The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 15

"Don't hurry it, mother--don't hurry it."

"No--no"--she said, laughing--"I am not such a fool. There will be many natural opportunities of meeting."

"There are some difficulties with the Vavasours. They have been disagreeable about the gardens. Ferrier and I have promised to go over and advise her."

"Good!" said Lady Lucy, delighted that the Vavasours had been disagreeable. "Good-night, my son, good-night!"

A minute later Oliver stood meditating in his own room, where he had just donned his smoking-jacket. By one of the natural ironies of life, at a moment when he was more in love than he had ever been yet, he was, nevertheless, thinking eagerly of prospects and of money. Owing to his peculiar relation to his mother, and his father's estate, marriage would be to him no mere satisfaction of a personal pa.s.sion. It would be a vital incident in a politician's career, to whom larger means and greater independence were now urgently necessary. To marry with his mother's full approval would at last bring about that provision for himself which his father's will had most unjustly postponed. He was monstrously dependent upon her. It had been one of the chief checks on a strong and concentrated ambition. But Lady Lucy had long made him understand that to marry according to her wishes would mean emanc.i.p.ation: a much larger income in the present, and the final settlement of her will in his favor. It was amazing how she had taken to Diana! Diana had only to accept him, and his future was secured.

But though thoughts of this kind pa.s.sed in tumultuous procession through the grooves of consciousness, they were soon expelled by others. Marsham was no mere interested schemer. Diana should help him to his career; but above all and before all she was the adorable brown-eyed creature, whose looks had just been s.h.i.+ning upon him, whose soft hand had just been lingering in his! As he stood alone and spellbound in the dark, yielding himself to the surging waves of feeling which broke over his mind, the thought, the dream, of holding Diana Mallory in his arms--of her head against his breast--came upon him with a sudden and stinging delight.

Yet the delight was under control--the control of a keen and practical intelligence. There rose in him a sharp sense of the unfathomed depths and possibilities in such a nature as Diana's. Once or twice that evening, through all her sweet forthcomingness, when he had forced the note a little, she had looked at him in sudden surprise or shrinking.

No!--nothing premature! It seemed to him, as it had seemed to Bobbie Forbes, that she could only be won by the slow and gradual conquest of a rich personality. He set himself to the task.

Down-stairs Mr. Ferrier and Sir James Chide were sitting together in a remote corner of the hall. Mr. Ferrier, in great good-humor with the state of things, was discussing Oliver's chances, confidentially, with his old friend. Sir James sat smoking in silence. He listened to Ferrier's praises of Miss Mallory, to his generous appreciation of Marsham's future, to his speculations as to what Lady Lucy would do for her son, upon his marriage, or as to the part which a creature so brilliant and so winning as Diana might be expected to play in London and in political life.

Sir James said little or nothing. He knew Lady Lucy well, and had known her long. Presently he rose abruptly and went up-stairs to bed.

"Ought I to speak?" he asked himself, in an agony of doubt. "Perhaps a word to Ferrier?--"

No!--impossible!--impossible! Yet, as he mounted the stairs, over the house which had just seen the triumph of Diana, over that radiant figure itself, the second sight of the great lawyer perceived the brooding of a cloud of fate; nor could he do anything to avert or soften its downfall.

Meanwhile Diana's golden hour had found an unexpected epilogue. After her good-night to Marsham she was walking along the gallery corridor going toward her room, when she perceived Miss Vincent in front of her moving slowly and, as it seemed, with difficulty. A sudden impulse made Diana fly after her.

"Do let me help you!" she said, shyly.

Marion Vincent smiled, and put her hand in the girl's arm.

"How do people manage to live at all in these big houses, and with dinner-parties every night!" she said, laughing. "After a day in the East End I am never half so tired."

She was indeed so pale that Diana was rather frightened, and remembering that in the afternoon she had seen Miss Vincent descend from an upper floor, she offered a rest in her own room, which was close by, before the evidently lame woman attempted further stairs.

Marion Vincent hesitated a moment, then accepted. Diana hurried up a chair to the fire, installed her there, and herself sat on the floor watching her guest with some anxiety.

Yet, as she did so, she felt a certain antagonism. The face, of which the eyes were now closed, was n.o.bly grave. The expression of its deeply marked lines appealed to her heart. But why this singularity--this eccentricity? Miss Vincent wore the same dress of dark woollen stuff, garnished with white frills, in which she had appeared the night before, and her morning attire, as Mr. Frobisher had foretold, had consisted of a precisely similar garment, adorned with a straight collar instead of frills. Surely a piece of acting!--of unnecessary self-a.s.sertion!

Yet all through the day--and the evening--Diana had been conscious of this woman's presence, in a strange penetrating way, even when they had had least to do with each other. In the intervals of her own joyous progress she had been often aware of Miss Vincent sitting apart, sometimes with Mr. Frobisher, who was reading or talking to her, sometimes with Lady Lucy, and--during the dance--with John Barton.

Barton might have been the Jeremiah or the Ezekiel of the occasion. He sat astride upon a chair, in his respectable workman's clothes, his eyes under their s.h.a.ggy brows, his weather-beaten features and compressed lips expressing an ill-concealed contempt for the scene before him. It was rumored that he had wished to depart before dinner, having concluded his consultation with Mr. Ferrier, but that Mrs. Fotheringham had persuaded him to remain for the night. His presence seemed to make dancing a misdemeanor, and the rich house, with its services and appurtenances, an organized crime. But if his personality was the storm-point of the scene, charged with potential lightning, Marion Vincent's was the still small voice, without threat or bitterness, which every now and then spoke to a quick imagination like Diana's its message from a world of poverty and pain. And sometimes Diana had been startled by the perception that the message seemed to be specially for her. Miss Vincent's eyes followed her; whenever Diana pa.s.sed near her, she smiled--she admired. But always, as it seemed to Diana, with a meaning behind the smile. Yet what that meaning might be the girl could not tell.

