The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 65

As Marsham, in undressing, flung his coat upon a chair, the copy of the _Herald_ which he had momentarily forgotten fell out of the inner pocket. He raised it--irresolute. Should he tear it up, and throw the fragments away?

No. He could not bring himself to do it. It was as though Ferrier, lying still and cold at Lytchett, would know of it--as though the act would do some roughness to the dead.

He went into his sitting-room, found an empty drawer in his writing-table, thrust in the newspaper, and closed the drawer.

CHAPTER XX

"I regard this second appeal to West Brooks.h.i.+re as an insult!" said the Vicar of Beechcote, hotly. "If Mr. Marsham must needs accept an office that involved re-election he might have gone elsewhere. I see there is already a vacancy by death--and a Liberal seat, too--in Suss.e.x. _We_ told him pretty plainly what we thought of him last time."

"And now I suppose you will turn him out?" asked the doctor, lazily. In the beat.i.tude induced by a completed article and an afternoon smoke, he was for the moment incapable of taking a tragic view either of Marsham's shortcomings or his prospects.

"Certainly, we shall turn him out."

"Ah!--a Labor candidate?" said the doctor, showing a little more energy.

Whereupon the Vicar, with as strong a relish for the _primeur_ of an important piece of news as any secular fighter, described a meeting held the night before in one of the mining villages, at which he had been a speaker. The meeting had decided to run a miners' candidate; expenses had been guaranteed; and the resolution pa.s.sed meant, according to Lavery, that Marsham would be badly beaten, and that Colonel Simpson, his Conservative opponent, would be handsomely presented with a seat in Parliament, to which his own personal merits had no claim whatever.

"But that we put up with," said the Vicar, grimly. "The joy of turning out Marsham is compensation."

The doctor turned an observant eye on his companion's clerical coat.

"Shall we hear these sentiments next Sunday from the pulpit?" he asked, mildly.

The Vicar had the grace to blush slightly.

"I say, no doubt, more than I should say," he admitted. Then he rose, b.u.t.toning his long coat down his long body deliberately, as though by the action he tried to restrain the surge within; but it overflowed all the same. "I know now," he said, with a kindling eye, holding out a gaunt hand in farewell, "what our Lord meant by sending, not peace--but a sword!"

"So, no doubt, did Torquemada!" replied the doctor, surveying him.

The Vicar rose to the challenge.

"I will be no party to the usual ignorant abuse of the Inquisition," he said, firmly. "We live in days of license, and have no right to sit in judgment on our forefathers."

"_Your_ forefathers," corrected the doctor. "Mine burned."

The Vicar first laughed; then grew serious. "Well, I'll allow you two opinions on the Inquisition, but not--" he lifted a gesticulating hand--"_not_ two opinions on mines which are death-traps for lack of a little money to make them safe--_not_ on the kind of tyranny which says to a man: 'Strike if you like, and take a week's notice at the same time to give up your cottage, which belongs to the colliery'--or, 'Make a fuss about allotments if you dare, and see how long you keep your berth in my employment: we don't want any agitators here'--or maintains, against all remonstrance, a brutal manager in office, whose rule crushes out a man's self-respect, and embitters his soul!"

"You charge all these things against Marsham?"

"He--or, rather, his mother--has a large holding in collieries against which I charge them."

"H'm. Lady Lucy isn't standing for West Brooks.h.i.+re."

"No matter. The son's teeth are set on edge. Marsham has been appealed to, and has done nothing--attempted nothing. He makes eloquent Liberal speeches, and himself spends money got by grinding the poor!"

"You make him out a greater fool than I believe him," said the doctor.

"He has probably attempted a great deal, and finds his power limited.

Moreover, he has been eight years member here, and these charges are quite new."

"Because the spirit abroad is new!" cried the Vicar. "Men will no longer bear what their fathers bore. The old excuses, the old pleas, serve no longer. I tell you the poor are tired of their patience! The Kingdom of Heaven, in its earthly aspect, is not to be got that way--no! 'The violent take it by force!' And as to your remark about Marsham, half the champions of democracy in this country are in the same box: prating about liberty and equality abroad; grinding their servants and underpaying their laborers at home. I know scores of them; and how any of them keep a straight face at a public meeting I never could understand. There is a French proverb that exactly expresses them--"

"I know," murmured the doctor, "I know. '_Joie de rue, douleur de maison_.' Well, and so, to upset Marsham, you are going to let the Tories in, eh?--with all the old tyrannies and briberies on their shoulders?--naked and unashamed. Hullo!"--he looked round him--"don't tell Patricia I said so--or Hugh."

