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

leave you her address?"

"Yes. Don't think any more about her. I have something to tell you."

Diana's painful start was the measure of her state. Muriel Colwood put her arms tenderly round the slight form.

"Mr. Marsham will be here directly. He came last night--too late--I would not let him see you. Ah!" She released Diana, and made a rapid step to the window. "There he is!--coming by the fields."

Diana sat down, as though her limbs trembled under her.

"Did you send for him?"

"Yes. You forgive me?"

"Then--he hasn't got my letter."

She said it without looking up, as though to herself.

Mrs. Colwood knelt down beside her.

"It is right he should be here," she said, with energy, almost with command; "it is the right, natural thing."

Diana stooped, mechanically, and kissed her; then sprang up, quivering, the color rushing into her cheeks. "Why, he mayn't even know!" She threw a piteous look at her companion.

"He does know, dear--he does know."

Diana composed herself. She lifted her hands to a tress of hair that was unfastened, and put it in its place. Instinctively she straightened her belt, her white collar. Mrs. Colwood noticed that she was in black again, in one of the dresses of her mourning.

* * * * *

When Marsham turned, at the sound of the latch, to see Diana coming in, all the man's secret calculations and revolts were for the moment scattered and drowned in sheer pity and dismay. In a few short hours can grief so work on youth? He ran to her, but she held up a hand which arrested him half-way. Then she closed the door, but still stood near it, as though she feared to move, or speak, looking at him with her appealing eyes.

"Oliver!"

He held out his hands.

"My poor, poor darling!"

She gave a little cry, as though some tension broke. Her lips almost smiled; but she held him away from her.

"You're not--not ashamed of me?"

His protests were the natural, the inevitable protests that any man with red blood in his veins must need have uttered, brought face to face with so much sorrow and so much beauty. She let him make them, while her left hand gently stroked and caressed his right hand which held hers; yet all the time resolutely turning her face and her soft breast away, as though she dreaded to be kissed, to lose will and identity in the mere delight of his touch. And he felt, too, in some strange way, as though the blow that had fallen upon her had placed her at a distance from him; not disgraced--but consecrate.

"Will you please sit down and let us talk?" she said, after a moment, withdrawing herself.

She pushed a chair forward, and sat down herself. The tears were in her eyes, but she brushed them away unconsciously.

"If papa had told me!" she said, in a low voice--"if he had only told me--before he died."

"It was out of love," said Marsham; "but yes--it would have been wiser--kinder--to have spoken."

She started.

"Oh no--not that. But we might have sorrowed--together. And he was always alone--he bore it all alone--even when he was dying."

"But you, dearest, shall not bear it alone!" cried Marsham, finding her hand again and kissing it. "My first task shall be to comfort you--to make you forget."

He thought she winced at the word "forget."

"When did you first guess--or know?"

He hesitated--then thought it best to tell the truth.

"When we were in the lime-walk."

"When you asked--her name? I remember"--her voice broke--"how you wrung my hand! And you never had any suspicion before?"

"Never. And it makes no difference, Diana--to you and me--none. I want you to understand that now--at once."

She looked at him, smiling tremulously. His words became him; even in her sorrow her eyes delighted in his shrewd thin face; in the fair hair, prematurely touched with gray, and lying heavily on the broad brow; in the intelligence and distinction of his whole aspect.

"You are so good to me--" she said, with a little sob. "No--no!--please, dear Oliver!--we have so much to talk of." And again she prevented him from taking her in his arms. "Tell me"--she laid her hand on his persuasively: "Sir James, of course, knew from the beginning?"

"Yes--from the beginning--that first night at Tallyn. He is coming down this afternoon, dearest. He knew you would want to see him. But it may not be till late."

"After all, I know so little yet," she said, bewildered. "Only--only what Fanny told me."

"What made her tell you?"

"She was angry with me--I forget about what. I did not understand at first what she was saying. Oliver"--she grasped his hand tightly, while the lids dropped over the eyes, as though she would shut out even his face as she asked her question--"is it true that--that--the death sentence--"

"Yes," said Marsham, reluctantly. "But it was at once commuted. And three weeks after the sentence she was released. She lived, Sir James tells me, nearly two months after your father brought her home."

"I wrote last night to the lawyers"--Diana breathed it almost in a whisper. "I am sure there is a letter for me--I am sure papa wrote."

