The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 21

Meanwhile he had found an opportunity in which to tell her, unheard by his parents, that he was practically certain of his Nigerian appointment, and must that night break it to his father and mother. And Diana had listened like a sister, all sympathy and kind looks, promising in the young man's ear, as he said good-bye at the garden gate, that she would come again next day to cheer his mother up.

He stood looking after her as she walked away; his hands in his pockets, a flush on his handsome face. How her coming had glorified and transformed the place! No womanish nonsense, too, about this going of his!--though she knew well that it meant fighting. Only a kindling of the eyes--a few questions as practical as they were eager--and then that fluttering of the soft breath which he had noticed as she bent over his mother.

But she was not for him! Thus it is that women--the n.o.blest and the dearest--throw themselves away. She, with all the right and proper feelings of an Englishwoman, to mate with this plausible Radical and Little Englander! Hugh kicked the stones of the gravel savagely to right and left as he walked back to the house--in a black temper with his poverty and Diana's foolishness.

But was she really in love? "Why then so pale, fond lover?" He found a kind of angry comfort in the remembrance of her drooping looks. They were no credit to Marsham, anyway.

Meanwhile Diana walked home, lingering by the way in two or three cottages. She was shyly beginning to make friends with the people. An old road-mender kept her listening while he told her how a Tallyn keeper had peppered him in the eye, ten years before, as he was crossing Barrow Common at dusk. One eye had been taken out, and the other was almost useless; there he sat, blind, and cheerfully telling the tale--"Muster Marsham--Muster Henry Marsham--had been verra kind--ten s.h.i.+llin' a week, and an odd job now and then. I do suffer terr'ble, miss, at times--but ther's noa good in grumblin'--is there?"

Next door, in a straggling line of cottages, she found a gentle, chattering widow whose husband had been drowned in the brew-house at Beechcote twenty years before, drowned in the big vat!--before any one had heard a cry or a sound. The widow was proud of so exceptional a tragedy; eager to tell the tale. How had she lived since? Oh, a bit here and a bit there. And, of late, half a crown from the parish.

Last of all, in a cottage midway between the village and Beechcote, she paused to see a jolly middle-aged woman, with a humorous eye and a stream of conversation--held prisoner by an incurable disease. She was absolutely alone in the world. n.o.body knew what she had to live on. But she could always find a crust for some one more dest.i.tute than herself, and she ranked high among the wits of the village. To Diana she talked of her predecessors--the Vavasours--whose feudal presence seemed to be still brooding over the village. With little chuckles of laughter, she gave instance after instance of the tyranny with which they had lorded it over the country-side in early Victorian days: how the "Madam Vavasour" of those days had pulled the feathers from the village-girls'

hats, and turned a family who had offended her, with all their belongings, out into the village street. But when Diana rejoiced that such days were done, the old woman gave a tolerant: "Noa--noa! They were none so bad--were t' Vavasours. Only they war no good at heirin."

"Airing?" said Diana, mystified.

"Heirin," repeated Betty Dyson, emphatically. "Theer was old Squire Henry--wi' noabody to follow 'im--an' Mr. Edward noa better--and now thissun, wi n.o.bbut la.s.ses. Noa--they war noa good at heirin--moor's t'

pity." Then she looked slyly at her companion: "An' yo', miss? yo'll be gettin' married one o' these days, I'll uphowd yer."

Diana colored and laughed.

"Ay," said the old woman, laughing too, with the merriment of a girl.

"Sweethearts is noa good--but you mun ha' a sweetheart!"

Diana fled, pursued by Betty's raillery, and then by the thought of this lonely laughing woman, often tormented by pain, standing on the brink of ugly death, and yet turning back to look with this merry indulgent eye upon the past; and on this dingy old world, in which she had played so ragged and limping a part. Yet clearly she would play it again if she could--so sweet is mere life!--and so hard to silence in the breast.

Diana walked quickly through the woods, the prey of one of those vague storms of feeling which test and stretch the soul of youth.

To what horrors had she been listening?--the suffering of the blinded road-mender--the grotesque and hideous death of the young laborer in his full strength--the griefs of a childless and penniless old woman? Yet life had somehow engulfed the horrors; and had spread its quiet waves above them, under a pale, late-born suns.h.i.+ne. The stoicism of the poor rebuked her, as she thought of the sharp impatience and disappointment in which she had parted from Mrs. Colwood.

