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

it off. And I never loved her--not for a moment--and she knew it. Then, as soon as this happened she left us. There was poetic justice, wasn't it? Who can blame her? I don't. I want you to know--what sort of a fellow I am."

Diana had recovered her strength. She raised his hand, and leaned her face upon it.

"Let me stay," she repeated--"let me stay!"

"No!" he said, with emphasis. "You should only stay if I might tell you--I am a miserable creature--but I love you! And I may be a miserable creature--in Chide's opinion--everybody's. But I am not quite such a cur as that."

"Oliver!" She slipped to her knees. "Oliver! don't send me away!" All her being spoke in the words. Her dark head sank upon his shoulder, he felt her fresh cheek against his. With a cry he pressed her to him.

"I am dying--and--I--I am weak," he said, incoherently. He raised her hand as it lay across his breast and kissed it. Then he dropped it despairingly.

"The awful thing is that when the pain comes I care about nothing--not even you--_nothing_. And it's coming now. Go!--dearest. Good-night. To-morrow!--Call my servant." And as she fled she heard a sound of anguish that was like a sword in her own heart.

His servant hurried to him; in the passage outside Diana found Lady Lucy. They went back to the sitting-room together.

"The morphia will ease him," said Lady Lucy, with painful composure, putting her arm round the girl's shoulders. "Did he tell you he was dying?"

Diana nodded, unable to speak.

"It may be so. But the doctors don't agree." Then with a manner that recalled old days: "May I ask--I don't know that I have the right--what he said to you?"

She had withdrawn her arm, and the two confronted each other.

"Perhaps you won't allow it," said Diana, piteously. "He said I might only stay, if--if he might tell me--he loved me."

"Allow it?" said Lady Lucy, vaguely--"allow it?"

She fell into her chair, and Diana looked down upon her, hanging on the next word.

Lady Lucy made various movements as though to speak, which came to nothing.

"I have no one--but him," she said at last, with pathetic irrelevance. "No one. Isabel--"

Her voice failed her. Diana held out her hands, the tears running down her cheeks. "Dear Lady Lucy, let me! I am yours--and Oliver's."

"It will, perhaps, be only a few weeks--or months--and then he will be taken from us."

"But give me the right to those weeks. You wouldn't--you wouldn't separate us now!"

Lady Lucy suddenly broke down. Diana clung to her with tears, and in that hour she became as a daughter to the woman who had sentenced her youth. Lady Lucy asked no pardon in words, to Diana's infinite relief; but the surrender of weakness and sorrow was complete. "Sir James will forbid it," she said at last, when she had recovered her calm.

"No one shall forbid it!" said Diana, rising with a smile. "Now, may I answer some of those letters for you?"

* * * * *

For some weeks after this Diana went backward and forward daily, or almost daily, between Beechcote and Tallyn. Then she migrated to Tallyn altogether, and Muriel Colwood with her. Before and after that migration wisdom had been justified of her children in the person of the doctor. Hugh Roughsedge's leave had been prolonged, owing to a slight but troublesome wound in the arm, of which he had made nothing on coming home. No wound could have been more opportune--more friendly to the doctor's craving for a daughter-in-law. It kept the Captain at Beechcote, but it did not prevent him from coming over every Sunday to Tallyn to bring flowers or letters, or news from the village; and it was positively benefited by such mild exercise as a man may take, in company with a little round-eyed woman, feather-light and active, yet in relation to Diana, like a tethered dove, that can only take short flights. Only here it was a tether self-imposed and of the heart.

There was no direct wooing, however, and for weeks their talk was all of Diana. Then the Captain's arm got well, and Nigeria called. But Muriel would not have allowed him to say a word before departure had it not been for Diana--and the doctor--who were suddenly found to have entered, in regard to this matter, upon a league and covenant not to be resisted. Whether the doctor opened Diana's eyes need not be inquired; it is certain that if, all the while, in Oliver's room, she and Lady Lucy had not been wrestling hour by hour with death--or worse--Diana would have wanted no one to open them. When she did understand, there was no opposing her. She pleaded--not without tears--to be given the happiness of knowing they were pledged, and her Muriel safe in harbor. So Roughsedge had his say; a quiet engagement began its course in the world; Brookshire as yet knew nothing; and the doctor triumphed over Patricia.

During this time Sir James Chide watched the development of a situation he had not been able to change with a strange mixture of revolt and sympathy. Sometimes he looked beyond the tragedy which he thought inevitable to a recovered and normal life for Diana; sometimes he felt a dismal certainty that when Oliver had left her, that recovered life could only shape itself to ascetic and self-renouncing ends. Had she belonged to his own church, she would no doubt have become a "religious"; and he would have felt it the natural solution. Outside the Catholic Church, the same need takes shape--he thought--in forms less suited to a woman's weakness, less conducive to her dignity.

