Within a very few days of their “settling down” at Rose Lea, everybody
in the neighbourhood,--that is to say, everybody of “county”
standing--that height of social magnificence--had left their cards on
Mr. and Mrs. Polydore May. They had, of course, previously made the
usual private “kind inquiries,”--first as to the newcomers’ financial
position, and next as to their respectability, and both were found to
be unimpeachable. One of the most curious circumstances in this curious
world is the strictness with which certain little bipeds inquire into
the reported life and conduct of other little bipeds, the inquisitors
themselves being generally the most doubtful characters.
“Funny little man, that Mr. May!” said the woman leader of the “hunting
set,” who played bridge all day and as far into the night as she could.
“Like a retired tradesman! Must have sold cheese and butter at some
time of his life!”
“Oh, no!” explained a male intimate, whose physiognomy strangely
resembled that of the fox he chased all the winter. “He made his pile
in copper.”
“Oh, did he? Then he’s quite decent?”
“Quite!”
“That daughter of his----”
Here a snigger went round the “county” company. They were discussing
the new arrivals at their afternoon tea.
“Poor old thing!”
“Must be forty if she’s a day!”
“Oh, give the dear ‘girl’ forty-five at least!” said a Chivalrous
Youth, declining tea, and helping himself to a whisky-soda at the
side-board.
“They say she was jilted.”
“No wonder!” And a bleating laugh followed this suggestion.
“I suppose,” remarked one man of gloomy countenance and dyspeptic eye,
“I suppose it’s really unpardonable for a woman to get out of her
twenties and remain unmarried, but if it happens so I don’t see what’s
to be done with her.”
“Smother her!” said the Chivalrous Youth, drinking his whisky.
Everybody laughed. What a witty boy he was!--no wonder his mother was
proud of him!
“We shall have to ask her to one or two tennis parties,” said the woman
who had first spoken. “We can’t leave her out altogether.”
“She doesn’t play,” said the gloomy man. “She told me so. She reads
Greek.”
A shrill chorus of giggles in falsetto greeted this announcement.
“Reads Greek! How perfectly dreadful! A blue-stocking!”
“No! Really! It’s _too_ weird!” exclaimed the bridge-and-hunting lady.
“I hope she’s not an ‘art’ person?”
“No.” And the gloomy man began to be cheerful, seeing that his talk
had awakened a little interest. “No, not at all. She told me she liked
pictures, but hated artists. I said she couldn’t have pictures without
artists, and she agreed, but observed that fortunately all the finest
pictures of the world were painted by artists who were dead. Curious
way of putting it!”
“Going off it?” queried the Chivalrous Youth, having now drained his
tumbler of drink.
“No, I don’t think so. The fact is--er--she--well, she appeared to me
to be rather--er--clever!”
Clever? Oh, surely not! The “county” dames almost shuddered. Clever?
She couldn’t be, you know!--not with that spoilt old-young sort of
face! And her hair! All dyed, of course! And her voice was very
affected, wasn’t it? Yes!--almost as if she were trying to imitate
Sarah Bernhardt! So stupid in a woman of her age! She ought to know
better!
So the little vicious, poisonous, gossiping mouths jabbered and hissed
about the woman who was “left” like a forgotten apple on a bough to
wither and drop unregarded to the ground. No one had anything kind to
say of her. It mattered not at all that they were not really acquainted
with her personally or sufficiently to be able to form an opinion,--the
point with these precious sort of persons was, and always is, that an
unwanted feminine nonentity had arrived in the neighbourhood who was
superfluous, and therefore likely to be tiresome.
“One can always leave her out of a dinner invitation,” said one woman,
thoughtfully. “It will be quite enough to ask Mr. and Mrs.”
“Oh, quite!”
Thus it was settled; meanwhile Diana, happily unconscious of any
discussion concerning her, went on the even tenor of her way, keeping
house for her parents, reading her favourite authors, studying her
“scientific” subjects, and working at her tapestry without any real
companionship save that of books and her own thoughts, and the constant
delight she had in the profusion of flowers with which the gardens of
Rose Lea abounded. These she arranged with exquisite taste and effect
in the various rooms, so artistically that on one occasion the vicar
of the parish, quite a dull, unimaginative man, was moved, during an
afternoon call, to compliment Mrs. Polydore May on the remarkable grace
with which some branches of roses were grouped in a vase on the table.
Mrs. May looked at them sleepily and smiled.
“Very pretty, yes!” she murmured. “I used to arrange every flower
myself, but now my daughter Diana does it for me. You see she can give
her time to it,--she has nothing else to do.”
