The Splendid Folly Part 28

Miss Lermontof leaned forward impetuously.

"How can I?" she said, in hurried tones, "It's all wrong--oh! you know that it's all wrong."

Errington shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm afraid we can never see eye to eye," he answered. "Let us, then, be philosophical over the matter and agree to differ."

Olga's green eyes flamed with sudden anger, but she abstained from making any reply, turning away from him abruptly.

Diana, whose attention had been claimed by the Rector, had not caught the quickly spoken sentences which had pa.s.sed between the two, but she was puzzled over the oddly yearning look she had surprised in Olga's eyes. There had been a tenderness, a species of wistful longing in her gaze, as she had turned towards Max Errington, which tallied ill with the bitter incisiveness of the remarks she let fall at times concerning him.

"Well, my dear"--the Rector's voice recalled Diana's wandering thoughts--"Joan and I must be getting back to our hotel, if we are to be dressed in time for the dinner Miss de Gervais is giving in your honour to-night."

Diana glanced at the clock and nodded.

"Indeed you must, Pobs darling. And I will send away these other good people too. As we're all going to meet again at dinner we can bear to be separated for an hour or so--even Jerry and Joan, I suppose?" she added whimsically, in a lower tone.

"It's invidious to mention names," murmured Stair, "or I might--"

Diana laid her hand lightly across his mouth.

"No, you mightn't," she said firmly. "Put on your coat and that nice squashy hat of yours, and trot back to your hotel like a good Pobs."

Stair laughed, looking down at her with kind eyes.

"Very well, little autocrat." He put his hand under her chin and tilted her face up. "I've not congratulated you yet, my dear. It's a big thing you've done--captured London in a day. But it's a bigger thing you'll have to do."

"You mean Paris--Vienna?"

He shook his head, still with the kind smile in his eyes.

"No. I mean, keep me the little Diana I love--don't let me lose her in the public singer."

"Oh, Pobs!"--reproachfully. "As though I should ever change!"

"Not deliberately--not willingly, I'm sure. But--success is a difficult sea to swim."

He sighed, kissed her upturned face, and then, with twist of his shoulders, pulled on his overcoat and prepared to depart.

Success is exhilarating. It goes to the head like wine, and yet, as Diana lay in bed that night, staring with wide eyes into the darkness, the memory that stood out in vivid relief from amongst the crowded events of the day was not the triumph of the afternoon, nor the merry evening which succeeded it, when "the coming _prima donna_" had been toasted amid a fusillade of brilliant little speeches and light-hearted laughter, but the remembrance of a pair of pa.s.sionate, demanding blue eyes and of a low, tense voice saying:--

"I swear I won't fail you. Let me 'stand by.'"

CHAPTER XIV

THE FLAME OF LOVE

Diana's gaze wandered idly over the blue stretch of water, as it lay beneath the blazing August sun, while the sea-gulls, like streaks of white light, wheeled through the shimmering haze of the atmosphere.

Her hands were loosely clasped around her knees, and a little evanescent smile played about her lips. Behind her, the great red cliffs of Culver Point reared up against the sapphire of the sky, and she was thinking dreamily of that day, nearly eighteen months ago, when she had been sitting in the self-same place, leaning against the self-same rock, whilst a grey waste of water crept hungrily up to her very feet, threatening to claim her as its prey. And then Errington had come, and straightway all the danger was pa.s.sed.

Looking back, it seemed as though that had always been the way of things. Some menace had arisen, either by land or sea--or even, as at her recital, out of the very intensity of feeling which her singing had inspired--and immediately Max had intervened and the danger had been averted.

She laid her hand caressingly on the sun-warmed surface of the rock.

How many things had happened since she had last leaned against its uncomfortable excrescences! She felt quite affectionately towards it, as one who has journeyed far may feel towards some old landmark of his youth which he finds unaltered on his return, from wandering in strange lands. The immutability of _things_, as compared with the constant fluctuation of life and circ.u.mstance, struck her poignantly. Here was this rock--cast up from the bowels of the earth thousands of years ago and washed by the waves of a million tides--still unchanged and changeless, while, for her, the face of the whole world had altered in little more than a year!

From a young girl-student, one insignificant person among scores of others similarly insignificant, she had become a prominent personality, some one in whom even the great, busy, hurrying world paused to take an interest, and of whom the newspapers wrote eulogistic notices, heralding her as the coming English _prima donna_. She felt rather like a mole which has been working quietly in the dark, tunnelling a pa.s.sage for itself, unseen and unsuspected, and which has suddenly emerged above the surface of the earth, much to its own--and every one else's--astonishment!

Then, too, how utterly changed were her relations with Max Errington!

At the beginning of their acquaintance he had held himself deliberately aloof, but since that evening at Adrienne de Gervais' house, when they had formed a compact of friendship, he had, apparently, completely blotted out from his mind the remembrance of the obstacle, whatever it might be, which he had contended must render any friendship between them out of the question.

And during these last few months Diana had gradually come to know the lofty strain of idealism which ran through the man's whole nature.

Pa.s.sionate, obstinate, unyielding--he could be each and all in turn, but, side by side with these exterior characteristics, there ran a streak of almost feminine delicacy of perception and ideality of purpose. Diana had once told him, laughingly, that he was of the stuff of which martyrs were made in the old days of persecution, and in this she had haphazard lit upon the fundamental force that shaped his actions. The burden which fate, or his own deeds, might lay upon his shoulders, that he would bear, be it what it might.

"Everything's got to be paid for," he had said one day. "It's inevitable. So what's the use of jibing at the price?"

Diana wondered whether the price of that mysterious something which lay in his past, and which not even intimate friendship had revealed to her, would mean that this comradeship must always remain only that--and never anything more?

A warm flush mounted to her face as the unbidden thought crept into her mind. Errington had been down at Crailing most of the summer, staying at Red Gables, and during the long, lazy days they had spent together, motoring, or sailing, or tramping over Dartmoor with the keen moorland air, like sparkling wine, in their nostrils, it seemed as though a deeper note had sounded than merely that of friendship.

And yet he had said nothing, although his eyes had spoken--those vivid blue eyes which sometimes blazed with a white heat of smouldering pa.s.sion that set her heart racing madly within her.

She flinched shyly away from her own thoughts, pulling restlessly at the dried weed which clung about the surface of the rock. A little brown crab ran out from a crevice, and, terrified by the big human hand which he espied meddling with the clump of weed and threatening to interfere with the liberty of the subject, skedaddled sideways into the safety of another cranny.

The hurried rush of the little live thing roused Diana from her day-dreams, and looking up, she saw Max coming to her across the sands.

She watched the proud, free gait of the tall figure with appreciation in her eyes. There was something very individual and characteristic about Max's walk--a suggestion as of immense vitality held in check, together with a certain air of haughty resolution and command.

"I thought I might find you here," he said, when they had shaken hands.

"Did you want me?"

He looked at her with a curious expression in his eyes.

"I always want you, I think," he said simply.

"Well, you seem to have a faculty for always turning up when _I_ want _you_," she replied. "I was just thinking how often you had appeared in the very nick of time. Seriously"--her voice took on a graver note--"I feel I can't ever repay you.--you've come to my help so often."

"There is a way," he said, very low, and then fell silent.

"Tell me," she urged him, smilingly. "I like to pay my debts."

He made no answer, and Diana, suddenly nervous and puzzled, continued a little breathlessly:--

"Have I--have I offended you? I--I thought"--her lips quivered--"we had agreed to be friends."

Max was silent a moment. Then he said slowly:--