and Diana mounted. Her young form showed sharply against the west; he looked into her eyes, divided between laughter and feeling; she gave him her hand. The man's pulses leaped anew. He was naturally of a cool and self-possessed temperament--the life of the brain much stronger in him than the life of the senses. But at that moment he recognized--as perhaps, for the first time, the night before--that Nature and youth had him at last in grip. At the same time the remembrance of a walk over the same ground that he had taken in the autumn With Alicia Drake flashed, unwelcomed, into his mind. It stirred a half-uneasy, half-laughing compunction. He could not flatter himself--yet--that his cousin had forgotten it.

"What gate?--and what threshold?" he asked Diana, as they moved on. "If you mean the gate of power--it is too late. Democracy is in the citadel--and has run up its own flag. Or to take another metaphor--the Whirlwind is in possession--the only question is who shall ride it!"

Diana declared that the Socialists would ride it to the abyss--with England on the crupper.

"Magnificent!" said Marsham, "but merely rhetorical. Besides--all that we ask, is that Ferrier should ride it. Let him only try the beast--and he will find it tame enough."

"And if he won't?--"

"Ah, if he won't--" said Marsham, uncertainly, and paused. In the growing darkness she could no longer see his face plainly. But presently he resumed, more earnestly and simply.

"Don't misunderstand me! Ferrier is our chief--my chief, above all--and one does not even discuss whether one is loyal to him. The party owes him an enormous debt. As for myself--" He drew a long breath, which was again a sigh.

Then with a change of manner, and in a lighter tone: "I seem to have given myself away--to an enemy!"

"Poor enemy!"

He looked at her, half laughing, half anxious.

"Tell me!--last night--you thought me intolerant--overbearing?"

"I disliked being beaten," said Diana, candidly; "especially as it was only my ignorance that was beaten--not my cause."

"Shall we begin again?"

Through his gayety, however, a male satisfaction in victory pierced very plainly. Diana winced a little.

"No, no! I must go back to Captain Roughsedge first and get some new arguments!"

"Roughsedge!" he said, in surprise. "Roughsedge? He never carried an argument through in his life!"

Diana defended her new friend to ears unsympathetic. Her defence, indeed, evoked from him a series of the same impatient, sarcastic remarks on the subject of the neighbors as had scandalized her the day before. She fired up, and they were soon in the midst of another battle-royal, partly on the merits of particular persons and partly on a more general theme--the advantage or disadvantage of an optimist view of your fellow-creatures.

Marsham was, before long, hard put to it in argument, and very delicately and discreetly convicted of arrogance or worse. They were entering the woods of the park when he suddenly stopped and said:

"Do you know that you have had a jolly good revenge--pressed down and running over?"

Diana smiled, and said nothing. She had delighted in the encounter; so, in spite of castigation, had he. There surged up in him a happy excited consciousness of quickened life and hurrying hours. He looked with distaste at the nearness of the house; and at the group of figures which had paused in front of them, waiting for them, on the farther edge of the broad lawn.

"You have convicted me of an odious, exclusive, bullying temper--or you think you have--and all you will allow _me_ in the way of victory is that I got the best of it because Captain Roughsedge wasn't there!"

"Not at all. I respect your critical faculty!"

"You wish to hear me gush like Mrs. Minchin. It is simply astounding the number of people you like!"

Diana's laugh broke into a sigh.

"Perhaps it's like a hungry boy in a goody-shop. He wants to eat them all."

"Were you so very solitary as a child?" he asked her, gently, in a changed tone, which was itself an act of homage, almost a caress.

"Yes--I was very solitary," she said, after a pause. "And I am really gregarious--dreadfully fond of people!--and curious about them. And I think, oddly enough, papa was too."