The vicar smiled the usual smile of polite agreement to everything
which always gives a touch of sickliness to the most open countenance,
and said no more. Diana was not present, so she did not hear that her
mother considered she “had nothing else to do” but arrange flowers.
Even if she had heard it, she would hardly have contradicted it; it
was one of those things which she would not have thought worth while
arguing about. The fact that she governed all the domestic working
of the house so that it ran like a perfectly-going machine on silent
and well-oiled wheels, required no emphasis,--at least, not in her
opinion,--and though she knew that not one of the servants would have
stayed in Mrs. May’s service or put up with her vague, fussy, and often
sulky disposition, unless she, Diana, had “managed” them, she took no
credit to herself for the comfortable and well-ordered condition of
things under which her selfish old parents enjoyed their existence.
That she “had nothing else to do but arrange flowers” was a sort of
house tradition with “Pa” and “Ma” through which they found all manner
of excuse for saddling her with as much work as they could possibly
give her in the way of constant attendance on themselves. But she did
not mind. She was obsessed by the “Duty” fetish, which too often makes
prisoners and slaves of those who should be free. Like all virtues,
devotion to duty can become a vice if carried to excess, and it is
unquestionably a vice when it binds unselfish souls to unworthy and
tyrannical taskmasters.
The summer moved on in shining weeks of sunlight and still air, and
Rose Lea lost nothing of its charm for Diana, despite the taint of the
commonplace with which the eating and sleeping silkworm-lives of her
parents invested it. Now and then a few visitors came from London,--men
and women of the usual dull type, bringing no entertainment in
themselves, and whose stay only meant a little more expenditure and
a more lavish display of food. One or two portly club friends of
James Polydore came to play golf and drink whisky with him, and they
condescended to converse with Diana at meals, because, perforce, they
thought they must,--but meals being over, they gave her no further
consideration, except to remark casually one to another: “Pity old
Polydore couldn’t have got that daughter off his hands!” And the long,
lovely month of August was nearly at its end when an incident happened
which, like the small displacement of earth that loosens an avalanche,
swept away all the old order of things, giving place to a new heaven
and a new earth so far as Diana was concerned.
It had been an exceedingly warm day, and nightfall was more than
usually welcome after the wide glare of the long, sunlit hours.
Dinner was over, and Mr. and Mrs. Polydore May, fed to repletion and
stimulated by two or three glasses of excellent champagne, were resting
in a _dolce-far-niente_ condition, each cushioned within a deep and
luxurious arm-chair placed on either side of the open French windows
of the drawing-room. The lawn in front of them was bathed in a lovely
light reflected from the after-glow of the vanished sun and a pale
glimmer from the risen half-moon, which hung in soft brilliance over
the eastern half of the quiet sea. Diana had left her parents to their
after-dinner somnolence, and was walking alone in the garden, up and
down a grass path between two rose hedges. She was within call should
she be wanted by either “Pa” or “Ma,” but they were not aware of her
close proximity. Mr. May was smoking an exceptionally choice cigar,--he
was in one of his “juvenile” moods, and for once was not inclined to
take his usual “cat-nap” or waking doze. He had been to a tennis party
that afternoon and had worn, with a “young man’s fancy” a young man’s
flannels, happily unconscious of the weird appearance he presented in
that unsuitable attire,--and, encouraged by the laughter and applause
of the more youthful players, who looked upon him as the “comic man”
of the piece, he had acquitted himself tolerably well. So that for the
moment he had cast off the dignity and weight of years, and the very
air with which he smoked his cigar, flicking off the burnt ash now and
again in the affected style of a “young blood about town,” expressed
the fact that he considered himself more than a merely “well-preserved”
man, and that if justice were done him he would be admitted to be “a
violet in the youth of primy nature.”
His better-half was not in quite such pleasant humour; she was
self-complacent enough, but the heat of the day had caused her to feel
stouter and more unwieldy than usual, and inclined to wish:
“Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and dissolve itself into a dew!”
When her husband lit his cigar, she had closed her eyes, thinking:
“Now there will be a little peace!” knowing that a good cigar to an
irritable man is like the bottle to a screaming baby. But Mr. May was
disposed to talk, just as he was disposed to admire the contour of his
little finger whenever he drew his cigar from his mouth or put it back
again.
“There were some smart girls playing tennis to-day,” he presently
remarked. “One of them I thought very pretty. She was about seventeen.”
His wife yawned expansively. She made no comment.
