THE VISION OF LOVE
A week after her visit to Somervell Street, the thing which Diana had
dreaded came to pass.
She was attending a reception at the French Embassy, and as she made
her way through the crowded rooms, followed by Olga Lermontof--who
frequently added to the duties of accompanist those of _dame de
compagnie_ to the great _prima donna_--she came suddenly face to face
with Max.
To many of us the anticipation of an unpleasant happening is far more
agonising than the actual thing itself. The mind, brooding
apprehensively upon what may conceivably occur, exaggerates the
possibilities of the situation, enhancing all the disagreeable details,
and oblivious of any mitigating circumstances which may, quite
probably, accompany it. There is sound sense and infinite comfort, if
you look for it, in the old saying which bids us not to cross our
bridges till we come to them.
The fear of the unknown, the unexperienced, is a more haunting,
insidious fear than any other, and sometimes one positively longs to
hasten the advent of an unwelcome ordeal, in order that the worst may
be known and the menace of the future be transformed into a memory of
the past.
So it was with Diana. She had been for so long beset by her fear of
the first meeting that she experienced a sensation almost of relief
when her eyes fell at last upon the tall figure of her husband.
He was deep in conversation with the French Ambassador at the moment,
but as Diana approached it was as though some sensitive, invisible live
wire had vibrated, apprising him of her nearness, and he looked up
suddenly, his blue eyes gazing straight into hers.
To Diana, the brief encounter proved amazingly simple and easy in
contrast with the shrinking apprehensions she had formed. A slight bow
from her, its grave return from him, and the dreaded moment was past.
It was only afterwards that she realised, with a sense of sick dismay,
how terribly he had altered. She caught at the accompanist's arm with
nervous force.
"Olga!" she whispered. "Did you see?"
The Russian's expression answered her. Her face wore a curious stunned
look, and her mouth twitched as she tried to control the sudden
trembling of her lips.
"Come outside--on to this balcony." Olga spoke with a fierce
imperativeness as she saw Diana sway uncertainly and her face whiten.
Once outside in the cool shelter of the balcony, dimly lit by swaying
Chinese lanterns, Diana sank into a chair, shaken and unnerved. For an
instant her eyes strayed back to where, through the open French window,
she could see Max still conversing with the Ambassador, but she averted
them swiftly.
The change in him hurt her like the sudden stab of a knife. His face
was worn and lined; there was something ascetic-looking in the hollowed
line from cheek-bone to chin and in the stern, austere closing of the
lips, while the eyes--the mocking blue eyes with the laughter always
lurking at the back of them--held an expression of deep, unalterable
sadness.
"Olga!" The word broke from Diana's white lips like a cry of appeal,
tremulous and uncertain.
But Miss Lermontof made no response. She seemed quite unmoved by the
distress of the woman sitting huddled in the chair before her, and her
light green eyes shone with a curious savage glint like the eyes of a
cat.
Diana spoke again nervously.
"Are you--angry with me?"
"Angry!" The Russian almost spat out the word. "Angry! Don't you see
what you're doing?"
"What I'm doing?" repeated Diana. "What am I doing?"
Olga replied with a grim incisiveness.
"You're killing Max--that's all. This--this is going to break
him--break him utterly."
There was a long silence, and the dewy dusk of the night, shaken into
pearly mist where the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns
illumined it, seemed to close round the two women, like a filmy
curtain, shutting them off from the chattering throng in the adjoining
room.
Presently a cart rattled past in the street below, rasping the tense
silence.
Diana lifted her head.
"I didn't know!" she said helplessly. "I didn't know! . . ."
"And yet you professed to love him!" Olga spoke consideringly, an
element of contemptuous wonder in her voice.
The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana's
mind.
"_You don't know what love means!_"
Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed
beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls
wheeling above it, and Max--Max standing tall and straight beside her,
with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love
illimitable in his eyes.
"You don't know what love means!"
The words penetrated to her innermost consciousness, cleaving their way
sheer through the fog of doubt and mistrust and pride as the sharp
blade of the surgeon's knife cuts deep into a festering wound. And
before their clarifying, essential truth, Diana's soul recoiled in dumb
dismay.
