The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 54

"Give her time, my dear, and don't talk nonsense!"

"It isn't nonsense! I tell you I felt just as I did when I went to see Mary Theed, years ago--you remember that pretty cousin of mine who became a Carmelite nun?--for the first time after she had taken the veil. She spoke to one from another world--it gave one the shivers!--and was just as smiling and cheerful over it as Diana--and it was just as ghastly and unbearable and abominable--as this is."

"Well, then," said the doctor, after a pause, "I suppose she'll take to good works. I hope you can provide her with a lot of hopeless cases in the village. Did she mention Marsham at all?"

"Not exactly. But she asked about the election--"

"The writs are out," interrupted the doctor. "I see the first borough elections are fixed for three weeks hence; ours will be one of the last of the counties; six weeks to-day."

"I told her you thought he would get in."

"Yes--by the skin of his teeth. All his real popularity has vanished like smoke. But there's the big estate--and his mother's money--and the collieries."

"The Vicar tells me the colliers are discontented--all through the district--and there may be a big strike--"

"Yes, perhaps in the autumn, when the three years' agreement comes to an end--not yet. Marsham's vote will run down heavily in the mining villages, but it'll serve--this time. They won't put the other man in."

Mrs. Roughsedge rose to take off her things, remarking, as she moved away, that Marsham was said to be holding meetings nightly already, and that Lady Lucy and Miss Drake were both hard at work.

"Miss Drake?" said the doctor, looking up. "Handsome girl! I saw Marsham in a dog-cart with her yesterday afternoon."

Mrs. Roughsedge flushed an angry red, but she said nothing. She was enc.u.mbered with parcels, and her husband rose to open the door for her.

He stooped and looked into her face.

"You didn't say anything about _that_, Patricia, I'll be bound!"

Meanwhile, Diana was wandering about the Beechcote garden, with her hands full of roses, just gathered. The garden glowed under the westering sun. In the field just below it the silvery lines of new-cut hay lay hot and fragrant in the quivering light. The woods on the hill-side were at the richest moment of their new life, the earth-forces swelling and rioting through every root and branch, wild roses climbing every hedge--the miracle of summer at its height.

Diana sat down upon a gra.s.s-bank, to look and dream. The flowers dropped beside her; she propped her face on her hands.

The home-coming had been hard. And perhaps the element in it she had felt most difficult to bear had been the universal sympathy with which she had been greeted. It spoke from the faces of the poor--the men and women, the lads and girls of the village; with their looks of curiosity, sometimes frank, sometimes furtive or embarra.s.sed. It was more politely disguised in the manners and tones of the gentle people; but everywhere it was evident; and sometimes it was beyond her endurance.

She could not help imagining the talk about her in her absence; the discussion of the case in the country-houses or in the village. To the village people, unused to the fine discussions which turn on motive and environment, and slow to revise an old opinion, she was just the daughter--

She covered her eyes--one hideous word ringing brutally, involuntarily, through her brain. By a kind of miserable obsession the talk in the village public-houses shaped itself in her mind. "Ay, they didn't hang her because she was a lady. She got off, trust her! But if it had been you or me--"

She rose, trembling, trying to shake off the horror, walking vaguely through the garden into the fields, as though to escape it. But the horror pursued her, only in different forms. Among the educated people--people who liked dissecting "interesting" or "mysterious"

crimes--there had been no doubt long discussions of Sir James Chide's letter to the _Times_, of Sir Francis Wing's confession. But through all the talk, rustic or refined, she heard the name of her mother bandied; forever soiled and dishonored; with no right to privacy or courtesy any more--"Juliet Sparling" to all the world: the loafer at the street corner--the drunkard in the tavern--

The thought of this vast publicity, this careless or cruel scorn of the big world--toward one so frail, so anguished, so helpless in death--clutched Diana many times in each day and night. And it led to that perpetual image in the mind which we saw haunting her in the first hours of her grief, as though she carried her dying mother in her arms, pa.s.sionately clasping and protecting her, their faces turned to each other, and hidden from all eyes besides.

Also, it deadened in her the sense of her own case--in relation to the gossip of the neighborhood. Ostrich-like, she persuaded herself that not many people could have known anything about her five days' engagement.

Dear kind folk like the Roughsedges would not talk of it, nor Lady Lucy surely. And Oliver himself--never!

She had reached a point in the field walk where the hill-side opened to her right, and the little winding path was disclosed which had been to her on that mild February evening the path of Paradise. She stood still a moment, looking upward, the deep sob of loss rising in her throat.

But she wrestled with herself, and presently turned back to the house, calm and self-possessed. There were things to be thankful for. She knew the worst. And she felt herself singularly set free--from ordinary conventions and judgments. n.o.body could ever quarrel with her if, now that she had come back, she lived her own life in her own way. n.o.body could blame her--surely most people would approve her--if she stood aloof from ordinary society, and ordinary gayeties for a while, at any rate. Oh! she would do nothing singular or rude. But she was often tired and weak--not physically, but in mind. Mrs. Roughsedge knew--and Muriel.

Dear Hugh Roughsedge!--he was indeed a faithful understanding friend.

She was proud of his letters; she was proud of his conduct in the short campaign just over; she looked forward to his return in the autumn. But he must not cherish foolish thoughts or wishes. She would never marry.