“She was my partner,” went on Mr. May. “As skittish as you please!”
Mrs. May cuddled herself together among her cushions. The slightest
glimmer of a smile lifted the corners of her pursy mouth towards her
parsimonious nose. Her husband essayed once more the fascinating
“flick” of burnt ash from his cigar.
“They’d have been as dull as a sermon at tea-time if it hadn’t been for
me,” he resumed. “You see, I kept the ball rolling.”
“Naturally!--it’s tennis,” murmured his wife, drowsily.
“Don’t be a fool, Margaret! I mean I keep people amused.”
“I’m sure you do!” his “Margaret” agreed, as she smothered another
yawn. “You’re the most amusing man I know!”
“Glad you admit it!” he said, captiously. “Not being amusing yourself,
you ought to thank God you’ve got an amusing husband!”
This time Mrs. May emitted a bleating giggle.
“I do!”
“Now if it were not for Diana----”
His wife opened her eyes.
“What about Diana?”
“Well--Diana--put it how you like, but she’s Diana. She’ll never
be anything else! Our daughter, oh, yes!--I know all that!--hang
sentiment! Everybody calls her an old maid--and she’s in the way.”
A light-footed figure pacing up and down the grass walk, unseen between
the two rose hedges close by, came to a sudden pause--listening.
“She’s in the way,” repeated Mr. May, with somewhat louder emphasis.
“Unmarried women of a certain age always are, you know. You can’t
class them with young people, and they don’t like being parcelled
off with old folks. They’re out of it altogether unless they’ve got
something to do which takes them away from their homes and saves them
from becoming a social nuisance. They’re superfluous. ‘How is your
daughter?’ the women here ask me, with a kind of pitying smile, as
though she had the plague, or was recovering from small-pox. To be a
spinster over thirty seems to them a kind of illness.”
“Well, it’s an illness that cannot be cured with Diana now!” sighed
Mrs. May. “Quite hopeless!”
“Quite.” And her husband gave his chronic snort of ill-tempered
defiance. “It’s a most unfortunate thing--especially for _me_. You see,
when I go about with a daughter like Diana, it makes me seem so old!”
“And me!” she interposed. “You talk only of yourself,--don’t forget me!”
Mr. May laughed--a short, sardonic laugh.
“_You!_ My dear Margaret, I don’t wish to be unkind, but really _you_
needn’t worry yourself on that score! Surely you don’t suppose _you’ll_
ever look young again? Think of your size, Margaret!--think of your
size!”
Somewhat roused from her customary inertia by this remark, Mrs. May
pulled herself up in her chair with an assumption of dignity.
“You are very coarse, James,” she said--“very coarse indeed! I consider
that I look as young as you do any day,--I ought to, for you are
fully eight years my senior--I daresay more, for I doubt if you gave
your true age when I married you. You want to play the young man, and
you only make yourself ridiculous,--I have no wish to play the young
woman, but certainly Diana, with her poor, thin face--getting so
many wrinkles, too!--does make me seem older than I am. She has aged
terribly the last three or four years.”
“She’ll never see forty again,” said Mr. May, tersely.
Mrs. May rolled up her eyes in pained protest.
“Why _say_ it?” she expostulated. “You only give yourself and me away!
We are her parents!”
“I don’t say it in public,” he replied. “Catch me! But it’s true. Let
me see!--why, Diana was born in----”
His wife gave an angry gesture.
“Never mind when she was born!” she said, with a tremble as of tears in
her voice. “You needn’t recall it! Our only child!--and she has spoilt
her life and mine too!”
A faint whimper escaped her, and she put a filmy handkerchief to her
eyes.
Mr. May took no notice. For women’s tears he had a sovereign contempt.
“The fact is,” he said, judicially, “we ought to have trained her
to do something useful. Nursing, or doctoring, or dressmaking, or
type-writing. She would have had her business to attend to, which would
have kept her away from _Us_,--and I--we--could have gone about free as
air. We need never have mentioned that we had a daughter.”
Mrs. May looked scrutinizingly at her lace handkerchief. She remembered
it had cost a couple of guineas, and now there was a hole in it. She
must tell Diana to mend it. With this thought uppermost in her always
chaotic mind, she said between two long-drawn sighs:
“After all, James, poor Diana does her best. She is very useful in the
house.”
“Stuff and nonsense! She does nothing at all! She spoils the servants,
if that is what you mean,--allows them to have their own way a great
deal too much, in my opinion! It amuses her to play at housekeeping.”
