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

a girl, blushed.

"I vow that I am as innocent as a babe unborn!"

"What of?" The tone of the demand was like that of a sword in the drawing.

"I have some guests here to-day."

"Who are they?"

"A young man you know--a young woman you would like to know."

Silence. Lady Niton sat down again.

"Kindly ring the bell," she said, lifting a peremptory hand, "and send for my carriage."

"Let me parley an instant," said Sir James, moving between her and the bell. "Bobbie is just off to Berlin. Won't you say good-bye to him?"

"Mr. Forbes's movements are entirely indifferent to me--ring!" Then, shrill-voiced--and with sudden fury, like a bird ruffling up: "Berlin, indeed! More waste--more shirking! He needn't come to me! I won't give him another penny."

"I don't advise you to offer it," said Sir James, with suavity. "Bobbie has got a post in Berlin through his uncle, and is going off for a twelvemonth to learn banking."

Lady Niton sat blinking and speechless. Sir James drew the muslin curtain back from the window.

"There they are, you see--Bobbie--and the Explanation. And if you ask me, I think the Explanation explains."

Lady Niton put up her gold-rimmed glasses.

"She is not in the least pretty!" she said, with hasty venom, her old hand shaking.

"No, but fetching--and a good girl. She worships her Bobbie, and she's sending him away for a year."

"I won't allow it!" cried Lady Niton. "He sha'n't go."

Sir James shrugged his shoulders.

"These are domestic brawls--I decline them. Ah!" He turned to the window, opening it wide. She did not move. He made a sign, and two of the three persons who had just appeared on the lawn came running toward the house. Diana loitered behind.

Lady Niton looked at the two young faces as they reached her side--the mingling of laughter and anxiety in the girl's, of pride and embarrassment in Bobbie's.

"You sha'n't go to Berlin!" she said to him, vehemently, as she just allowed him to take her hand.

"Dear Lady Niton!--I must."

"You sha'n't!--I tell you! I've got you a place in London--a, thousand times, better than your fool of an uncle could ever get you. Uncle, indeed! Read that letter!" She tossed him one from her bag.

Bobbie read, while Lady Niton stared hard at the girl. Presently Bobbie began to gasp.

"Well, upon my word!"--he put the letter down--"upon my word!"' He turned to his sweetheart. "Ettie!--you marry me in a month!--mind that! Hang Berlin! I scorn their mean proposals. London requires me." He drew himself up. "But first" (he looked at Lady Niton, his flushed face twitching a little) "justice!" he said, peremptorily--"justice on the chief offender."

And walking across to her, he stooped and kissed her. Then he beckoned to Ettie to do the same. Very shyly the girl ventured; very stoically the victim, submitted. Whereupon, Bobbie subsided, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and a violent quarrel began immediately between him and Lady Niton on the subject of the part of London in which he and Ettie were to live. Fiercely the conflict waxed and waned, while the young girl's soft irrepressible laughter filled up all the gaps and like a rushing stream carried away the detritus--the tempers and rancors and scorns--left by former convulsions.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Diana and Sir James paced the garden. He saw that she was silent and absent-minded, and guessed uneasily at the cause. It was impossible that any woman of her type, who had gone through the experience that she had, should remain unmoved by the accounts now current as to Oliver Marsham's state.

As they returned across the lawn to the house the two lovers came out to meet them. Sir James saw the look with which Diana watched them coming. It seemed to him one of the sweetest and one of the most piteous he had ever seen on a human face.

"I shall descend upon you next week," said Lady Niton abruptly, as Diana made her farewells. "I shall be at Tallyn."

Diana did not reply. The little _fiancee_ insisted on the right to take her to her pony-carriage, and kissed her tenderly before she let her go. Diana had already become as a sister to her and Bobbie, trusted in their secrets and advising in their affairs.

Lady Niton, standing by Sir James, looked after her.

"Well, there's only one thing in the world that girl wants; and I suppose nobody in their senses ought to help her to it."

"What do you mean?"

She murmured a few words in his ear.

"Not a bit of it!" said Sir James, violently. "I forbid it. Don't you go and put anything of the sort into her head. The young man I mean her to marry comes back from Nigeria this very day."

