Diana Tempest Volume Iii Part 13

"I have come up to London for one thing, and I have come here for one thing, which is--to ask you to marry me. Don't speak--don't say anything just for a moment," he continued hurriedly, raising his hand as if to ward off a rebuff. "For G.o.d's sake don't stop me. I've kept it in so long I must say it, and you must hear me."

She let him say it. And he got it out with stumbling and difficulty and long gaps between--got out in shaking commonplaces a t.i.the of the love he had for her. And all the time Di thought if it might only have been some one else who was uttering those halting words! (I wonder how many men have proposed and been accepted while the woman has said to herself, "If it had only been some one else!")

Despair at his inability to express himself, and at her silence, seized him: as if it mattered a pin how he expressed himself if she had been willing to listen.

"If you understood," he said over and over again, with the monotonous reiteration of a piano-tuner, "you would not refuse me. I know you are going to, but if only you understood you would not. You would not have the heart. It's--it's just everything to me." And Lord Hemsworth--oh, bathos of modern life!--looked into his hat.

"Lord Hemsworth," said Di, "have I ever given you any encouragement?"

"None," he replied. "People might think you had, but you never did. I knew better. I never misunderstood you. I know you don't care a straw about me; but--oh, Di, you have not your equal in the world. There's no woman to compare with you. I don't see how you could care for any one like me. Of course you don't. I would not expect it. But if--if you would only marry me--I would be content with very little. I've looked at it all round. I would be content with--very little."

There was a long silence.

What woman whose love has been slighted can easily reject a great devotion?

"I think," said Di, after several false starts to speak, "that if I only considered myself I would marry you; but there is the happiness of one other person to think of--_yours_."

"I can't have any apart from you."

"You would have none with me. If it is miserable to care for any one who is indifferent, it would be a thousand times more miserable to be married to that person."

"Not if it were you."

"Yes, if it were I."

"I would take the risk," said Lord Hemsworth, who held, in common with most men, the rooted conviction that a woman will become attached to any husband, however little she cares for her lover. It is precisely this conviction which makes the average marriages of the present day such mediocre affairs; which serves to place worldly or facile women, or those whose affections have never been called out, at the head of so many homes; as the mothers of the new generation from which we hope so much.

"I would take any risk," repeated Lord Hemsworth, doggedly. "I would rather be unhappy with you than happy with any one else."

"You think so now," said Di; "but the time would come when you would see that I had cut you off from the best thing in the world--from the love of a woman who would care for you as much as you do for me."

"I don't want her. I want you."

"I cannot marry you."

Lord Hemsworth clutched blindly at the arms of the chair.

"I would wait any time."

Di shook her head.

"Any time," he stammered. "Go away for a year, and--come back."

"It would be no good."

Then he lost his head.

"So long as you don't care for any one else," he said incoherently. "I thought at the carnival--that is why I have kept out of the way--but I met Tempest to-day at the Carlton, and--I asked him straight out, and he said there was nothing between you and him. I suppose you have refused him, like the rest of us. Oh, my G.o.d, Di, they say you have no heart!

But it isn't true, is it? Don't refuse me. Don't make me live without you. I've tried for three months"--and Lord Hemsworth's face worked--"and if you knew what it was like, you wouldn't send me back to it."

Every vestige of colour had faded from Di's face at the mention of John.

"I don't care enough for you to marry you," she said, pitiless in her great pity. "I wish I did, but--I don't."

"Do you care for any one else?"

Di saw that nothing short of the truth would wrest his persistence from its object.

"Yes, I do," she said pa.s.sionately, trembling from head to foot. "For some one who does not care for me. You and I are both in the same position. Do you see now how useless it is to talk of this any longer?"

Both had risen to their feet. Lord Hemsworth looked at Di's white convulsed face, and his own became as ashen. He saw at last that he had no more chance of marrying her than if she were lying at his feet in her coffin. Constancy, which can compa.s.s many things, avails nought sometimes.

"I beg your pardon," he said, holding out his hand to go.

"I think I ought to beg yours," she said brokenly, while their hands clasped tightly each in each. "I never meant to make you as--unhappy as--as I am myself, but yet I have."

They looked at each other with tears in their eyes.

"It does not matter," said Lord Hemsworth, hoa.r.s.ely. "I shall be all right--it's you--I think of. Don't stand--mustn't stand--you're too tired. Good-bye."

Di flung herself down on her face on the sofa as the door closed. She had forgotten Lord Hemsworth's existence the moment after he had left the room. _John had told him that there was nothing between her and_ _himself._ John had told him that. John had said that. A cry escaped her, and she strangled it in the cushion.

Hope does not always die when we imagine it does. It is subject to long trances. The hope which she had thought dead was only giving up the ghost now. "Chaque esperance est un oeuf d'ou peut sortir un serpent au lieu d'une colombe." Out of that frail sh.e.l.l of a cherished hope lying broken before her the serpent had crept at last. It moved, it grew before her eyes.

"Slighted love is sair to bide."

CHAPTER XII.

"We met, hand to hand, We clasped hands close and fast, As close as oak and ivy stand; But it is past."

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

"Half false, half fair, all feeble."

SWINBURNE.

When John roused himself from the long stupor into which he had fallen after Lord Hemsworth's departure, he put his finished letter to Colonel Tempest into an envelope, and then remembered with annoyance that he did not know how to address it. When the landlady in Brook Street had told him that Colonel and Captain Tempest had gone to Brighton that morning, he had been too much taken aback at the moment to think of asking for their address. He was too much exhausted in mind and body to go back to the lodgings for it immediately. He wrote a second letter, this time to his lawyer, and then, conscious of the state of his body by the shaking hand and clumsy, tardy brain which made of a short and explicit statement so lengthy an affair, he mechanically changed his clothes, dined, and sat watching the smoke of his cigar.

Presently, with food and rest, the apathy into which exhaustion had plunged him lifted, and the restlessness of a tortured mind returned. He had only as yet seen one of the three men whom he had come to London to interview, namely, Lord Frederick. Colonel Tempest, the second, was out of town; but probably the third, Lord ----, the minister, was not. It was close on ten o'clock. He should probably find him in his private room in the House.

John flung away his cigar, and was in a few minutes spinning towards the Houses of Parliament in a hansom. He had not thought much about it till now, but as he turned in at the gates the lines of the great buildings suddenly brought back to him the remembrance of his own ambition, and of the splendid career that had seemed to be opening before him when last he had pa.s.sed those gates; which had fallen at a single touch like a house of cards--a house built with Fortune's cards.

There was a _queue_ of carriages at the Speaker's entrance. A party was evidently going on there. John went to the House and inquired for Lord ----. He was not there. Perhaps he was at the Speaker's reception.

John remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had a card for it, and went on there. His mind was set on finding Lord ----.