“She doesn’t play at it,” remonstrated Mrs. May, weakly endeavouring
to espouse the cause of justice. “She is very earnest and painstaking
about it, and does it very well. She keeps down expenses, and saves me
a great deal of worry.”
“Hm-m-m!” growled her husband. “It would do you good to be worried a
bit! Take down your weight! Of course, what can’t be cured must be
endured, but I’ve spoken the brutal truth,--Diana, at her age, and with
her looks, and all her chances of marriage gone, is _in the way_. For
instance, suppose I go to a new neighbour’s house, and I’m asked ‘Have
you any family?’--I reply: ‘Yes, one daughter.’ Then some fool of a
woman says: ‘Oh, do bring your girl with you next time!’ Well, she’s
not a ‘girl.’ I don’t wish to say she’s not, but if I do take her with
me ‘next time,’ everybody is surprised. You see, when they look at
_me_, they expect my daughter to be quite a young person.”
Mrs. May sank gradually back in her chair, as though she were slowly
pushed by an invisible finger.
“_Do_ they?” The query was almost inaudible.
“Of course they do! And upon my soul, it’s rather trying to a man! You
ought to sympathise, but you don’t!”
“Well, I really can’t see what’s to be done!” she murmured, closing
her eyes in sheer weariness. “Diana cannot help getting older, poor
thing!--and she’s our child----”
“Don’t I know she’s our child?” he snapped out. “What do you keep on
telling me that for?”
“Why, I mean that you can’t turn her out of the house, or say you don’t
want her, or anything of that sort. But I’m sure”--here, the round,
pale eyes opened appealingly over the buff-coloured cheeks--“I’m sure,
James, that if you don’t wish to take her out with you she’d never
dream of expecting you to do so. She’s very unselfish,--besides, she’s
so happy with her books.”
“Books--books!--hang books!” he exclaimed, irascibly. “There’s another
drawback! If there’s one thing people object to more than another, it’s
a bookish spinster! Any assumption of knowledge in a woman is quite
enough to keep her out of society!”
His wife yawned.
“I dare say!” she admitted. “But I can’t help it.”
“You want to go to sleep,--that’s what _you_ want!” said Mr. May,
contemptuously. “Well, sleep!--I’m going over to the Club.”
She murmured an inward “Thank God!” and settled down in her chair to
her deferred and much desired doze. Mr. May threw on his cap,--one of a
jaunty shape, which he fondly imagined gave him the look of a dashing
sportsman of some thirty summers--and stepped out on to the now fully
moonlit lawn, crossing it at as “swinging” a pace as his little legs
would allow him, and making for the high road just outside the garden
gates.
Not till he had disappeared did the figure which had stayed
statuesquely still between the two rose hedges show any sign of
movement. Then it stirred, its dark grey draperies swaying like mist in
a light wind. The bright moonlight fell on its uplifted face,--Diana’s
face, pale always, but paler than ever in that ghostly radiance from
the skies. She had heard all,--and there was a curious sense of
tightening pain in her throat and round her heart, as if an overflow
of tears or laughter struggled against repression. She had stood in
such a motionless attitude of strained attention that her limbs felt
cramped and stiff, so that when she began to walk it was almost with
difficulty. She turned her back to the house and went towards the sea,
noiselessly opening the little white gate that led to the shore. She
was soon on the smooth soft sand where the little wet pools glittered
like silver in the moon, and, going to the edge of the sea, she stood
awhile, watching wave after wave glide up in small, fine lines and
break at her feet in a delicate fringe of snowy foam. She was not
conscious of any particularly keen grief or hurt feeling at the verdict
of her general tiresomeness which her parents had passed upon her,--her
thoughts were not in any way troubled; she only felt that the last
thing she had clung to as giving value to life,--her affection and duty
towards the old people,--was counted as valueless,--she was merely “in
the way.” Watching the waves, she smiled,--a pitiful little smile.
“Poor old dears!” she said, tenderly,--and again: “Poor old dears!”
Then there arose within her another impulse,--a suggestion almost
wildly beautiful,--the idea of freedom! No one wanted her,--not even
her father or her mother. Then was she not at liberty? Could she not
go where she liked? Surely! Just as a light globe of thistledown is
blown by the wind to fall where it will, so she could drift with the
movement of casual things anywhere,--so long as she troubled nobody by
her existence.
“The world is wide!” she said, half-aloud, stretching her arms with an
unconscious gesture of appeal towards the sea. “I have stayed too long
in one small corner of it!”
