The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 39

CHAPTER XIII

Owing to the scantiness of Sunday trains, Marsham did not arrive at Beechcote village till between nine and ten at night. He left his bag at the village inn, tried to ignore the scarcely concealed astonishment with which the well-known master--or reputed master--of Tallyn was received within its extremely modest walls, and walked up to the manor-house. There he had a short conversation with Mrs. Colwood, who did not propose to tell Diana of his arrival till the morning.

"She does not know that I wrote to you," said the little lady, in her pale distress. "She wrote to you herself this evening. I hope I have not done wrong."

Marsham rea.s.sured her, and they had a melancholy consultation. Diana, it seemed, had insisted on getting up that day as usual. She had tottered across to her sitting-room and had spent the day there alone, writing a few letters, or sitting motionless in her chair for hours together. She had scarcely eaten, and Mrs. Colwood was sure she had not slept at all since the shock. It was to be hoped that out of sheer fatigue she might sleep, on this, the second night. But it was essential there should be no fresh excitement, such as the knowledge of Marsham's arrival would certainly arouse.

Mrs. Colwood could hardly bring herself to speak of f.a.n.n.y Merton. She was, of course, still in the house--sulking--and inclined to blame everybody, her dead uncle in particular, rather than herself. But, mercifully, she was departing early on the Monday morning--to some friends in London.

"If you come after breakfast you will find Miss Mallory alone. I will tell her first thing that you are here."

Marsham a.s.sented, and got up to take his leave. Involuntarily he looked round the drawing-room where he had first seen Diana the day before.

Then it was flooded by spring sunshine--not more radiant than her face.

Now a solitary lamp made a faint spot of light amid the shadows of the panelled walls. He and Mrs. Colwood spoke almost in whispers. The old house, generally so winning and sympathetic, seemed to hold itself silent and aloof--as though in this touch of calamity the living were no longer its master and the dead generations woke. And, up-stairs, Diana lay perhaps in her white bed, miserable and alone, not knowing that he was there, within a few yards of her.

Mrs. Colwood noiselessly opened a garden door and so dismissed him. It was moonlight outside, and instead of returning to the inn he took the road up the hill to the crest of the encircling down. Diverging a little to the left, he found himself on the open hill-side, at a point commanding the village and Beechcote itself, ringed by its ancient woods. In the village two dim lights, far apart, were visible; lights, he thought, of sickness or of birth?--for the poor sleep early. One of the Beechcote windows shone with a dim illumination. Was she there, and sleepless? The sky was full of light; the blanched chalk down on which he stood ran northward in a shining curve, bare in the moon; but in the hollow below, and on the horizon, the dark huddled woods kept watch, guarding the secrets of night. The owls were calling in the trees behind him--some in faint prolonged cry, one in a sharp shrieking note.

And at whiles a train rushed upon the ear, held it, and died away; or a breeze crept among the dead beech leaves at his feet. Otherwise not a sound or show of life; Marsham was alone with night and himself.

Twenty-four hours--little more--since on that same hill-side he had held Diana in his arms in the first rapture of love. What was it that had changed? How was it--for he was frank with himself--that the love which had been then the top and completion of his life, the angel of all good-fortune within and without, had become now, to some extent, a burden to be borne, an obligation to be met?

Certainly, he loved her well. But she came to him now, bringing as her marriage portion, not easy joy and success, the full years of prosperity and ambition, but poverty, effort, a certain measure of disgrace, and the perpetual presence of a ghastly and heart-breaking memory. He shrank from this last in a positive and sharp impatience. Why should Juliet Sparling's crime affect him?--depress the vigor and cheerfulness of his life?

As to the effort before him, he felt toward it as a man of weak unpractised muscle who endeavors with straining to raise a physical weight. He would make the effort, but it would tax his whole strength.

