Sir James Chide was giving tea to a couple of guests at Lytchett Manor.
It was a Saturday in late September. The beech-trees visible through the
drawing-room windows were still untouched and heavily green; but their
transformation was approaching. Soon, steeped in incredible splendors of
orange and gold, they would stand upon the leaf-strewn grass, waiting
for the night of rain or the touch of frost which should at last
disrobe them.
"If you imagine, Miss Ettie," said Sir James, severely, to a young lady
beside him, "that I place the smallest faith in any of Bobbie's remarks
or protestations--"
The girl addressed smiled into his face, undaunted. She was a small
elfish creature with a thin face, on the slenderest of necks. But in her
queer little countenance a pair of laughing eyes, out of all proportion
to the rest of her for loveliness and effect, gave her and kept her the
attention of the world. They lent distinction--fascination even--to a
character of simple virtues and girlish innocence.
Bobbie lounged behind her chair, his arms on the back of it. He took Sir
James's attack upon him with calm. "Shall I show him the letter of my
beastly chairman?" he said, in the girl's ear.
She nodded, and Bobbie drew from his breast-pocket a folded sheet of
blue paper, and pompously handed it to Sir James.
The letter was from the chairman of a leading bank in Berlin--a man well
known in European finance. It was couched in very civil terms, and
contained the offer to Mr. Robert Forbes of a post in the Lindner bank,
as an English correspondence clerk, at a salary in marks which, when
translated, meant about £140 a year.
Sir James read it, and handed it back. "Well, what's the meaning of
that?"
"I'm giving up the Foreign Office," said Bobbie, an engaging openness of
manner. "It's not a proper place for a young man. I've learned nothing
there but a game we do with Blue-Books, and things you throw at the
ceiling--where they stick--I'll tell you about it presently. Besides,
you see, I must have some money, and it don't grow in the Foreign Office
for people like me. So I went to my uncle, Lord Forestier--"
"Of course!" growled Sir James. "I thought we should come to the uncles
before long. Miss Wilson, I desire to warn you against marrying a young
man of 'the classes.' They have no morals, but they have always uncles."
Miss Wilson's eyes shot laughter at her _fiancé_. "Go on, Bobbie, and
don't make it too long!"
"I decline to be hustled." Bobbie's tone was firm, though urbane. "I
repeat: I went to my uncle. And I said to him, like the unemployed:
'Find me work, and none of your d----d charity!'"
"Which means, I suppose, that the last time you went to him, you
borrowed fifty pounds?" said Sir James.
"I shouldn't dream, sir, of betraying my uncle's affairs. On this
occasion--for an uncle--he behaved well. He lectured me for twenty-seven
minutes and a half--I had made up my mind beforehand not to let it go
over the half-hour--and then he came to business. After a year's
training and probation in Berlin he thought he could get me a post in
his brother-in-law's place in the City. Awfully warm thing, you know,"
said Bobbie, complacently; "worth a little trouble. So I told him,
kindly, I'd think of it. Ecco!" He pointed to the letter. "Of course, I
told my uncle I should permit him to continue my allowance, and in a
year I shall be a merchant prince--in the egg; I shall be worth
marrying; and I shall allow Ettie two hundred a year for her clothes."
"And Lady Niton?"
Bobbie sat down abruptly; the girl stared at the carpet.
"I don't see the point of your remark," said Bobbie at last, with
mildness. "When last I had the honor of hearing of her, Lady Niton was
taking the air--or the waters--at Strathpeffer."
"As far as I know," remarked Sir James, "she is staying with the
Feltons, five miles off, at this moment."
Bobbie whistled. "Close quarters!" He looked at Miss Ettie Wilson, and
she at him. "May I ask whether, as soon as Ettie and I invited ourselves
for the day, you asked Lady Niton to come to tea?"
"Not at all. I never play Providence unless I'm told to do so. Only Miss
Mallory is coming to tea."
Bobbie expressed pleasure at the prospect; then his amiable
countenance--the face of an "Idle Apprentice," whom no god has the heart
to punish--sobered to a real concern as the association of ideas led him
to inquire what the latest news might be of Oliver Marsham.
Sir James shook his head; his look clouded. He understood from Lady Lucy
that Oliver was no better; the accounts, in fact, were very bad.
"Did they arrest anybody?" asked Bobbie.
"At Hartingfield? Yes--two lads. But there was not evidence enough to
convict. They were both released, and the village gave them an ovation."
Bobbie hesitated.
"What do you think was the truth about that article?"
Sir James frowned and rose.
"Miss Wilson, come and see my garden. If you don't fall down and worship
the peaches on my south wall, I shall not pursue your acquaintance."
It was a Saturday afternoon. Briefs were forgotten. The three strolled
down the garden. Sir James, in a disreputable shooting-coat and cap, his
hands deep in his pockets, took the middle of the path--the two lovers
on either side. Chide made himself delightful to them. On that Italian
journey of which he constantly thought, Ferrier had been amused and
cheered all through by Bobbie's nonsense; and the young fellow had
loyally felt his death--and shown it. Chide's friendly eye would be on
him and his Ettie henceforward.
* * * * *
Five or ten minutes afterward, a brougham drove up to the door of
Lytchett, and a small lady emerged. She had rung the bell, and was
waiting on the steps, when a pony-carriage also turned into the Lytchett
avenue and drew near rapidly.
A girl in a shady hat was driving it.
"The very creature!" cried Lady Niton, under her breath, smartly tapping
her tiny boot with the black cane she carried, and referring apparently
to some train of meditation in which she had been just engaged. She
waved to her own coachman to be off, and stood awaiting Diana.
[Illustration: "SIR JAMES MADE HIMSELF DELIGHTFUL TO THEM"]
"How do you do, Miss Mallory? Are you invited? I'm not."
Diana descended, and they shook hands. They had not met since the
evening at Tallyn when Diana, in her fresh beauty, had been the gleaming
princess, and Lady Niton the friendly godmother, of so promising a fairy
tale. The old woman looked at her curiously, as they stood in the
drawing-room together, while the footman went off to find Sir James.
Frail--dark lines under the eyes--a look as of long endurance--a smile
that was a mere shield and concealment for the heart beneath--alack!
And there was no comfort to be got out of calling down fire from heaven
on the author of this change, since it had fallen so abundantly already!
"Sit down; you look tired," said the old lady, in her piping, peremptory
voice. "Have you been here all the summer?"
"Yes--since June."
"Through the election?"
"Yes." Diana turned her face away. Lady Niton could see the extreme
delicacy to which the profile had fined down, the bluish or purple
shadows here and there on the white skin. Something glittered in the old
woman's eyes. She put out a hand from the queer flounced mantle, made
out of an ancient evening dress, in which she was arrayed, and
touched Diana's.
"You know--you've heard--about those poor things at Tallyn?"
Diana made a quick movement. Her eyes were on the speaker.
"How is Mr. Marsham?"
Lady Niton shook her head. She opened a hand-bag on her wrist, took out
a letter, and put on her eye-glasses.
"This is Lucy--arrived this morning. It don't sound well. 'Come when you
can, my dear Elizabeth--you will be very welcome. But I do not know how
I have the courage to ask you. We are a depressing pair, Oliver and I.
Oliver has been in almost constant pain this last week. If it goes on we
must try morphia. But before that we shall see another doctor. I dread
to think of morphia. Once begin it, and what will be the end? I sit here
alone a great deal--thinking. How long did that stone take to throw?--a
few seconds, perhaps? And here is my son--my poor son!--broken and
helpless--perhaps for life. We have been trying a secretary to write for
him and read to him, for the blindness increases, but it has not been a
success.'"
Diana rose abruptly and walked to the window, where she stood,
motionless--looking out--her back turned to Lady Niton. Her companion
glanced at her--lifted her eyebrows--hesitated--and finally put the
letter back into her pocket. There was an awkward silence, when Diana
suddenly returned to Lady Niton's side.