"Promise me one thing!" said Marsham. "If they send you newspapers--for my sake, don't read them. Sir James will tell you, this afternoon, things the public have never known--facts which would certainly have altered the verdict if the jury had known. Your poor mother struck the blow in what was practically an impulse of self-defence, and the evidence which mainly convicted her was perjured evidence, as the liar who gave it confessed years afterward. Sir James will tell you that. He has the confession."

Her face relaxed, her mouth trembled violently.

"Oh, Oliver!--Oliver!" She was unable to bear the relief his words brought her: she broke down under it.

He caught her in his arms at last, and she gave way--she let herself be weak--and woman. Clinging to him with all the pure passion of a woman and all the trust of a child, she felt his kisses on her cheek, and her deep sobs shook her upon his breast. Marsham's being was stirred to its depths. He gave her the best he had to give; and in that moment of mortal appeal on her side and desperate pity on his, their natures met in that fusion of spirit and desire wherewith love can lend even tragedy and pain to its own uses.

* * * * *

And yet--and yet!--was it in that very moment that feeling--on the man's side--"o'erleaped itself, and fell on the other"? When they resumed conversation, Marsham's tacit expectation was that Diana would now show herself comforted; that, sure of him and of his affection, she would now be ready to put the tragic past aside; to think first and foremost of her own present life and his, and face the future cheerfully. A misunderstanding arose between them, indeed, which is, perhaps, one of the typical misunderstandings between men and women. The man, impatient of painful thoughts and recollections, eager to be quit of them as weakening and unprofitable, determined to silence them by the pleasant clamor of his own ambitions and desires; the woman, priestess of the past, clinging to all the pieties of memory, in terror lest she forget the dead, feeling it a disloyalty even to draw the dagger from the wound--between these two figures and dispositions there is a deep and natural antagonism.

It showed itself rapidly in the case of Marsham and Diana; for their moment of high feeling was no sooner over, and she sitting quietly again, her hand in his, the blinding tears dashed away, than Marsham's mind flew inevitably to his own great sacrifice. She must be comforted, indeed, poor child! yet he could not but feel that he, too, deserved consolation, and that his own most actual plight was no less worthy of her thoughts than the ghastly details of a tragedy twenty years old.

Yet she seemed to have forgotten Lady Lucy!--to have no inkling of the real situation. And he could find no way in which to break it.

For, in little broken sentences of horror and recollection, she kept going back to her mother's story--her father's silence and suffering. It was as though her mind could not disentangle itself from the load which had been flung upon it--could not recover its healthiness of action amid the phantom sights and sounds which beset imagination. Again and again she must ask him for details--and shrink from the answers; must hide her eyes with the little moan that wrung his heart; and break out in ejaculations, as though of bewilderment, under a revelation so singular and so terrible.

It was to be expected, of course; he could only hope it would soon pass. Secretly, after a time, he was repelled and wearied. He answered her with the same tender words, he tried to be all kindness; but more perfunctorily. The oneness of that supreme moment vanished and did not return.

Meanwhile, Diana's perceptions, stunned by the one overmastering thought, gave her no warning. And, in truth, if Marsham could have understood, the process of mental recovery was set going in her by just this freedom of utterance to the man she loved--these words and looks and tears--that brought ease after the dumb horror of the first hours.

At last he made an effort, hiding the nascent impatience in a caress.

"If I could only persuade you not to dwell upon it too persistently--to put it from your thoughts as soon and as much as you can! Dear, we shall have our own anxieties!"

She looked up with a sudden start.

"My mother," he said, reluctantly, "may give us trouble."

The color rushed into Diana's cheeks, and ebbed with equal suddenness.

"Lady Lucy! Oh!--how could I forget? Oliver!--she thinks--I am not fit!"

And in her eyes he saw for the first time the self-abasement he had dreaded, yet perhaps expected, to see there before. For in her first question to him there had been no real doubt of him; it had been the natural humility of wounded love that cries out, expecting the reply that no power on earth could check itself from giving were the case reversed.

"Dearest! you know my mother's bringing up: her Quaker training, and her rather stern ideas. We shall persuade her--in time."

"In time? And now--she--she forbids it?"

Her voice faltered. And yet, unconsciously, she had drawn herself a little together and away.

Marsham began to give a somewhat confused and yet guarded account of his mother's state of mind, endeavoring to prepare her for the letter which might arrive on the morrow. He got up and moved about the room as he spoke, while Diana sat, looking at him, her lips trembling from time to time. Presently he mentioned Ferrier's name, and Diana started.

"Does _he_ think it would do you harm--that you ought to give me up?"

"Not he! And if anybody can make my mother hear reason, it will be Ferrier."

"Lady