The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 14

"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 cla.s.s. 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 Diana fled from, Lady Niton took up; and when Mrs.

Fotheringham, bewildered by an avalanche of words, would say--"Give me time, please, Lady Niton--I must think!"--Lady Niton would reply, coolly--"Not unless you're accustomed to it"; while she finally capped her misdeeds by insisting that it was no good to say Mr. Barton had a warm heart if he were without that much more useful possession--a narrow mind.

Thus b.u.t.tressed and befriended on almost all sides, Diana drank her cup of pleasure. Once in an interval between two dances, as she pa.s.sed on Oliver Marsham's arm, close to Lady Lucy, that lady put up her frail old hand, and gently touched Diana's. "Do not overtire yourself, my dear!"

she said, with effusion; and Oliver, looking down, knew very well what his mother's rare effusion meant, if Diana did not. On several occasions Mr. Perrier sought her out, with every mark of flattering attention, while it often seemed to Diana as if the protecting kindness of Sir James Chide was never far away. In her white _ingenue's_ dress she was an embodiment of youth, simplicity, and joy, such as perhaps our grandmothers knew more commonly than we, in our more hurried and complex day. And at the same time there floated round her something more than youth--something more thrilling and challenging than mere girlish delight--an effluence, a pa.s.sion, a "swell of soul," which made this dawn of her life more bewitching even for its promise than for its performance.

For Marsham, too, the hours flew. He was carried away, enchanted; he had eyes for no one, time for no one but Diana; and before the end of the evening the gossip among the Tallyn guests ran fast and free. When at last the dance broke up, many a curious eye watched the parting between Marsham and Diana; and in their bedroom on the top floor Lady Lucy's two nieces sat up till the small hours discussing, first, the situation--was Oliver really caught at last?--and then, Alicia's refusal to discuss it.

She had said bluntly that she was dog-tired--and shut her door upon them.

On a hint from his mother, Marsham went to say good-night to her in her room. She threw her arms round his neck, whispering: "Dear Oliver!--dear Oliver!--I just wished you to know--if it is as I think--that you had my blessing."

He drew back, a little shrinking and reluctant--yet still flushed, as it were, with the last rays Diana's sun had shed upon him.

"Things mustn't be hurried, mother."

"No--no--they sha'n't. But you know how I have wished to see you happy--how ambitious I have been for you!"

"Yes, mother, I know. You have been always very good to me." He had recovered his composure, and stood holding her hand and smiling at her.

"What a charming creature, Oliver! It is a pity, of course, her father has indoctrinated her with those opinions, but--"

"Opinions!" he said, scornfully--"what do they matter!" But he could not discuss Diana. His blood was still too hot within him.

"Of course--of course!" said Lady Lucy, soothingly. "She is so young--she will develop. But what a wife, Oliver, she will make--how she might help a man on--with her talents and her beauty and her refinement.

She has such dignity, too, for her years."

He made no reply, except to repeat: