The Following of the Star Part 37

WHAT DAVID WONDERED

One more episode, culled from the year's correspondence, shows the intimacy, constantly bordering on the personal, which grew up between David and Diana.

He had mentioned in one of his letters, that among a package of ill.u.s.trated papers which had reached his station, he had found one in which was an excellent photograph of Diana, pa.s.sing down the steps of the Town Hall, to her motor, after opening a bazaar at Eversleigh.

David had written with so much pleasure of this, that Diana, realising he had no portrait of her, and knowing how her heart yearned for one of him, went up to town, and was photographed especially for him.

When the portrait arrived, and her own face looked out at her from the silver wrappings, she was startled by its expression. It was not a look she ever saw in her mirror. The depth of tenderness in the eyes, the soft wistfulness of the mouth, were a revelation of her own heart to Diana. She had been thinking of her husband, when the camera unexpectedly opened its eye upon her. The clever artist had sacrificed minor details of arrangement, in order to take her unawares before a photographic expression closed the gates upon the luminous beauty of her soul.

Diana hurried the picture back into its wrappings. It had been taken for David. To David it must go; and go immediately, if it were to go at all.

If it did not go at once to David, it would go into the fire.

It went to David.

With it went a letter.

"MY DEAR DAVID,--I am much amused that you should have come across a picture of me in an ill.u.s.trated paper. I did not see it myself; but I gather from your description, that it must have been taken as I was leaving the Town Hall after the function of which I told you in September. Fancy you being able to recognise the motor and the men. I remember having to stand for a minute at the top of the long flight of steps, while some of the members of the committee, who had organised the bazaar, made their adieus. I always hate all the hand-shaking on these occasions. I suppose you would enjoy it, David. To you, each hand would mean an interesting personality behind it. I am afraid to me it only means something unpleasantly hot, and unnecessarily literal in the meaning it gives to 'hand-shake.' Don't you know a certain style of story which says, in crucial moments between the hero and the heroine: 'He wrung her hand and left her?' They always wring your hand--a most painful process--when you open bazaars, but they don't leave you! You are constrained at last to flee to your motor.

"'The fellow in the topper'"--Diana paused here to refer to David's letter, then continued writing, a little smile of amus.e.m.e.nt curving the corners of her mouth,--"The 'good-looking fellow in the topper' who was being 'so very attentive' to me, and 'apparently enjoying himself on the steps,' is our Member. His wife, a charming woman, is a great friend of mine. She should appear just behind us. The mayoress had presented me with the bouquet he was holding for me. I foisted it upon the poor man because, personally, I hate carrying bouquets. I daresay it had the effect in the snapshot of making him look 'a festive chap.' But he was not enjoying himself, any more than I was. We had both just shaken hands with the Mayor!

"It seems so funny to think that a reproduction of this scene should have found its way to you in Central Africa; and I am much gratified that you considered it worth framing, and hanging up in your hut.

"I am glad you thought me looking so like myself. I don't think I am much given to looking like other people! Unlike a little lady in this neighbourhood who is never herself, but always some one else, and not the same person for many weeks together. It is one of our mild amus.e.m.e.nts to wonder who she will be next. She had a phase of being me once, with a bunch of _artificial_ violets on her m.u.f.f!

"But, to return to the picture. It has occurred to me that, as you were so pleased with it, you might like a better. It is not right, my dear David, that the only likeness you possess of your wife, should be a snapshot in a penny paper. So, by this mail, I send a proper photograph, taken the other day on purpose for you. Are you not flattered, sir?"

The letter then went on to speak of other things; but, before signing her name, Diana drew the photograph once more from its wrappings, and looked at it, shyly, wistfully. She could not help seeing that it was very beautiful. She could not help knowing that her heart was in her eyes. What would they say to David--those tender, yearning eyes? What might they not lead David to say to her?

At last his answer came.

"How kind of you to send me this beautiful large photograph, and very good of you to have had it taken expressly for me. I fear you will think me an ungrateful fellow, if I confess that I still prefer the snapshot, and cannot bring myself to take it from its frame.

"This is lovely beyond words, of course; and immensely artistic; but it gives me more the feeling of an extremely beautiful fancy picture. You see, I never saw you look as you are looking in this portrait, whereas the Town Hall picture is you, exactly as I remember you always; tall and gay, and immensely enjoying life, and life's best gifts.

"Conscious of ingrat.i.tude, I put the portrait up on the wall of my hut; but I could not leave it there; and it is now safely locked away in my desk.

"I could not leave it there for two reasons: its effect on myself; and its effect on the natives.

"Reason No. 1. Its effect on myself: I could not work, while it was where I could see it. It set me wondering; and a fellow is lost if he once starts wondering, out in the wilds of Central Africa.

