The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 41

"Yes," said Marsham, reluctantly. "But it was at once commuted. And three weeks after the sentence she was released. She lived, Sir James tells me, nearly two months after your father brought her home."

"I wrote last night to the lawyers"--Diana breathed it almost in a whisper. "I am sure there is a letter for me--I am sure papa wrote."

"Promise me one thing!" said Marsham. "If they send you newspapers--for my sake, don't read them. Sir James will tell you, this afternoon, things the public have never known--facts which would certainly have altered the verdict if the jury had known. Your poor mother struck the blow in what was practically an impulse of self-defence, and the evidence which mainly convicted her was perjured evidence, as the liar who gave it confessed years afterward. Sir James will tell you that. He has the confession."

Her face relaxed, her mouth trembled violently.

"Oh, Oliver!--Oliver!" She was unable to bear the relief his words brought her: she broke down under it.

He caught her in his arms at last, and she gave way--she let herself be weak--and woman. Clinging to him with all the pure pa.s.sion of a woman and all the trust of a child, she felt his kisses on her cheek, and her deep sobs shook her upon his breast. Marsham's being was stirred to its depths. He gave her the best he had to give; and in that moment of mortal appeal on her side and desperate pity on his, their natures met in that fusion of spirit and desire wherewith love can lend even tragedy and pain to its own uses.

And yet--and yet!--was it in that very moment that feeling--on the man's side--"o'erleaped itself, and fell on the other"? When they resumed conversation, Marsham's tacit expectation was that Diana would now show herself comforted; that, sure of him and of his affection, she would now be ready to put the tragic past aside; to think first and foremost of her own present life and his, and face the future cheerfully. A misunderstanding arose between them, indeed, which is, perhaps, one of the typical misunderstandings between men and women. The man, impatient of painful thoughts and recollections, eager to be quit of them as weakening and unprofitable, determined to silence them by the pleasant clamor of his own ambitions and desires; the woman, priestess of the past, clinging to all the pieties of memory, in terror lest she forget the dead, feeling it a disloyalty even to draw the dagger from the wound--between these two figures and dispositions there is a deep and natural antagonism.

It showed itself rapidly in the case of Marsham and Diana; for their moment of high feeling was no sooner over, and she sitting quietly again, her hand in his, the blinding tears dashed away, than Marsham's mind flew inevitably to his own great sacrifice. She must be comforted, indeed, poor child! yet he could not but feel that he, too, deserved consolation, and that his own most actual plight was no less worthy of her thoughts than the ghastly details of a tragedy twenty years old.

Yet she seemed to have forgotten Lady Lucy!--to have no inkling of the real situation. And he could find no way in which to break it.

For, in little broken sentences of horror and recollection, she kept going back to her mother's story--her father's silence and suffering. It was as though her mind could not disentangle itself from the load which had been flung upon it--could not recover its healthiness of action amid the phantom sights and sounds which beset imagination. Again and again she must ask him for details--and shrink from the answers; must hide her eyes with the little moan that wrung his heart; and break out in e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, as though of bewilderment, under a revelation so singular and so terrible.

It was to be expected, of course; he could only hope it would soon pa.s.s.

Secretly, after a time, he was repelled and wearied. He answered her with the same tender words, he tried to be all kindness; but more perfunctorily. The oneness of that supreme moment vanished and did not return.

Meanwhile, Diana's perceptions, stunned by the one overmastering thought, gave her no warning. And, in truth, if Marsham could have understood, the process of mental recovery was set going in her by just this freedom of utterance to the man she loved--these words and looks and tears--that brought ease after the dumb horror of the first hours.

At last he made an effort, hiding the nascent impatience in a caress.

"If I could only persuade you not to dwell upon it too persistently--to put it from your thoughts as soon and as much as you can! Dear, we shall have our own anxieties!"

She looked up with a sudden start.

"My mother," he said, reluctantly, "may give us trouble."

The color rushed into Diana's cheeks, and ebbed with equal suddenness.

"Lady Lucy! Oh!--how could I forget? Oliver!--she thinks--I am not fit!"

And in her eyes he saw for the first time the self-abas.e.m.e.nt he had dreaded, yet perhaps expected, to see there before. For in her first question to him there had been no real doubt of him; it had been the natural humility of wounded love that cries out, expecting the reply that no power on earth could check itself from giving were the case reversed.

"Dearest! you know my mother's bringing up: her Quaker training, and her rather stern ideas. We shall persuade her--in time."

"In time? And now--she--she forbids it?"

Her voice faltered. And yet, unconsciously, she had drawn herself a little together and away.

Marsham began to give a somewhat confused and yet guarded account of his mother's state of mind, endeavoring to prepare her for the letter which might arrive on the morrow. He got up and moved about the room as he spoke, while Diana sat, looking at him, her lips trembling from time to time. Presently he mentioned Ferrier's name, and Diana started.