As he strolled along the down, dismally smoking and pondering, he made himself contemplate the then and now--taking stock, as it were, of his life. In this truth-compelling darkness, apart from the stimulus of his mother's tyranny, he felt himself to be two men: one in love with Diana, the other in love with success and political ambition, and money as the agent and servant of both. He had never for one moment envisaged the first love--Diana--as the alternative to, or subst.i.tute for the second love--success. As he had conceived her up to twenty-four hours before, Diana was to be, indeed, one of the chief elements and ministers of success. In winning her, he was, in fact, to make the best of both worlds. A certain cool a.n.a.lytic gift that he possessed put all this plainly before him. And now it must be a choice between Diana and all those other desirable things.

Take the poverty first. What would it amount to? He knew approximately what was Diana's fortune. He had meant--with easy generosity--to leave it all in her hands, to do what she would with. Now, until his mother came to her senses, they must chiefly depend upon it. What could he add to it? He had been called to the Bar, but had never practised.

Directorships no doubt, he might get, like other men; though not so easily now, if it was to be known that his mother meant to make a pauper of him. And once a man whom he had met in political life, who was no doubt ignorant of his private circ.u.mstances, had sounded him as to whether he would become the London correspondent of a great American paper. He had laughed then, good-humoredly, at the proposal. Perhaps the thing might still be open. It would mean a few extra hundreds.

He laughed again as he thought of it, but not good-humoredly. The whole thing was so monstrous! His mother had close on twenty thousand a year!

For all her puritanical training she liked luxury--of a certain kind--and had brought up her son in it. Marsham had never gambled or speculated or raced. It was part of his democratic creed and his Quaker Ancestry to despise such modes of wasting money, and to be scornful of the men who indulged in them. But the best of housing, service, and clothes; the best shooting, whether in England or Scotland; the best golfing, fishing, and travelling: all these had come to him year after year since his boyhood, without question. His mother, of course, had provided the majority of them, for his own small income and his allowance from her were absorbed by his personal expenses, his Parliamentary life, and the subscriptions to the party, which--in addition to his mother's--made him, as he was well aware, a person of importance in its ranks, quite apart from his record in the House.

Now all that must be given up. He would be reduced to an income--including what he imagined to be Diana's--of less than half his personal spending hitherto; and those vast perspectives implied in the inheritance at his mother's death of his father's half million must also be renounced.

No doubt he could just maintain himself in Parliament. But everything--judged by the standards he had been brought up in--would be difficult where everything till now had been ease.

He knew his mother too well to doubt her stubbornness, and his feeling was bitter, indeed. Bitter, too, against his father, who had left him in this plight. Why had his father distrusted and wronged him so? He recalled with discomfort certain collisions of his youth; certain disappointments at school and college he had inflicted on his father's ambition; certain lectures and gibes from that strong mouth, in his early manhood. Absurd! If his father had had to do with a really spendthrift and unsatisfactory son, there might have been some sense in it. But for these trifles--these suspicions--these foolish notions of a doctrinaire--to inflict this stigma and this yoke on him all his days!

Suddenly his wanderings along the moon-lit hill came to a stand-still.

For he recognized the hollow in the chalk--the gnarled thorn--the wide outlook. He stood gazing about him--a shamed lover; conscious of a dozen contradictory feelings. Beautiful and tender Diana!--"Stick to her, Oliver!--she is worth it!" Chide's eager and peremptory tone smote on the inward ear. Of course he would stick to her. The only thing which it gave him any pleasure to remember in this nightmare of a day was his own answer to Ferrier's suggestion that Diana might release him: "Do you imagine I could be such a hound as to let her?" As he said it, he had been conscious that the words rang well; that he had struck the right att.i.tude, and done the right thing. Of course he had done the right thing! What would he, or any other decent person, have thought of a man who could draw back from his word, for such a cause?

No!--he resigned himself. He would do nothing mean and ungentlemanly. A policy of waiting and diplomacy should be tried. Ferrier might be of some use. But, if nothing availed, he must marry and make the best of it. He wondered to what charitable societies his mother would leave her money!