"She won't marry him!"

"We shall see."

* * * * *

Diana drove home through lanes suffused with sunset and rich with autumn. There had been much rain through September, and the deluged earth steamed under the return of the sun. Mists were rising from the stubbles, and wrapping the woods in sleep and purple. To her the beauty of it all was of a mask or pageant--seen from a distance across a plain or through a street-opening--lovely and remote. All that was real--all that lived--was the image within the mind; not the great earth-show without.

As she passed through the village she fell in with the Roughsedges: the doctor, with his wide-awake on the back of his head, a book and a bulging umbrella under his arm; Mrs. Roughsedge, in a new shawl, and new bonnet-strings, with a prodigal flutter of side curls beside her ample countenance. Hugh, it appeared, was expected by an evening train. Diana begged that he might be brought up to see her some time in the course of the following afternoon. Then she drove on, and Mrs. Roughsedge was left staring discontentedly at her husband.

"I think she _was_ glad, Henry?"

"Think it, my dear, if it does you any good," said the doctor, cheerfully.

* * * * *

When Diana reached home night had fallen--a moon-lit night, through which all the shapes and even the colors of day were still to be seen or divined in a softened and pearly mystery. Muriel Colwood was not at home. She had gone to town, on one of her rare absences, to meet some relations. Diana missed her, and yet was conscious that even the watch of those kind eyes would--to-night--have added to the passionate torment of thought.

As she sat alone in the drawing-room after her short and solitary meal her nature bent and trembled under the blowing of those winds of fate, which, like gusts among autumn trees, have tested or strained or despoiled the frail single life since time began; winds of love and pity, of desire and memory, of anguish and of longing.

Only her dog kept her company. Sometimes she rose out of restlessness, and moved about the room, and the dog's eyes would follow her, dumbly dependent. The room was dimly lit; in the mirrors she saw now and then the ghostly passage of some one who seemed herself and not herself. The windows were open to a misty garden, waiting for moonrise; in the house all was silence; only from the distant road and village came voices sometimes of children, or the sounds of a barrel-organ, fragmentary and shrill.

Loneliness ached in her heart--spoke to her from the future. And five miles away Oliver, too, was lonely--and in pain. _Pain_!--the thought of it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a man already crushed and helpless--gave her no respite. The tears ran down her cheeks as she moved to and fro, her hands at her breast.

Yet she was helpless. What could she do? Even if he were free from Alicia, even if he wished to recall her, how could he--maimed and broken--take the steps that could alone bring her to his side? If their engagement had subsisted, horror, catastrophe, the approach of death itself, could have done nothing to part them. Now, how was a man in such a plight to ask from a woman what yet the woman would pay a universe to give? And in the face of the man's silence, how could the woman speak?

No!--she began to see her life as the Vicar saw it: pledged to large causes, given to drudgeries--necessary, perhaps noble, for which the happy are not meant. This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers much longer. If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden, surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the world rang in her ears--wild voices!--speaking universal, terrible, representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close, close to her heart. No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she best could. Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own youth, grief for her parents. She must turn to the poor in that mood she had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself--the mood of one seeking an opiate, an anaesthetic. The scrubbing of hospital floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of them deaden thought--these were what she turned to as the only means by which life could be lived.

Oliver!--No hope for him?--at thirty-six! His career broken--his ambition defeated. Nothing before him but the decline of power and joy; nights of barren endurance, separating days empty and tortured; all natural pleasures deadened and destroyed; the dying down of all the hopes and energies that make a man.

She threw herself down beside the open window, burying her face on her knees. Would they never let her go to him?--never let her say to him: "Oliver, take me!--you did love me once--what matters what came between us? That was in another world. Take my life--crush out of it any drop of comfort or of ease it can give you! Cruel, cruel--to refuse! It is mine to give and yours to spend!"

Juliet Sparling's daughter. There was the great consecrating, liberating fact! What claim had she to the ordinary human joys? What could the ordinary standards and expectations of life demand from her? Nothing!--nothing that could stem this rush of the heart to the beloved--the forsaken and suffering and overshadowed beloved. Her future?--she held it dross--apart from Oliver. Dear Sir James!--but he must learn to bear it--to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for herself. What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but