The little waves plashed one upon the other with a musical whisper as
though they agreed with her thought,--and yet--yet there was something
appalling in the utter loneliness of her heart. No one loved her,--no
one wanted her! She was “in the way.” Smarting tears filled her
eyes,--but they angered her by their confession of weakness, and she
dashed them away with a quick, defiant hand. She began to consider her
position coldly and critically. Her thoughts soon ranged themselves
in order like obedient soldiers at drill under their commanding
officer,--each in its place and ready for action. It was useless to
expect help or sympathy from anyone,--she would not get it. She must
stand alone. It is perhaps a little hard and difficult to stand alone
when one is a woman; it used to be considered cruel and pitiful, but
in these days it has become such a matter of course that no one thinks
about it or cares. The nature and temperament of woman as God made her,
have not altered; with all her “advancement,” she is just as amative,
as credulous, as tender, as maternal as ever she was, longing for man’s
love as her “right,” which it is, and becoming hardened and embittered
when this right is withheld from her,--but the rush of the time is too
swift and precipitous for any display of masculine chivalry on her
behalf; she has elected to be considered co-equal with man, and she is
now, after a considerable tussle, to be given her “chance.” What she
will make of the long-deferred privilege remains a matter of conjecture.
Slowly, and with a vague reluctance, Diana turned away from the moonlit
sea; the murmur of the little waves followed her, like suggestive
whispers. A curious change had taken place in her mentality during the
last few minutes. She, who was accustomed to think only of others, now
thought closely and consistently of herself. She moved quietly towards
the house, gliding like a grey ghost across the lawn which showed
almost white in the spreading radiance of the moon,--the drawing-room
windows were still open, and Mrs. May was still comfortably ensconced
in her arm-chair, sleeping soundly and snoring hideously. Her daughter
came up and stood beside her, quite unobserved. Nothing could have been
more unlovely than the aspect she presented, sunk among the cushions,
a mere adipose heap, with her fat cheeks, small nose and open mouth
protruding above the folds of a grey woollen shawl which was her
favourite evening wear, her resemblance to a pig being more striking
than pleasing. But Diana’s watching face expressed nothing but the
gentlest solicitude.
“Poor mother!” she sighed to herself. “She’s tired! And--and of course,
it’s natural she should be disappointed in me. I’ve not been a success!
Poor dear mother! God bless her!”
She went out of the room noiselessly, and made her way upstairs. She
met Grace Laurie.
“I’m going to bed, Grace,” she said. “I’ve got a tiresome headache, and
shall be better lying down. If mother wants to know where I am, will
you tell her?”
“Yes, miss. Can I do anything for you?” Grace asked, for, as she often
said afterwards, she “thought Miss Diana looked a bit feverish.”
“No, thanks very much!” Diana answered in her sweet-voiced, pleasant
manner. “Bed is the best place for me. Good-night!”
“Good-night, miss.” And Diana entering her own room, locked the door.
She was eager to be alone. Her window was open, and she went to that
and looked out. All was silent and calm; the night was beautiful. The
sea spread itself out in gently heaving stretches of mingled light and
shade, and above it bent a sky in which the moon’s increasing splendour
swamped the sparkling of the stars. The air was very still,--not a
leaf on any small branch of tree or plant stirred. The scent of roses
and sweet-briar and honeysuckle floated upwards like incense from the
flower altars of the earth.
“I am free!” murmured Diana to the hushed night. “Free!”
And then, turning, she saw herself in the mirror, as she had already
seen herself that day,--only with a greater sense of shock. The
evening gown she wore, chosen to please her father’s taste, of dull,
dowdy-grey chiffon, intensified her worn and “ageing” look; the colour
of her hair was deadened by contrast with it, and in very truth she had
at that moment a sad and deplorably jaded aspect.
“Free!” she repeated, in self-scorn. “And what is the use of freedom to
me at my age!--and with my face and figure!”
She shrank from her own pitiful “double” in the glass,--it seemed
asking her why she was ever born! Then, she put away all doleful
thoughts that might weaken her or shake her already formed
resolution:--“Nothing venture, nothing have!” she said. And, shutting
her window, she drew the blinds and curtains close, so that no glimpse
of light from her room might be seen by her father when he should
cross the lawn on his return from the Club. She had plenty to do, and
she began to do it. She had a clear plan in view, and as she said to
herself, a trifle bitterly, she “was old enough” to carry it out. And
when all her preparations were fully made and completed, she went to
bed and slept peacefully till the first break of dawn.