"Where is Miss Drake?" she said, sharply. "Is the marriage put off?"
"Marriage!" Lady Niton laughed. "Alicia and Oliver? H'm. I don't think
we shall hear much more of that!"
"I thought it was settled."
"Well, as soon as I heard of the accident and Oliver's condition, I
wondered to myself how long that young woman would keep it up. I have no
doubt the situation gave her a disturbed night or two, Alicia never can
have had: the smallest intention of spending her life, or the best
years of it, in nursing a sick husband. On the other hand, money is
money. So she went off to the Treshams', to see if there was no third
course--that's how I read it."
"The Treshams'?--a visit?--since the accident?"
"Don't look so astonished, my dear. You don't know the Alicias of this
world. But I admit we should be dull without them. There's a girl at the
Feltons' who has just come down from the Treshams', and I wouldn't have
missed her stories of Alicia for a great deal. She's been setting her
cap, it appears, at Lord Philip. However" (Lady Niton chuckled) "_there_
she's met her match."
"Rut they _are_ engaged?" said Diana, in bewildered interrogation.
The little lady's laugh rang out--shrill and cracked--like the crow of a
bantam.
"She and Lord Philip? Trust Lord Philip!"
"No, I didn't mean that!"
"She and Oliver? I've no doubt Oliver thinks--or thought--they were.
What view he takes now, poor fellow, I'm sure I don't know. But I don't
somehow think Alicia will be able to carry on the game indefinitely.
Lady Lucy is losing patience."
Diana sat in silence. Lady Niton could not exactly decipher her. But she
guessed at a conflict between a scrupulous or proud unwillingness to
discuss the matter at all or hear it discussed, and some motive deeper
still and more imperative.
"Lady Lucy has been ill too?" Diana inquired at last, in the same voice
of constraint.
"Oh, very unwell indeed. A poor, broken thing! And there don't seem to
be anybody to look after them. Mrs. Fotheringham is about as much good
as a broomstick. Every family ought to keep a supply of superfluous
girls. They're like the army--useless in peace and indispensable in war.
Ha! here's Sir James."
Both ladies perceived Sir James, coming briskly up the garden path. As
she saw him a thought struck Diana--a thought which concerned Lady
Niton. It broke down the tension of her look, and there was the gleam of
a smile--sad still, and touching--in the glance she threw at her
companion. She had been asked to tea to meet a couple of guests from
London with whose affairs she was well acquainted; and she too thought
Sir James had been playing Providence.
Sir James, evidently conscious, saw the raillery in her face, pinched
her fingers as she gave him her hand, and Diana, passing him, escaped to
the garden, very certain that she should find the couple in question
somewhere among its shades.
Lady Niton examined Sir James--looked after Diana.
"Look here!" she said, abruptly; "what's up? You two understand
something I don't. Out with it!"
Sir James, who could always blush like a girl, blushed.
"I vow that I am as innocent as a babe unborn!"
"What of?" The tone of the demand was like that of a sword in the
drawing.
"I have some guests here to-day."
"Who are they?"
"A young man you know--a young woman you would like to know."
Silence. Lady Niton sat down again.
"Kindly ring the bell," she said, lifting a peremptory hand, "and send
for my carriage."
"Let me parley an instant," said Sir James, moving between her and the
bell. "Bobbie is just off to Berlin. Won't you say good-bye to him?"
"Mr. Forbes's movements are entirely indifferent to me--ring!" Then,
shrill-voiced--and with sudden fury, like a bird ruffling up: "Berlin,
indeed! More waste--more shirking! He needn't come to me! I won't give
him another penny."
"I don't advise you to offer it," said Sir James, with suavity. "Bobbie
has got a post in Berlin through his uncle, and is going off for a
twelvemonth to learn banking."
Lady Niton sat blinking and speechless. Sir James drew the muslin
curtain back from the window.
"There they are, you see--Bobbie--and the Explanation. And if you ask
me, I think the Explanation explains."
Lady Niton put up her gold-rimmed glasses.
"She is not in the least pretty!" she said, with hasty venom, her old
hand shaking.
"No, but fetching--and a good girl. She worships her Bobbie, and she's
sending him away for a year."
"I won't allow it!" cried Lady Niton. "He sha'n't go."
Sir James shrugged his shoulders.
"These are domestic brawls--I decline them. Ah!" He turned to the
window, opening it wide. She did not move. He made a sign, and two of
the three persons who had just appeared on the lawn came running toward
the house. Diana loitered behind.
Lady Niton looked at the two young faces as they reached her side--the
mingling of laughter and anxiety in the girl's, of pride and
embarrassment in Bobbie's.
"You sha'n't go to Berlin!" she said to him, vehemently, as she just
allowed him to take her hand.
"Dear Lady Niton!--I must."
"You sha'n't!--I tell you! I've got you a place in London--a, thousand
times, better than your fool of an uncle could ever get you. Uncle,
indeed! Read that letter!" She tossed him one from her bag.
Bobbie read, while Lady Niton stared hard at the girl. Presently Bobbie
began to gasp.
"Well, upon my word!"--he put the letter down--"upon my word!"' He
turned to his sweetheart. "Ettie!--you marry me in a month!--mind that!
Hang Berlin! I scorn their mean proposals. London requires me." He drew
himself up. "But first" (he looked at Lady Niton, his flushed face
twitching a little) "justice!" he said, peremptorily--"justice on the
chief offender."
And walking across to her, he stooped and kissed her. Then he beckoned
to Ettie to do the same. Very shyly the girl ventured; very stoically
the victim, submitted. Whereupon, Bobbie subsided, sitting cross-legged
on the floor, and a violent quarrel began immediately between him and
Lady Niton on the subject of the part of London in which he and Ettie
were to live. Fiercely the conflict waxed and waned, while the young
girl's soft irrepressible laughter filled up all the gaps and like a
rushing stream carried away the detritus--the tempers and rancors and
scorns--left by former convulsions.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Diana and Sir James paced the garden. He saw that she was
silent and absent-minded, and guessed uneasily at the cause. It was
impossible that any woman of her type, who had gone through the
experience that she had, should remain unmoved by the accounts now
current as to Oliver Marsham's state.
As they returned across the lawn to the house the two lovers came out to
meet them. Sir James saw the look with which Diana watched them coming.
It seemed to him one of the sweetest and one of the most piteous he had
ever seen on a human face.
"I shall descend upon you next week," said Lady Niton abruptly, as Diana
made her farewells. "I shall be at Tallyn."
Diana did not reply. The little _fiancée_ insisted on the right to take
her to her pony-carriage, and kissed her tenderly before she let her go.
Diana had already become as a sister to her and Bobbie, trusted in their
secrets and advising in their affairs.
Lady Niton, standing by Sir James, looked after her.
"Well, there's only one thing in the world that girl wants; and I
suppose nobody in their senses ought to help her to it."
"What do you mean?"
She murmured a few words in his ear.
"Not a bit of it!" said Sir James, violently. "I forbid it. Don't you go
and put anything of the sort into her head. The young man I mean her to
marry comes back from Nigeria this very day."
"She won't marry him!"
"We shall see."
* * * * *
Diana drove home through lanes suffused with sunset and rich with
autumn. There had been much rain through September, and the deluged
earth steamed under the return of the sun. Mists were rising from the
stubbles, and wrapping the woods in sleep and purple. To her the beauty
of it all was of a mask or pageant--seen from a distance across a plain
or through a street-opening--lovely and remote. All that was real--all
that lived--was the image within the mind; not the great
earth-show without.
As she passed through the village she fell in with the Roughsedges: the
doctor, with his wide-awake on the back of his head, a book and a
bulging umbrella under his arm; Mrs. Roughsedge, in a new shawl, and new
bonnet-strings, with a prodigal flutter of side curls beside her ample
countenance. Hugh, it appeared, was expected by an evening train. Diana
begged that he might be brought up to see her some time in the course of
the following afternoon. Then she drove on, and Mrs. Roughsedge was left
staring discontentedly at her husband.
"I think she _was_ glad, Henry?"
"Think it, my dear, if it does you any good," said the doctor,
cheerfully.
* * * * *
When Diana reached home night had fallen--a moon-lit night, through
which all the shapes and even the colors of day were still to be seen or
divined in a softened and pearly mystery. Muriel Colwood was not at
home. She had gone to town, on one of her rare absences, to meet some
relations. Diana missed her, and yet was conscious that even the watch
of those kind eyes would--to-night--have added to the passionate torment
of thought.
As she sat alone in the drawing-room after her short and solitary meal
her nature bent and trembled under the blowing of those winds of fate,
which, like gusts among autumn trees, have tested or strained or
despoiled the frail single life since time began; winds of love and
pity, of desire and memory, of anguish and of longing.
Only her dog kept her company. Sometimes she rose out of restlessness,
and moved about the room, and the dog's eyes would follow her, dumbly
dependent. The room was dimly lit; in the mirrors she saw now and then
the ghostly passage of some one who seemed herself and not herself. The
windows were open to a misty garden, waiting for moonrise; in the house
all was silence; only from the distant road and village came voices
sometimes of children, or the sounds of a barrel-organ, fragmentary
and shrill.
Loneliness ached in her heart--spoke to her from the future. And five
miles away Oliver, too, was lonely--and in pain. _Pain_!--the thought of
it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a
man already crushed and helpless--gave her no respite. The tears ran
down her cheeks as she moved to and fro, her hands at her breast.
Yet she was helpless. What could she do? Even if he were free from
Alicia, even if he wished to recall her, how could he--maimed and
broken--take the steps that could alone bring her to his side? If their
engagement had subsisted, horror, catastrophe, the approach of death
itself, could have done nothing to part them. Now, how was a man in such
a plight to ask from a woman what yet the woman would pay a universe to
give? And in the face of the man's silence, how could the woman speak?
No!--she began to see her life as the Vicar saw it: pledged to large
causes, given to drudgeries--necessary, perhaps noble, for which the
happy are not meant. This quiet shelter of Beechcote could not be hers
much longer. If she was not to go to Oliver, impossible that she could
live on in this rose-scented stillness of the old house and garden,
surrounded by comfort, tranquillity, beauty, while the agony of the
world rang in her ears--wild voices!--speaking universal, terrible,
representative things, yet in tones piteously dear and familiar, close,
close to her heart. No; like Marion Vincent, she must take her life in
her hands, offering it day by day to this hungry human need, not
stopping to think, accepting the first task to her hand, doing it as she
best could. Only so could she still her own misery; tame, silence her
own grief; grief first and above all for Oliver, grief for her own
youth, grief for her parents. She must turn to the poor in that mood she
had in the first instance refused to allow the growth of in herself--the
mood of one seeking an opiate, an anæsthetic. The scrubbing of hospital
floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest
obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of
them deaden thought--these were what she turned to as the only means by
which life could be lived.
Oliver!--No hope for him?--at thirty-six! His career broken--his
ambition defeated. Nothing before him but the decline of power and joy;
nights of barren endurance, separating days empty and tortured; all
natural pleasures deadened and destroyed; the dying down of all the
hopes and energies that make a man.
She threw herself down beside the open window, burying her face on her
knees. Would they never let her go to him?--never let her say to him:
"Oliver, take me!--you did love me once--what matters what came between
us? That was in another world. Take my life--crush out of it any drop of
comfort or of ease it can give you! Cruel, cruel--to refuse! It is mine
to give and yours to spend!"