At last, as she watched her, Marion Vincent looked up.

"Mr. Barton would talk to me just now about the history of his own life.

I suppose it was the dance and the supper excited him. He began to testify! Sometimes when he does that he is magnificent. He said some fine things to-night. But I am run down and couldn't stand it."

Diana asked if Mr. Barton had himself gone through a great struggle with poverty.

"The usual struggle. No more than thousands of others. Only in him it is vocal--he can reflect upon it.--You had an easy triumph over him last night," she added, with a smile, turning to her companion.

"Who wouldn't have?" cried Diana. "What outrageous things he said!"

"He doesn't know much about India--or the Colonies. He hasn't travelled; he reads very little. He showed badly. But on his own subjects he is good enough. I have known him impress or convert the most unlikely people--by nothing but a bare sincerity. Just now--while the servants were handing champagne--he and I were standing a little way off under the gallery. His eyes are weak, and he can't bear the glare of all these lights. Suddenly he told me the story of his father's death."

She paused, and drew her hand across her eyes. Diana saw that they were wet. But although startled, the girl held herself a little aloof and erect, as though ready at a moment's notice to defend herself against a softening which might involve a treachery to glorious and sacred things.

"It so chanced"--Miss Vincent resumed--"that it had a bearing on experiences of my own--just now."

"You are living in the East End?"

"At present. I am trying to find out the causes of a great wave of poverty and unemployment in a particular district."--She named it.--"It is hard work--and not particularly good for the nerves."

She smiled, but at the same moment she turned extremely white, and as she fell back in her chair, Diana saw her clinch her hand as though in a strong effort for physical self-control.

Diana sprang up.

"Let me get you some water!"

"Don't go. Don't tell anybody. Just open that window." Diana obeyed, and the northwest wind, sweeping in, seemed to revive her pale companion almost at once.

"I am very sorry!" said Miss Vincent, after a few minutes, in her natural voice. "Now I am all right." She drank some water, and looked up.

"Shall I tell you the story he told me? It is very short, and it might change your view of him."

"If you feel able--if you are strong enough," said Diana, uncomfortably, wondering why it should matter to Miss Vincent or anybody else what view she might happen to take of Mr. Barton.

"He said he remembered his father (who was a house-painter--a very decent and hard-working man) having been out of work for eight weeks. He used to go out looking for work every day--and there was the usual story, of course, of p.a.w.ning or selling all their possessions--odd jobs--increasing starvation--and so on. Meanwhile, _his_ only pleasure--he was ten--was to go with his sister after school to look at two shops in the East India Dock Road--one a draper's with a 'Christmas Bazaar'--the other a confectioner's. He declares it made him not more starved, but less, to look at the goodies and the cakes; they _imagined_ eating them; but they were both too sickly, he thinks, to be really hungry. As for the bazaar, with its dolls and toys, and its Father Christmas, and bright lights, they both thought it paradise. They used to flatten their noses against the gla.s.s; sometimes a shopman drove them away; but they came back and back. At last the iron shutters would come down--slowly. Then he and his sister would stoop--and stoop--to get a last look. Presently there would be only a foot of bliss left; then they both sank down flat on their stomachs on the pavement, and so stayed--greedily--till all was dark, and paradise had been swallowed up.

Well, one night, the show had been specially gorgeous; they took hands afterward, and ran home. Their father had just come in. Mr. Barton can remember his staggering into the room. I'll give it in his words.

'Mother, have you got anything in the house?' 'Nothing, Tom.' And mother began to cry. 'Not a bit of bread, mother?' 'I gave the last bit to the children for their teas.' Father said nothing, but he lay down on the bed. Then he called me. 'Johnnie,' he said, 'I've got work--for next week--but I sha'n't never go to it--it's too late,' and then he asked me to hold his hand, and turned his face on the pillow. When my mother came to look, he was dead. 'Starvation and exhaustion'--the doctor said."

Marion Vincent paused.

"It's just like any other story of the kind--isn't it?" Her smile turned on Diana. "The charitable societies and missions send them out by scores in their appeals. But somehow as he told it just now, down-stairs, in that glaring hall, with the champagne going round--it seemed intolerable."

"And you mean also"--said Diana, slowly--"that a man with that history can't know or care very much about the Empire?"

"Our minds are all picture-books," said the woman beside her, in a low, dreamy voice: "it depends upon what the pictures are. To you the words 'England'--and the 'Empire'--represent one set of pictures--all bright and magnificent--like the Christmas Bazaar. To John Barton and me"--she smiled--"they represent another. We too have seen the lights, and the candles, and the toys; we have admired them, as you have; but we know the reality is not there. The reality is in the dark streets, where men tramp, looking for work; it is in the rooms where their wives and children live stifled and hungry--the rooms where our working folk die--without having lived."

Her eyes, above her pale cheeks, had opened to their fullest extent--the eyes of a seer. They held Diana. So did the voice, which was the voice of one in whom tragic pa.s.sion and emotion are forever wearing away the physical frame, as the sea waves break down a crumbling sh.o.r.e.

Suddenly Diana bent over her, and took her hands.

"I wonder why you thought me worth talking to like this?" she said, impetuously.

"I liked you!" said Marion Vincent, simply. "I liked you as you talked last night. Only I wanted to add some more pictures to your picture-book. _Your_ set--the popular one--is called _The Glories of England_. There is another--I recommend it to you: _The Shames of England_."