All through he resented the sacrifice of a being so noble, true, and tender to a love, in his eyes, so unfitting and derogatory. Not all the pathos of suffering could blunt his sense of Marsham's inferiority, or make him think it "worth while."

Then, looking deeper, he saw the mother in the child; and in Diana's devotion, mysterious influences, flowing from her mother's fate--from the agony, the sin, the last tremulous hope, and piteous submission of Juliet Sparling. He perceived that in this broken, tortured happiness to which Diana had given herself there was some sustaining or consoling element that nothing more normal or more earthly would have brought her; he guessed at spiritual currents and forces linking the dead with the living, and at a soul heroically calm among them, sending forth rays into the darkness. His religion, which was sincere, enabled him to understand her; his affection, his infinite delicacy of feeling, helped her.

Meanwhile, Diana and Lankester became the sustaining angels of a stricken house. But not all their tenderness and their pity could, in the end, do much for the two sufferers they tried to comfort. In Oliver's case the spinal pain and disorganization increased, the blindness also; Lady Lucy became steadily feebler and more decrepit. At last all life was centred on one hope--the coming of a great French specialist, a disciple of Charcot's, recommended by the English Ambassador in Paris, who was an old friend and kinsman of Lady Lucy.

But before he arrived Diana took a resolution. She went very early one morning to see Sir James Chide. He was afterward closeted with Lady Lucy, and he went up to town the following day on Diana's business. The upshot of it all was that on the morning of New Year's Eve a marriage was celebrated in Oliver Marsham's room by the Rector of Tallyn and Mr. Lavery. It was a wedding which, to all who witnessed it, was among the most heart-rending experiences of life. Oliver, practically blind, could not see his bride, and only morphia enabled him to go through it. Mrs. Fotheringham was to have been present; but there was a feminist congress in Paris, and she was detained at the last moment. The French specialist came. He made a careful examination, but would give no decided opinion. He was to stay a week at Tallyn in order to watch the case, and he reserved his judgment. Meanwhile he gave certain directions as to local treatment, and he asked that a new drug might be tried during the night instead of the second dose of morphia usually given. The hearts of all in charge of the invalid sank as they foresaw the inevitable struggle.

In the evening the new doctor paid a second visit to his patient. Diana saw him afterward alone. He was evidently touched by the situation in the house, and, cautious as he was, allowed himself a few guarded sentences throwing light on the doubt--which was in effect a hope--in his own mind.

"Madame, it is a very difficult case. The emaciation, the weakness, the nerve depression--even if there were no organic disease--are alone enough to threaten life. The morphia is, of course, a contributing cause. The question before us is: Have we here a case of irreparable disease caused by the blow, or a case of nervous shock producing all the symptoms of disease--pain, blindness, emaciation--but ultimately curable? That is what we have to solve."

Diana's eyes implored him.

"Give him hope," she said, with intensity. "For weeks--months--he has never allowed himself a moment's hope."

The doctor reflected.

"We will do what we can," he said, slowly. "Meanwhile, cheerfulness!--all the cheerfulness possible."

Diana's faint, obedient smile, as she rose to leave the room, touched him afresh. Just married, he understood. These are the things that women do!

As he opened the door for her he said, with some hesitation: "You have, perhaps, heard of some of the curious effects that a railway collision produces. A man who has been in a collision and received a blow suffers afterward great pain, loss of walking power, impairment of vision, and so forth. The man's suffering is real--the man himself perfectly sincere--his doctor diagnoses incurable injury--the jury awards him damages. Yet, in a certain number of instances, the man recovers. Have we here an aggravated form of the same thing? _Ah, madame, courage!_"

For in the doorway he saw her fall back against the lintel for support. The hope that he infused tested her physically more severely than the agonies of the preceding weeks. But almost immediately she controlled herself, smiled at him again, and went.

That night various changes were made at Tallyn. Diana's maid unpacked, in the room communicating with Marsham's; and Diana, pale and composed, made a new arrangement with Oliver's male nurse. She was to take the nursing of the first part of the night, and he was to relieve her at three in the morning. To her would fall the administration of the new medicine.

* * * * *

At eleven o'clock all was still in the house. Diana opened the door of Oliver's room with a beating heart. She wore a dressing-gown of some white stuff; her black hair, released from the combs of the day, was loosely rolled up, and curled round her neck and temples. She came in with a gentle deliberate step; it was but a few hours since the ceremony of the morning, but the tranformation in her was instinctive and complete. To-night she was the wife--alone with her husband.