She seemed to hear her father's voice. "No s.h.i.+rking, Diana! You asked her--you formed absurd and exaggerated expectations. She is here; and she is not responsible for your expectations. Make the best of her, and do your duty!"

And eagerly the child's heart answered: "Yes, yes, papa!--dear papa!"

And there, sharp in color and line, it rose on the breast of memory, the beloved face. It set pulses beating in Diana which from her childhood onward had been a life within her life, a pain answering to pain, the child's inevitable response to the father's misery, always discerned, never understood.

This abiding remembrance of a dumb unmitigable grief beside which she had grown up, of which she had never known the secret, was indeed one of the main factors in Diana's personality. Muriel Colwood had at once perceived it; Marsham had been sometimes puzzled by the signs of it.

To-day--because of f.a.n.n.y and this toppling of her dreams--the dark mood, to which Diana was always liable, had descended heavily upon her. She had no sooner rebuked it--by the example of the poor, or the remembrance of her father's long patience--than she was torn by questions, vehement, insistent, full of a new anguish.

Why had her father been so unhappy? What was the meaning of that cloud under which she had grown up?

She had repeated to Muriel Colwood the stock explanations she had been accustomed to give herself of the manner and circ.u.mstances of her bringing-up. To-day they seemed to her own mind, for the first time, utterly insufficient. In a sudden crash and confusion of feeling it was as though she were tearing open the heart of the past, pa.s.sionately probing and searching.

Certain looks and phrases of f.a.n.n.y Merton were really working in her memory. They were so light--yet so ugly. They suggested something, but so vaguely that Diana could find no words for it: a note of desecration, of cheapening--a breath of dishonor. It was as though a mourner, shut in for years with sacred memories, became suddenly aware that all the time, in a sordid world outside, these very memories had been the sport of an unkind and insolent chatter that besmirched them.

Her mother!

In the silence of the wood the girl's slender figure stiffened itself against an attacking thought. In her inmost mind she knew well that it was from her mother--and her mother's death--that all the strangeness of the past descended. But yet the death and grief she remembered had never presented themselves to her as they appear to other bereaved ones. Why had n.o.body ever spoken to her of her mother in her childhood and youth?--neither father, nor nurses, nor her old French governess? Why had she no picture--no relics--no letters? In the box of "Sparling Papers" there was nothing that related to Mrs. Sparling; that she knew, for her father had abruptly told her so not long before his death. They were old family records which he could not bear to destroy--the honorable records of an upright race, which some day, he thought, "might be a pleasure to her."

Often during the last six months of his life, it seemed to her now, in this intensity of memory, that he had been on the point of breaking the silence of a lifetime. She recalled moments and looks of agonized effort and yearning. But he died of a growth in the throat; and for weeks before the end speech was forbidden them, on account of the constant danger of hemorrhage. So that Diana had always felt herself starved of those last words and messages which make the treasure of bereaved love.

Often and often the cry of her loneliness to her dead father had been the bitter cry of Andromache to Hector; "I had from thee, in dying, no memorable word on which I might ever think in the year of mourning while I wept for thee."

Had there been a quarrel between her father and mother?--or something worse?--at which Diana's ignorance of life, imposed upon her by her upbringing, could only glance in shuddering? She knew her mother had died at twenty-six; and that in the two years before her death Mr.

Mallory had been much away, travelling and exploring in Asia Minor. The young wife must have been often alone. Diana, with a sudden catching of the breath, envisaged possibilities of which no rational being of full age who reads a newspaper can be unaware.

Then, with an inward pa.s.sion of denial, she shook the whole nightmare from her. Outrage!--treason!--to those helpless memories of which she was now the only guardian. In these easy, forgetting days, when the old pa.s.sions and endurances look to us either affected or eccentric, such a life, such an exile as her father's, may seem strange even--so she accused herself--to that father's child. But that is because we are mean souls beside those who begot us. We cannot feel as they; and our constancy, compared to theirs, is fickleness.

So, in spirit, she knelt again beside her dead, embracing their cold feet and asking pardon.

The tears clouded her eyes; she wandered blindly on through the wood till she was conscious of sudden light and s.p.a.ce. She had come to a clearing, where several huge beeches had been torn up by a storm some years before. Their place had been filled by a tangle of many saplings, and in their midst rose an elder-bush, already showing leaf, amid the bare winterly wood. The last western light caught the twinkling leaf buds, and made of the tree a Burning Bush, first herald of the spring.