Slowly he strolled back along the hill. That dim light, high up on the shrouded walls of Beechcote, seemed to go with him, softly, insistently reminding him of Diana. The thought of her moved him deeply. He longed to have her in his arms, to comfort her, to feel her dependent on him for the recovery of joy and vitality. It was only by an obstinate and eager dwelling upon her sweetness and charm that he could protect himself against the rise of an invading wave of repugnance and depression; the same repugnance, the same instinctive longing to escape, which he had always felt, as boy or man, in the presence of sickness, or death, or mourning.

Marsham had been long asleep in his queer little room at "The Green Man." The last lights were out in the village, and the moon had set.

Diana stole out of bed; Muriel must not hear her, Muriel whose eyes were already so tired and tear-worn with another's grief. She went to the window, and, throwing a shawl over her, she knelt there, looking out.

She was dimly conscious of stars, of the hill, the woods; what she really _saw_ was a prison room as she was able to imagine it, and her mother lying there--her young mother--only four years older than she, Diana, was now. Or again she saw the court of law--the judge in the black cap--and her mother looking up. f.a.n.n.y had said she was small and slight--with dark hair.

The strange frozen horror of it made tears--or sleep--or rest--impossible. She did not think much of Marsham; she could hardly remember what she had written to him. Love was only another anguish. Nor could it protect her from the images which pursued her. The only thought which seemed to soothe the torture of imagination was the thought stamped on her brain tissue by the long inheritance of centuries--the thought of Christ on Calvary. "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" The words repeated themselves again and again. She did not pray in words. But her agony crept to the foot of what has become through the action and interaction of two thousand years, the typical and representative agony of the world, and, clinging there, made wild appeal, like the generations before her, to a G.o.d in whose hand lie the creatures of His will.

"Mrs. Colwood said I might come and say good-bye to you," said f.a.n.n.y Merton, holding her head high.

She stood on the threshold of Diana's little sitting-room, looking in.

There was an injured pride in her bearing, balanced by a certain anxiety which seemed to keep it within bounds.

"Please come in," said Diana.

She rose with difficulty from the table where she was forcing herself to write a letter. Had she followed her own will she would have been up at her usual time and down to breakfast. But she had turned faint while dressing, and Mrs. Colwood had persuaded her to let some tea be brought up-stairs.

f.a.n.n.y came in, half closing the door.

"Well, I'm off," she said, flushing. "I dare say you won't want to see _me_ again."

Diana came feebly forward, clinging to the chairs.

"It wasn't your fault. I must have known--some time."

f.a.n.n.y looked at her uneasily.

"Well, of course, that's true. But I dare say I--well I'm no good at beating about the bush, never was! And I was in a temper, too--that was at the bottom of it."

Diana made no reply. Her eyes, magnified by exhaustion and pallor, seemed to be keeping a pitiful shrinking watch lest she should be hurt again--past bearing. It was like the shrinking of a child that has been tortured, from its tormentor.

"You are going to London?"

"Yes. You remember those Devonshire people I went to stay with? One of the girls is up in London with her aunt. I'm going to board with them a bit."

"My lawyers will send the thousand pounds to Aunt Merton when they have arranged for it," said Diana, quietly. "Is that what you wish?"

A look of relief she could not conceal slipped into f.a.n.n.y's countenance.

"You're going to give it us--after all?" she said, stumbling over the words.

"I promised to give it you."

f.a.n.n.y fidgeted, but even her perceptions told her that further thanks would be out of place.

"Mother'll write to you, of course. And you'd better send fifty pounds of it to me. I can't go home under three months, and I shall run short."

"Very well," said Diana.

"Good-bye," said f.a.n.n.y, coming a little nearer. Then she looked round her, with a first genuine impulse of something like remorse--if the word is not too strong. It was rather, perhaps, a consciousness of having managed her opportunities extremely badly. "I'm sorry you didn't like me." she said, abruptly, "and I didn't mean to be nasty."