"Does _he_ think it would do you harm--that you ought to give me up?"

"Not he! And if anybody can make my mother hear reason, it will be Ferrier."

"Lady Lucy believes it would injure you in Parliament?" faltered Diana.

"No, I don't believe she does. No sane person could."

"Then it's because--of the disgrace? Oliver!--perhaps--you ought to give me up?"

She breathed quick. It stabbed him to see the flush in her cheeks contending with the misery in her eyes. She could not pose, or play a part. What she could not hide from him was just the conflict between her love and her new-born shame. Before that scene on the hill there would have been her girlish dignity also to reckon with. But the greater had swallowed up the less; and from her own love--in innocent and simple faith--she imagined his.

So that when she spoke of his giving her up, it was not her pride that spoke, but only and truly her fear of doing him a hurt--by which she meant a hurt in public estimation or repute. The whole business side of the matter was unknown to her. She had never speculated on his circ.u.mstances, and she was const.i.tutionally and rather proudly indifferent to questions of money. Vaguely, of course, she knew that the Marshams were rich and that Tallyn was Lady Lucy's. Beyond, she had never inquired.

This absence of all self-love in her att.i.tude--together with her complete ignorance of the calculation in which she was involved--touched him sharply. It kept him silent about the money; it seemed impossible to speak of it. And yet all the time the thought of it clamored--perhaps increasingly--in his own mind.

He told her that they must stand firm--that she must be patient--that Ferrier would work for them--and Lady Lucy would come round. And she, loving him more and more with every word, seeing in him a G.o.d of consolation and of chivalry, trusted him wholly. It was characteristic of her that she did not attempt heroics for the heroics' sake; there was no idea of renouncing him with a flourish of trumpets. He said he loved her, and she believed him. But her heart went on its knees to him in a grat.i.tude that doubled love, even in the midst of her aching bewilderment and pain.

He made her come out with him before luncheon; he talked with her of politics and their future; he did his best to scatter the nightmare in which she moved.

But after awhile he felt his efforts fail. The scenes that held her mind betrayed themselves in her recurrent pallor, the trembling of her hand in his, her piteous, sudden looks. She did not talk of her mother, but he could not presently rouse her to talk of anything else; she sat silent in her chair, gazing before her, her slender hands on her knee, dreaming and forlorn.

Then he remembered, and with involuntary relief, that he must get back to town, and to the House, for an important division. He told her, and she made no protest. Evidently she was already absorbed in the thought of Sir James Chide's visit. But when the time came for him to go she let herself be kissed, and then, as he was moving away, she caught his hand, and held it wildly to her lips.

"Oh, if you hadn't come!--if you hadn't come!" Her tears fell on the hand.

"But I did come!" he said, caressing her. "I was here last night--did Mrs. Colwood tell you? Afterward--in the dark--I walked up to the hill, only to look down upon this house, that held you."

"If I had known," she murmured, on his breast, "I should have slept."

He went--in exaltation; overwhelmed by her charm even in this eclipse of grief, and by the perception of her pa.s.sion.

But before he was half-way to London he felt that he had been rather foolish and quixotic in not having told her simply and practically what his mother's opposition meant. She must learn it some day; better from him than others. His mother, indeed, might tell her in the letter she had threatened to write. But he thought not. n.o.body was more loftily secret as to business affairs than Lady Lucy; money might not have existed for the rare mention she made of it. No; she would base her opposition on other grounds.

These reflections brought him back to earth, and to the gloomy pondering of the situation. Half a million!--because of the ill-doing of a poor neurotic woman--twenty years ago!

It filled him with a curious resentment against Juliet Sparling herself, which left him still more out of sympathy with Diana's horror and grief.

It must really be understood, when they married, that Mrs. Sparling's name was never to be mentioned between them--that the whole grimy business was buried out of sight forever.

And with a great and morbid impatience he shook the recollection from him. The bustle of Whitehall, as he drove down it, was like wine in his veins; the crowd and the gossip of the Central Lobby, as he pressed his way through to the door of the House of Commons, had never been so full of stimulus or savor. In this agreeable, exciting world he knew his place; the relief was enormous; and, for a time, Marsham was himself again.

Sir James Chide came in the late afternoon; and in her two hours with him, Diana learned, from lips that spared her all they could, the heart-breaking story of which f.a.n.n.y had given her but the crudest outlines.

The full story, and its telling, taxed the courage both of hearer and speaker. Diana bore it, as it seemed to Sir James, with the piteous simplicity of one in whose nature grief had no pretences to overcome.

The iron entered into her soul, and her quick imagination made her torment. But her father had taught her lessons of self-conquest, and in this first testing of her youth she did not fail. Sir James was astonished at the quiet she was able to maintain, and touched to the heart by the suffering she could not conceal.