The sight of it unloosed some swell of pa.s.sion in Diana; she found herself smiling amid her tears, and saying incoherent things that only the wood caught.

To-day was the meeting of Parliament. She pictured the scene. Marsham was there, full of projects and ambitions. Innocently, exultantly, she reminded herself how much she knew of them. If he could not have her sympathy, he must have her antagonism. But no chilling exclusions and reserves! Rather, a generous confidence on his side; and a gradual, a child-like melting and kindling on hers. In politics she would never agree with him--never!--she would fight him with all her breath and strength. But not with the methods of Mrs. Fotheringham. No!--what have politics to do with--with--

She dropped her face in her hands, laughing to herself, the delicious tremors of first love running through her. Would she hear from him? She understood she was to be written to, though she had never asked it. But ought she to allow it? Was it _convenable_? She knew that girls now did what they liked--threw all the old rules overboard. But--proudly--she stood by the old rules; she would do nothing "fast" or forward. Yet she was an orphan--standing alone; surely for her there might be more freedom than for others?

She hurried home. With the rush of new happiness had come back the old pity, the old yearning. It wasn't, wasn't f.a.n.n.y's fault! She--Diana--had always understood that Mr. Merton was a vulgar, grasping man of no breeding who had somehow entrapped "your aunt Bertha--who was very foolish and very young"--into a most undesirable marriage. As for Mrs.

Merton--Aunt Bertha--f.a.n.n.y had with her many photographs, among them several of her mother. A weak, heavy face, rather pretty still. Diana had sought her own mother in it, with a pa.s.sionate yet shrinking curiosity, only to provoke a rather curt reply from f.a.n.n.y, in answer to a question she had, with difficulty, brought herself to put:

"Not a bit! There wasn't a sc.r.a.p of likeness between mother and Aunt Sparling."

The evening pa.s.sed off better than the morning had done. Eyes more acute in her own interests than Diana's might have perceived a change in f.a.n.n.y Merton, after her long conversation with Mrs. Colwood. A certain excitement, a certain triumph, perhaps an occasional relenting and compunction: all these might have been observed or guessed. She made herself quite amiable: showed more photographs, talked still more frankly of her card-winnings on the steamer, and of the flirtation which had beguiled the voyage; bespoke the immediate services of Diana's maid for a dress that must be done up; and expressed a desire for another and a bigger wardrobe in her room. Gradually a tone of possession, almost of command, crept in. Diana, astonished and amused, made no resistance.

These, she supposed, were West-Indian manners. The Colonies are like healthy children that submit in their youth, and then grow up and order the household about. What matter!

Meanwhile Mrs. Colwood looked a little pale, and confessed to a headache. Diana was pleased, however, to see that she and f.a.n.n.y were getting on better than had seemed to be probable in the morning. f.a.n.n.y wished--nay, was resolved--to be entertained and amused, Mrs. Colwood threw herself with new zest into the various plans Diana had made for her cousin. There was to be a luncheon-party, an afternoon tea, and so forth. Only Diana, p.r.i.c.ked by a new mistrust, said nothing in public about an engagement she had (to spend a Sat.u.r.day-to-Monday with Lady Lucy at Tallyn three weeks later), though she and Muriel made anxious plans as to what could be done to amuse f.a.n.n.y during the two days.

Diana was alone in her room at night when Mrs. Colwood knocked. Would Diana give her some lavender-water?--her headache was still severe.

Diana new to minister to her; but, once admitted, Muriel said no more of her headache. Rather she began to soothe and caress Diana. Was she in better spirits? Let her only intrust the entertaining of f.a.n.n.y Merton to her friend and companion--Mrs. Colwood would see to it. Diana laughed, and silenced her with a kiss.

Presently they were sitting by the fire, Muriel Colwood in a large arm-chair, a frail, fair creature, with her large dark-circled eyes, and her thin hands and arms; Diana kneeling beside her.

"I had no idea what a poison poverty could be!" said Muriel, abruptly, with her gaze on the fire.

"My cousin?" Diana looked up startled. "Was that what she was saying to you?"

Muriel nodded a.s.sent. Her look--so anxious and tender--held, enveloped her companion.

"Are they in debt?" said Diana, slowly.

"Terribly. They seem to be going to break up their home."

"Did she tell you all about it?"

Mrs. Colwood hesitated.