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

just this: to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver--to bring him the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love? And if it were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena, where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and throw herself blindly into the fight. Perhaps some heavenly voice might still speak through it; perhaps, beyond its jar, some ineffable reunion might dawn--

"First a peace out of pain--then a light--then thy breast!..."

She trembled through and through. Restraining herself, she rose, and went to her locked desk, taking from it the closely written journal of her father's life, which had now been for months the companion of her thoughts, and of the many lonely moments in her days and nights. She opened on a passage tragically familiar to her:

"It is an April day. Everything is very still and balmy. clouds are low, yet suffused with sun. They seem to be tangled among the olives, and all the spring green and flowering fruit trees are like embroidery on a dim yet shining background of haze, silvery and glistening in the sun, blue and purple in the shadows. The beach-trees in the olive garden throw up their pink spray among the shimmering gray leaf and beside the gray stone walls. Warm breaths steal to me over the grass and through the trees; the last brought with it a strong scent of narcissus. A goat tethered to a young tree in the orchard has reared its front feet against the stem, and is nibbling at the branches. His white back shines amid the light spring shade.

"Far down through the trees I can see the sparkle of the waves--beyond, the broad plain of blue; and on the headland, a mile away, white foam is dashing.

"It is the typical landscape of the South, and of spring, the landscape, with only differences in detail, of Theocritus or Vergil, or the Greek anthologists, those most delicate singers of nature and the South. From the beginning it has filled man with the same joy, the same yearning, the same despair.

"In youth and happiness we _are_ the spring--the young green--the blossom--the plashing waves. Their life is ours and one with ours.

"But in age and grief? There is no resentment, I think; no anger, as though a mourner resented the gayety around him; but, rather, a deep and melancholy wonder at the chasm that has now revealed itself between our life and nature. What does the breach mean?--the incurable dissonance and alienation? Are we greater than nature, or less? Is the opposition final, the prophecy of man's ultimate and hopeless defeat at the hands of nature?--or is it, in the Hegelian sense, the mere development of a necessary conflict, leading to a profounder and intenser unity? The old, old questions--stock possessions of the race, yet burned anew by life into the blood and brain of the individual.

"I see Diana in the garden with her nurse. She has been running to and fro, playing with the dog, feeding the goat. Now I see her sitting still, her chin on her hands, looking out to sea. She seems to droop; but I am sure she is not tired. It is an attitude not very natural to a child, especially to a child so full of physical health and vigor; yet she often falls into it.

"When I see it I am filled with dread. She knows nothing, yet the cloud seems to be upon her. Does she already ask herself questions--about her father--about this solitary life?

"Juliet was not herself--not in her full sane mind--when I promised her. That I know. But I could no more have refused the promise than water to her dying lips. One awful evening of fever and hallucination I had been sitting by her for a long time. Her thoughts, poor sufferer, had been full of _blood_--it is hard to write it--but there is the truth--a physical horror of blood--the blood in which her dress--the dress they took from her, her first night in prison--was once steeped. She saw it everywhere, on her hands, the sheets, the walls; it was a nausea, an agony of brain and flesh; and yet it was, of course, but a mere symbol and shadow of the manifold agony she had gone through. I will not attempt to describe what I felt--what the man who knows that his neglect and selfishness drove her the first steps along this infernal road must feel to his last hour.--But at last we were able--the nurse and I--to soothe her a little. The nightmare lifted, we gave her food, and the nurse brushed her poor brown hair, and tied round it, loosely, the little black scarf she likes to wear. We lifted her on her pillows, and her white face grew calm, and so lovely--though, as we thought, very near to death. Her hair, which was cut in prison, had grown again a little--to her neck, and could not help curling. It made her look a child again--poor, piteous child!--so did the little scarf, tied under her chin--and the tiny proportions to which all her frame had shrunk.

"She lifted her face to mine, as I bent over her, kissed me, and asked for you. You were brought, and I took you on my knee, showing you pictures, to keep you quiet. But every other minute, almost, your eyes looked away from the book to her, with that grave considering look, as though a question were behind the look, to which your little brain could not yet give shape. My strange impression was that the question was there--in the mind--fully formed, like the Platonic 'ideas' in heaven; but that, physically, there was no power to make the word-copy that could have alone communicated it to us. Your mother looked at you in return, intently--quite still. When you began to get restless, I lifted you up to kiss her; you were startled, perhaps, by the cold of her face, and struggled away. A little color came into her cheeks; she followed you hungrily with her eyes as you were carried off; then she signed to me, and it was my hand that brushed away her tears.

"Immediately afterward she began to speak, with wonderful will and self-control, and she asked me that till you were grown up and knowledge became inevitable, I should tell you nothing. There was to be no talk of her, no picture of her, no letters. As far as possible, during your childhood and youth, she was to be to you as though she had never existed. What her thought was exactly she was too feeble to explain; nor was her mind strong enough to envisage all the consequences--to me, as well as to you--of what she proposed. No doubt it tortured her to think of you as growing up under the cloud of her name and fate, and with her natural and tragic impetuosity she asked what she did.

"'One day--there will come some one--who will love her--in spite of me. Then you and he--shall tell her.'

"I pointed out to her that such a course would mean that I must change my name and live abroad. Her eyes assented, with a look of relief. She knew that I had already developed the tastes of the nomad and the sun-worshipper, that I was a student, happy in books and solitude; and I have no doubt that the picture her mind formed at the moment of some such hidden life together, as we have actually led, you and I, since her death, soothed and consoled her. With her intense and poetic imagination, she knew well what had happened to us, as well as to herself.

"So here we are in this hermitage; and except in a few passing perfunctory words, I have never spoken to you of her. Whether what I have done is wise I cannot tell. I could not help it; and if I had broken my word, remorse would have killed me. I shall not die, however, without telling you--if only I have warning enough.

"But supposing there is no warning--then all that I write