Juliet Sparling's daughter. There was the great consecrating,
liberating fact! What claim had she to the ordinary human joys? What
could the ordinary standards and expectations of life demand from her?
Nothing!--nothing that could stem this rush of the heart to the
beloved--the forsaken and suffering and overshadowed beloved. Her
future?--she held it dross--apart from Oliver. Dear Sir James!--but he
must learn to bear it--to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for
herself. What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but
just this: to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver--to bring him
the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love? And if it
were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena,
where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and
throw herself blindly into the fight. Perhaps some heavenly voice might
still speak through it; perhaps, beyond its jar, some ineffable reunion
might dawn--
"First a peace out of pain--then a light--then thy breast!..."
She trembled through and through. Restraining herself, she rose, and
went to her locked desk, taking from it the closely written journal of
her father's life, which had now been for months the companion of her
thoughts, and of the many lonely moments in her days and nights. She
opened on a passage tragically familiar to her:
"It is an April day. Everything is very still and balmy.
clouds are low, yet suffused with sun. They seem to be
tangled among the olives, and all the spring green and
flowering fruit trees are like embroidery on a dim yet
shining background of haze, silvery and glistening in the
sun, blue and purple in the shadows. The beach-trees in the
olive garden throw up their pink spray among the shimmering
gray leaf and beside the gray stone walls. Warm breaths
steal to me over the grass and through the trees; the last
brought with it a strong scent of narcissus. A goat tethered
to a young tree in the orchard has reared its front feet
against the stem, and is nibbling at the branches. His white
back shines amid the light spring shade.
"Far down through the trees I can see the sparkle of the
waves--beyond, the broad plain of blue; and on the headland,
a mile away, white foam is dashing.
"It is the typical landscape of the South, and of spring, the
landscape, with only differences in detail, of Theocritus or
Vergil, or the Greek anthologists, those most delicate
singers of nature and the South. From the beginning it has
filled man with the same joy, the same yearning, the
same despair.
"In youth and happiness we _are_ the spring--the young
green--the blossom--the plashing waves. Their life is ours
and one with ours.
"But in age and grief? There is no resentment, I think; no
anger, as though a mourner resented the gayety around him;
but, rather, a deep and melancholy wonder at the chasm that
has now revealed itself between our life and nature. What
does the breach mean?--the incurable dissonance and
alienation? Are we greater than nature, or less? Is the
opposition final, the prophecy of man's ultimate and hopeless
defeat at the hands of nature?--or is it, in the Hegelian
sense, the mere development of a necessary conflict, leading
to a profounder and intenser unity? The old, old
questions--stock possessions of the race, yet burned anew by
life into the blood and brain of the individual.
"I see Diana in the garden with her nurse. She has been
running to and fro, playing with the dog, feeding the goat.
Now I see her sitting still, her chin on her hands, looking
out to sea. She seems to droop; but I am sure she is not
tired. It is an attitude not very natural to a child,
especially to a child so full of physical health and vigor;
yet she often falls into it.
"When I see it I am filled with dread. She knows nothing, yet
the cloud seems to be upon her. Does she already ask herself
questions--about her father--about this solitary life?
"Juliet was not herself--not in her full sane mind--when I
promised her. That I know. But I could no more have refused
the promise than water to her dying lips. One awful evening
of fever and hallucination I had been sitting by her for a
long time. Her thoughts, poor sufferer, had been full of
_blood_--it is hard to write it--but there is the truth--a
physical horror of blood--the blood in which her dress--the
dress they took from her, her first night in prison--was
once steeped. She saw it everywhere, on her hands, the
sheets, the walls; it was a nausea, an agony of brain and
flesh; and yet it was, of course, but a mere symbol and
shadow of the manifold agony she had gone through. I will not
attempt to describe what I felt--what the man who knows that
his neglect and selfishness drove her the first steps along
this infernal road must feel to his last hour.--But at last
we were able--the nurse and I--to soothe her a little. The
nightmare lifted, we gave her food, and the nurse brushed her
poor brown hair, and tied round it, loosely, the little black
scarf she likes to wear. We lifted her on her pillows, and
her white face grew calm, and so lovely--though, as we
thought, very near to death. Her hair, which was cut in
prison, had grown again a little--to her neck, and could not
help curling. It made her look a child again--poor, piteous
child!--so did the little scarf, tied under her chin--and the
tiny proportions to which all her frame had shrunk.