What Lady Lucy said was true. She had probably no right to marry. She stood apart.

But--but--she must not be asked yet to give herself to any great mission--any set task of charity or philanthropy. Her poor heart fluttered within her at the thought, and she clung gratefully to the recollection of Marion's imperious words to her. That exaltation with which, in February, she had spoken to the Vicar of going to the East End to work had dropped--quite dropped.

Of course, there was a child in the village--a dear child--ill and wasting--in a spinal jacket, for whom one would do anything--just anything! And there was Betty Dyson--plucky, cheerful old soul. But that was another matter.

What, she asked, had she to give the poor? She wanted guiding and helping and putting in the right way herself. She could not preach to any one--wrestle with any one. And ought one to make out of others' woes plasters for one's own? To use the poor as the means of a spiritual "cure" seemed a dubious indecent thing; more than a touch in it of arrogance--or sacrilege.

Meanwhile she had been fighting her fight in the old ways. She had been falling back on her education, appealing to books and thought, reminding herself of what the life of the mind had been to her father in his misery, and of those means of cultivating it to which he would certainly have commended her. She was trying to learn a new foreign language, and, under Marion Vincent's urging, the table in the little sitting-room was piled with books on social and industrial matters, which she diligently read and pondered.

It was all struggle and effort. But it had brought her some reward. And especially through Marion Vincent's letters, and through the long day with Marion in London, which she had now to look back upon. For Miss Vincent and Frobisher had returned, and Marion was once more in her Stepney rooms. She was apparently not much worse; would allow no talk about herself; and though she had quietly relinquished all her old activities, her room was still the centre it had long been for the London thinker and reformer.

Diana found there an infinity to learn. The sages and saints, it seemed, are of all sides and all opinions. That had not been the lesson of her youth. In a comforting heat of prejudice her father had found relief from suffering, and his creeds had been fused with her young blood.

Lately she had seen their opposites embodied in a woman from whom she shrank in repulsion--whose name never pa.s.sed her lips--Oliver's sister--who had trampled on her in her misery. Yet here, in Marion's dingy lodging, she saw the very same ideas which Isabel Fotheringham made hateful, clothed in light, speaking from the rugged or n.o.ble faces of men and women who saw in them the salvation of their kind.

The intellect in Diana, the critical instinct resisted. And, moreover, to have abandoned any fraction of the conservative and traditional beliefs in which she had been reared was impossible for her of all women; it would have seemed to her that she was thereby leaving those two suffering ones, whom only her love sheltered, still lonelier in death. So, beneath the clatter of talk and opinion, run the deep omnipotent tides of our real being.

But if the mind resisted, the heart felt, and therewith, the soul--that total personality which absorbs and trans.m.u.tes the contradictions of life--grew kinder and gentler within her.

One day, after a discussion on votes for women which had taken place beside Marion's sofa, Diana, when the talkers were gone, had thrown herself on her friend.

"Dear, you can't wish it!--you can't believe it! To brutalize--uns.e.x us!"

Marion raised herself on her elbow, and looked down the narrow cross street beneath the windows of her lodging. It was a stifling evening.

The street was strewn with refuse, the odors from it filled the room.

Ragged children with smeared faces were sitting or playing listlessly in the gutters. The public-house at the corner was full of animation, and women were pa.s.sing in and out. Through the roar of traffic from the main street beyond a nearer sound persisted: a note of wailing--the wailing of babes.

"There are the uns.e.xed!" said Marion, panting. "Is their brutalization the price we pay for our refinement?" Then, as she sank back: "Try anything--everything--to change that."

Diana pressed the speaker's hand to her lips.

But from Marion Vincent, the girl's thoughts, as she wandered in the summer garden, had pa.s.sed on to the news which Mrs. Roughsedge had brought her. Oliver was speaking every night, almost, in the villages round Beechcote. Last week he had spoken at Beechcote itself. Since Mrs.

Roughsedge's visit, Diana had borrowed the local paper from Brown, and had read two of Oliver's speeches therein reported. As she looked up to the downs, or caught through the nearer trees the lines of distant woods, it was as though the whole scene--earth and air--were once more haunted for her by Oliver--his presence--his voice. Beechcote lay on the high-road from Tallyn to Duns...o...b.., the chief town of the division.

Several times a week, at least, he must pa.s.s the gate. At any moment they might meet face to face.

The sooner the better! Unless she abandoned Beechcote, they must learn to meet on the footing of ordinary acquaintances; and it were best done quickly.

Voices on the lawn! Diana, peeping through the trees, beheld the Vicar in conversation with Muriel Colwood. She turned and fled, pausing at last in the deepest covert of the wood, breathless and a little ashamed.

She had seen him once since her return. Everybody was so kind to her, the Vicar, the Miss Bertrams--everybody; only the pity and the kindness burned so. She wrestled with these feelings in the wood, but she none the less kept a thick screen between herself and Mr. Lavery.

She could never forget that night of her misery when--good man that he was!--he had brought her the message of his faith.

But the great melting moments of life are rare, and the tracts between are full of small frictions. What an incredible sermon he had preached on the preceding Sunday! That any minister of the national church--representing all sorts and conditions of men--should think it right to bring his party politics into the pulpit in that way! Unseemly!