A question rose naturally to his lips, but was checked unspoken. He well remembered Mr. Mallory at Portofino; a pleasant courteous man, evidently by nature a man of the world, interested in affairs and in literature, with all the signs on him of the English governing class. It was certainly curious that he should have spent all those years in exile with his child, in a remote villa on the Italian coast. Health, Marsham supposed, or finance--the two chief motives of life. For himself, the thought of Diana's childhood between the pine woods and the sea gave him pleasure; it added another to the poetical and romantic ideas which she suggested. There came back on him the plash of the waves beneath the Portofino headland, the murmur of the pines, the fragrance of the underwood. He felt the kindred between all these, and her maidenly energy, her unspoiled beauty.

"One moment!" he said, as they began to cross the lawn. "Has my sister attacked you yet?"

The smile with which the words were spoken could be heard though not seen. Diana laughed, a little awkwardly.

"I am afraid Mrs. Fotheringham thinks me a child of blood and thunder! I am so sorry!"

"If she presses you too hard, call me in. Isabel and I understand each other."

Diana murmured something polite.

Mr. Frobisher meanwhile came to meet them with a remark upon the beauty of the evening, and Alicia Drake followed.

"I expect you found it a horrid long way," she said to Diana. Diana disclaimed fatigue.

"You came _so_ slowly, we thought you must be tired."

Something in the drawling manner and the slightly insolent expression made the words sting. Diana hurried on to Marion Vincent's side. That lady was leaning on a stick, and for the first time Diana saw that she was slightly lame. She looked up with a pleasant smile and greeting; but before they could move on across the ample drive, Mr. Frobisher overtook them.

"Won't you take my arm?" he said, in a low voice.

Miss Vincent slipped her hand inside his arm, and rested on him. He supported her with what seemed to Diana a tender carefulness, his head bent to hers, while he talked and she replied. Diana followed, her girl's heart kindling.

"Surely!--surely!--they are in love?--engaged?"

But no one else appeared to take any notice or made any remark.

Long did the memory of the evening which followed live warm in the heart of Diana. It was to her an evening of triumph--triumph innocent, harmless, and complete. Her charm, her personality had by now captured the whole party, save for an opposition of three--and the three realized that they had for the moment no chance of influencing the popular voice. The rugged face of Mr. Barton stiffened as she approached; it seemed to him that the night before he had been snubbed by a chit, and he was not the man to forget it easily. Alicia Drake was a little pale and a little silent during the evening, till, late in its course, she succeeded in carrying off a group of young men who had come for the shoot and were staying the night, and in establishing a noisy court among them Mrs. Fotheringham disapproved, by now, of almost everything that concerned Miss Mallory: of her taste in music or in books, of the touch of effusion in her manner, which was of course "affected" or "aristocratic"; of the enthusiasms she did _not_ possess, no less than of those She did. On the sacred subject of the suffrage, for instance, which with Mrs. Fotheringham was a matter for propaganda everywhere and at all times, Diana was but a cracked cymbal, when struck she gave back either no sound at all, or a wavering one. Her beautiful eyes were blank or hostile; she would escape like a fawn from the hunter. As for other politics, no one but Mrs. Fotheringham dreamed of introducing them. She, however, would have discovered many ways of dragging them in, and of setting down Diana; but here her brother was on the watch, and time after time she found herself checked or warded off.

Diana, indeed, was well defended. The more ill-humored Mrs. Fotheringham grew, the more Lady Niton enjoyed the evening and her own "Nitonisms." It was she who after dinner suggested the clearing of the hall and an impromptu dance--on the ground that "girls must waltz for their living." And when Diana proved to be one of those in whom dancing is a natural and shining gift, so that even the gilded youths of the party, who were perhaps inclined to fight shy of Miss Mallory as "a girl who talked clever," even they came crowding about her, like flies about a milk-pail--it was Lady Niton who drew Isabel Fotheringham's attention to it loudly and repeatedly. It was she also who, at a pause in the dancing and at a hint from Mrs. Colwood, insisted on making Diana sing, to the grand piano which had been pushed into a corner of the hall. And when the singing, helped by the looks and personality of the singer, had added to the girl's success, Lady Niton sat fanning herself in reflected triumph, appealing to the spectators on all sides for applause. The topics that