"Reason No. 2. Its effect on the natives: They all began worshipping it. It became a second G.o.ddess fallen from heaven, like unto your namesake at Ephesus. They had seen a Madonna, brought here by an artist travelling through. They took this for a Madonna--and well they might. They asked: Where was the little child? I said: There was no little child. Yet still they worshipped. So I placed it under lock and key."

Diana laid her head down on the letter, after reading these words. When she lifted it, the page was blotted with her tears. Sometimes her punishment seemed heavier than she could bear.

She took up her pen, and added a postscript to the letter she was just mailing.

"Dear David, what did you wonder? Tell me."

And David, with white set face, wrote in answer: "I wondered who----"

then started up, and tore the sheet to fragments; threw prudence to the winds; went out and beat his way for hours through the swampy jungle, fighting the long gra.s.ses, and the evil clinging tendrils of poisonous growths.

When he regained his hut, worn out and exhausted, the stars were p.r.i.c.king in golden pin-points through the sky; one planet hung luminous and low on the horizon.

David stood in his doorway, trying to gain a little refreshment from the night wind, blowing up from the river.

Suddenly he laughed, long and wildly; then caught his breath, in a short dry sob.

"My G.o.d," he said, "I have so little! Let me keep to the end the one thing in my wife which I possess: my faith in her."

Then he pa.s.sed into the hut, closing the door; groped his way to the rough wooden table; lighted a lamp, and sitting down at his desk, drew Diana's portrait from its silver wrappings; placed it in front of him, and sat long, looking at it intently; his head in his hands.

At last he laid his hot mouth on those sweet pictured lips, parted in wistful tenderness, as if offering much to one at whom the grey eyes looked with love unmistakable.

Then he laid it away, out of sight, and rewrote his letter.

"I wondered," he said, "at the great kindness which took so much trouble, only for me."

CHAPTER x.x.x

RESURGAM

"RIVERSCOURT,

"Feast of Epiphany,

"MY DEAR DAVID,--A wonderful thing has happened; and I am so glad it happened on the Feast of the Star, which is also--as you will remember--our wedding-day.

"I want to tell you of it, David, because it is one of those utterly unexpected, beautiful happenings, which, on the rare occasions when they do occur, make one feel that, after all, nothing is irrevocably hopeless, even in this poor world of ours, where mistakes usually appear to be irretrievable, and where wisdom, bought too dearly and learned too late, can bring forth no fruit save in the mournful land of might-have-beens.

"Last year, this day was one of frost and sunshine. This year, the little Hampshire farms and homesteads, all along the railway, cannot have looked either cosy or picturesque; and the distant line of undulating hills must have been completely hidden by fog and mist. It has sleeted, off and on, during the whole morning--a seasonable attempt at snow somewhere up above, frustrated by the unseasonable murky dampness of the earth, below. I wonder how often G.o.d's purposes for us, of pure white beauty, are prevented by the murk and mist of our own mental atmosphere. This sounds like moralising, and so it is! I thought it out, in Brambledene church this morning, while G.o.d-papa was enjoying himself in the pulpit.

"He took for his text: 'They departed into their own country another way.' He displayed a vast amount of geographical information, concerning the various ways by which the three Wise Men--oh, David, there were _three_ all through the sermon; and I felt so wrathful, because Mrs.

Smith's back view--I mean _my_ back view of Mrs. Smith--was so smugly complacent, and she nodded her head in approval, every time G.o.d-papa said 'three.' I could have hurled my Bible, open at Matthew ii. at G.o.d-papa; and an aged and mouldy copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, at Mrs. Smith; a performance which would have carried on, in a less helpful way, your particular faculty for making that congregation sit up. This desire on my part will possibly lead you to conclude, my dear David, that your wife was giving way to an unchristian temper. But she was not.

She was simply experiencing a wifely pride in your sermons, and a quite justifiable desire that every word they contained should be understood and corroborated. Other ladies have hurled stools in defence of the faith, and thereby taken their place in the annals of history. Why should not your wife hurl a very, _very_ old copy of Ancient and Modern Hymns and Tunes, and thus become famous?

"Well, as I was saying, G.o.d-papa was being very learned as to the probable route by which the Wise Men returned home, though he had already told us it was impossible to be at all certain as to the locality from which they started. This struck me as being so very like the good people who tell us with authoritative detail where we are going, although they know not whence we came.

"This thought unhitched my mind from G.o.d-papa's rolling chariot of eloquence, which went lumbering on along a highroad of Eastern lore and geographical research, regardless of the fact that my little mental wheel had trundled gaily off on its own, down a side alley.

"This tempting glade, my dear David, alluring to a mind perplexed by the dust of G.o.d-papa's highway, was an imaginary sermon, preached by _you_, on this self-same text.