"There is no room for a middle party," was the Vicar's fierce reply.

"Socialists on the one side, Tories on the other!--that'll be the Armageddon of the future."

The doctor, declining to be drawn, nodded placidly through the clouds of smoke that enwrapped him. The Vicar hurried away, accompanied, however, furtively to the door, even to the gate of the drive, by Mrs.

Roughsedge, who had questions to ask.

She came back presently with a thoughtful countenance.

"I asked him what he thought I ought to do about those tales I told you of."

"Why don't you settle for yourself?" cried the doctor, testily. "That is the way you women flatter the pride of these priests!"

"Not at all. _You_ make him talk nonsense; I find him a fount of wisdom."

"I admit he knows some moral theology," said Roughsedge, thoughtfully.

"He has thought a good deal about 'sins' and 'sin.' Well, what was his view about these particular 'sinners'?"

"He thinks Diana ought to know."

"She can't do any good, and it will keep her awake at nights. I object altogether."

However, Mrs. Roughsedge, having first dropped a pacifying kiss on her husband's gray hair, went up-stairs to put on her things, declaring that she was going there and then to Beechcote.

The doctor was left to ponder over the gossip in question, and what Diana could possibly do to meet it. Poor child!--was she never to be free from scandal and publicity?

As to the couple of people involved--Fred Birch and that odious young woman Miss f.a.n.n.y Merton--he did not care in the least what happened to them. And he could not see, for the life of him, why Diana should care either. But of course she would. In her ridiculous way, she would think she had some kind of responsibility, just because the girl's mother and her mother happened to have been brought up in the same nursery.

"A plague on Socialist vicars, and a plague on dear good women!" thought the doctor, knocking out his pipe. "What with philanthropy and this delicate altruism that takes the life out of women, the world becomes a kind of impenetrable jungle, in which everybody's business is intertwined with everybody else's, and there is n.o.body left with primitive brutality enough to hew a way through! And those of us that might lead a decent life on this ill-arranged planet are all crippled and hamstrung by what we call unselfishness." The doctor vigorously replenished his pipe. "I vow I will go to Greece next spring, and leave Patricia behind!"

Meanwhile, Mrs. Roughsedge walked to Beechcote--in meditation. The facts she pondered were these, to put them as shortly as possible. Fred Birch was fast becoming the _mauvais sujet_ of the district. His practice was said to be gone, his money affairs were in a desperate condition, and his mother and sister had already taken refuge with relations. He had had recourse to the time-honored expedients of his type: betting on horses and on stocks with other people's money. It was said that he had kept on the safe side of the law; but one or two incidents in his career had emerged to light quite recently, which had led all the scrupulous in Duns...o...b.. to close their doors upon him; and as he had no means of bribing the unscrupulous, he had now become a mere object-lesson for babes as to the advantages of honesty.

At the same time Miss f.a.n.n.y Merton, first introduced to Brooks.h.i.+re by Brooks.h.i.+re's favorite, Diana Mallory, was constantly to be seen in the black sheep's company. They had been observed together, both in London and the country--at race-meetings and theatres; and a brawl in the Duns...o...b.. refreshment-room, late at night, in which Birch had been involved, brought out the scandalous fact that Miss Merton was in his company. Birch was certainly not sober, and it was said by the police that Miss Merton also had had more port wine than was good for her.

All this Brooks.h.i.+re knew, and none of it did Diana know. Since her return she and Mrs. Colwood had lived so quietly within their own borders that the talk of the neighborhood rarely reached her, and those persons who came in contact with her were far too deeply touched by the signs of suffering in the girl's face and manner to breathe a word that might cause her fresh pain. Brooks.h.i.+re knew, through one or other of the mysterious channels by which such news travels, that the two cousins were uncongenial; that it was f.a.n.n.y Merton who had revealed to Diana her mother's history, and in an abrupt, unfeeling way; and that the two girls were not now in communication. f.a.n.n.y had been boarding with friends in Bloomsbury, and was supposed to be returning to her family in Barbadoes in the autumn.

The affair at the refreshment-room was to be heard of at Petty Sessions, and would, therefore, get into the local papers. Mrs. Roughsedge felt there was nothing for it; Diana must be told. But she hated her task.

On reaching Beechcote she noticed a fly at the door, and paused a moment to consider whether her visit might not be inopportune. It was a beautiful day, and Diana and Mrs. Colwood were probably to be found in some corner of the garden. Mrs. Roughsedge walked round the side of the house to reconnoitre.