"She lifted her face to mine, as I bent over her, kissed me,
and asked for you. You were brought, and I took you on my
knee, showing you pictures, to keep you quiet. But every
other minute, almost, your eyes looked away from the book to
her, with that grave considering look, as though a question
were behind the look, to which your little brain could not
yet give shape. My strange impression was that the question
was there--in the mind--fully formed, like the Platonic
'ideas' in heaven; but that, physically, there was no power
to make the word-copy that could have alone communicated it
to us. Your mother looked at you in return, intently--quite
still. When you began to get restless, I lifted you up to
kiss her; you were startled, perhaps, by the cold of her
face, and struggled away. A little color came into her
cheeks; she followed you hungrily with her eyes as you were
carried off; then she signed to me, and it was my hand that
brushed away her tears.
"Immediately afterward she began to speak, with wonderful
will and self-control, and she asked me that till you were
grown up and knowledge became inevitable, I should tell you
nothing. There was to be no talk of her, no picture of her,
no letters. As far as possible, during your childhood and
youth, she was to be to you as though she had never existed.
What her thought was exactly she was too feeble to explain;
nor was her mind strong enough to envisage all the
consequences--to me, as well as to you--of what she proposed.
No doubt it tortured her to think of you as growing up under
the cloud of her name and fate, and with her natural and
tragic impetuosity she asked what she did.
"'One day--there will come some one--who will love her--in
spite of me. Then you and he--shall tell her.'
"I pointed out to her that such a course would mean that I
must change my name and live abroad. Her eyes assented, with
a look of relief. She knew that I had already developed the
tastes of the nomad and the sun-worshipper, that I was a
student, happy in books and solitude; and I have no doubt
that the picture her mind formed at the moment of some such
hidden life together, as we have actually led, you and I,
since her death, soothed and consoled her. With her intense
and poetic imagination, she knew well what had happened to
us, as well as to herself.
"So here we are in this hermitage; and except in a few
passing perfunctory words, I have never spoken to you of her.
Whether what I have done is wise I cannot tell. I could not
help it; and if I had broken my word, remorse would have
killed me. I shall not die, however, without telling you--if
only I have warning enough.
"But supposing there is no warning--then all that I write
now, and much else, will be in your hands some day. There are
moments when I feel a rush of comfort at the notion that I
may never have to watch your face as you hear the story;
there are others when the longing to hold you--child as you
still are--against my heart, and feel your tears--your tears
for her--mingling with mine, almost sweeps me off my feet.
"And when you grow older my task in all its aspects will be
harder still. You have inherited her beauty on a larger,
ampler scale, and the time will come for lovers. You will
hear of your mother then for the first time; my mind trembles
even now at the thought of it. For the story may work out
ill, or well, in a hundred different ways; and what we did in
love may one day be seen as an error and folly, avenging
itself not on us, but on our child.
"Nevertheless, my Diana, if it had to be done again, it must
still be done. Your mother, before she died, was tortured by
no common pains of body and spirit. Yet she never thought of
herself--she was tormented for us. If her vision was clouded,
her prayer unwise--in that hour, no argument, no resistance
was possible.
"The man who loves you will love you well, my child. You are
not made to be lightly or faithlessly loved. He will carry
you through the passage perilous if I am no longer there to
help. To him--in the distant years--I commit you. On him be
my blessing, and the blessing, too, of that poor ghost whose
hands I seem to hold in mine as I write. Let him not be too
proud to take it!"
Diana put down the book with a low sob that sounded through the quiet
room. Then she opened the garden door and stepped on to the terrace. The
night was cold but not frosty; there was a waning moon above the
autumnal fulness of the garden and the woods.
A "spirit in her feet" impelled her. She went back to the house, found a
cloak and hat, put out the lamps, and sent the servants to bed. Then
noiselessly she once more undid the drawing-room door, and stole out
into the garden and across the lawn. Soon she was in the lime-walk, the
first yellow leaves crackling beneath her feet; then in the kitchen
garden, where the apples shone dimly on the laden boughs, where
sunflowers and dahlias and marigolds, tall white daisies and late
roses--the ghosts of their daylight selves--dreamed and drooped under
the moon; where the bees slept and only great moths were abroad. And so
on to the climbing path and the hollows of the down. She walked quickly
along the edge of it, through hanging woods of beech that clothed the
hill-side. Sometimes the trees met in majestic darkness above her head,
and the path was a glimmering mystery before her. Sometimes the ground
broke away on her left--abruptly--in great chasms, torn from the
hill-side, stripped of trees, and open to the stars. Down rushed the
steep slopes to the plain, clad in the decaying leaf and mast of former
years, and at the edges of these precipitous glades, or scattered at
long intervals across them, great single trees emerged, the types and
masters of the forest, their trunks, incomparably tall, and all their
noble limbs, now thinly veiled by a departing leafage, drawn sharp, in
black and silver, on the pale background of the chalk plain. Nothing so
grandiose as these climbing beech woods of middle England!--by day, as
it were, some vast procession marching joyously over hill and dale to
the music of the birds and the wind; and at night, a brooding host,
silent yet animate, waiting the signal of the dawn.
Diana passed through them, drinking in the exaltation of their silence
and their strength, yet driven on by the mere weakness and foolishness
of love. By following the curve of the down she could reach a point on
the hill-side whence, on a rising ground to the north, Tallyn was
visible. She hastened thither through the night. Once she was startled
by a shot fired from a plantation near the path, trees began to rustle
and dogs to bark, and she fled on, in terror lest the Tallyn keepers
might discover her. Alack!--for whose pleasure were they watching now?
The trees fell back. She reached the bare shoulder of the down.
Northward and eastward spread the plain; and on the low hill in front
her eyes discerned the pale patch of Tallyn, flanked by the darkness of
the woods. And in that dim front, a light--surely a light?--in an upper
window. She sank down in a hollow of the chalk, her eyes upon the house,
murmuring and weeping.
So she watched with Oliver, as once--at the moment of her sharpest
pain--he had watched with her. But whereas in that earlier night
everything was in the man's hands to will or to do, the woman felt
herself now helpless and impotent. His wealth, his mother hedged him
from her. And if not, he had forgotten her altogether for Alicia; he
cared for her no more; it would merely add to his burden to be reminded
of her. As to Alicia--the girl who could cruelly leave him there, in
that house of torture, to go and dance and amuse herself--leave him in
his pain, his mother in her sorrow--Diana's whole being was shaken
first with an anguish of resentful scorn, in which everything personal
to herself disappeared. Then--by an immediate revulsion--the thought of
Alicia was a thought of deliverance. Gone?--gone from between them?--the
flaunting, triumphant, heartless face?
Suddenly it seemed to Diana that she was there beside him, in the
darkened room--that he heard her, and looked up.
"Diana!"
"Oliver!" She knelt beside him--she raised his head on her breast--she
whispered to him; and at last he slept. Then hostile forms crowded about
her, forbidding her, driving her away--even Sir James Chide--in
the name of her own youth. And she heard her own answer: "Dear
friend!--think!--remember! Let me stay!--let me stay! Am I not the child
of sorrow? Here is my natural place--my only joy."
And she broke down into bitter helpless tears, pleading, it seemed, with
things and persons inexorable.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in Beechcote village, that night, a man slept lightly,
thinking of Diana. Hugh Roughsedge, bronzed and full of honors, a man
developed and matured, with the future in his hands, had returned that
afternoon to his old home.