No, she hadn't known what love meant--love, which, with an exquisite
unreasonableness, believes when there is ground for doubt--hadn't
understood it as even this cynical, bitter-tongued Russian understood
it. And she recognised the scorn on Olga's white, contemptuous face as
the unlovely sheath of an ideal of love immeasurably beyond her own
achieving.
The vision of Culver Point faded away, and an impalpable wall of
darkness seemed to close about her. Dimly, as though it were some one
else's voice speaking, she heard herself say slowly:--
"I thought I loved him." Then, after a pause, "Will you go? Please
go. I should like to be . . . quiet . . . a little while."
For a moment Olga gazed down at her, eagerly, almost hungrily, as
though silently beseeching her. Then, still silently, she went away.
Diana sat very still. Above her, the gay-coloured Chinese lanterns
swayed to and fro in the little breeze that drifted up the street, and
above again, far off in the sombre sky, the stars looked
down--pitiless, unmoved, as they have looked down through all the ages
upon the pigmy joys and sufferings of humanity.
For the first time Diana was awake to the limitations she had set to
love.
The meeting with her husband had shaken her to the very foundations of
her being, the shock of his changed appearance sweeping away at a
single blow the whole fabric of artificial happiness that she had been
trying to build up.
She had thought that the wound in her heart would heal, that she could
teach herself to forget the past. And lo! At the first sight of his
face the old love and longing had reawakened with a strength she was
powerless to withstand.
The old love, but changed into something immeasurably more than it had
ever been before, and holding in its depths a finer understanding. And
with this clearer vision came a sudden new knowledge--a knowledge
fraught with pain and yet bearing deep within it an unutterable sense
of joy.
Max had cared all the time--cared still! It was written in the lines
of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut
mouth. Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married
life, despite his inexplicable friendship for Adrienne, despite all
that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger
understanding which had come to her, that through it all he had loved
her. With an absolute certainty of conviction, she knew that it was
her hand which had graved those fresh lines about his mouth, brought
that look of calm sadness to his eyes, and the realisation held a
strange mingling of exquisite joy and keen anguish.
She hid her face in her hands, hid it from the stars and the shrouding
dark, tremulously abashed at the wonderful significance of love.
She almost laughed to think how she had allowed so small a thing as the
secret which Max could not tell her to corrode and eat into the heart
of happiness. Looking back from the standpoint she had now gained, it
seemed so pitifully mean and paltry, a profanation of the whole inner,
hidden meaning of love.
So long as she and Max cared for each other, nothing else mattered,
nothing in the whole world. And the long battle between love and
pride--between love, that had turned her days and nights into one
endless ache of longing to return to Max, and pride, that had barred
the way inflexibly--was over, done with.
Love had won, hands down. She would go back to Max, and all thought
that it might be weak-minded of her, humiliating to her self-respect,
was swept aside. Love, the great teacher, had brought her through the
dark places where the lesser gods hold sway, out into the light of day,
and she knew that to return to Max, to give herself afresh to him,
would be the veritable triumph, of love itself.
She would go back, back to the shelter of his love which had been
waiting for her all the time, unswerving and unreproaching. She had
read it in his eyes when they had met her own an hour ago.
"I want you---body and soul I want you!" he had told her there by the
cliffs at Culver.
And she had not given him all her soul. She had kept back that supreme
belief in the beloved which is an integral part of love. But now, now
she would go to him and give with both hands royally--faith and trust,
blindly, as love demanded.
She smiled a little. Happiness and the haven of Max's arms seemed very
near her just then.
She was very silent as she and Olga Lermontof drove home together from
the Embassy, but just at the last, when the limousine stopped at
Baroni's house, she leaned closer to Olga in the semi-darkness, and
whispered a little breathlessly:--
"I'm going back to him, Olga."
Somehow the mere putting of it into words seemed to give it substance,
convert it into an actual fact that could be talked about, just like
the weather, or one's favourite play, or any other commonplace matter
which can be spoken of because it has a knowledgeable existence. And
the Russian's quick "Thank God!" set the seal of assuredness upon it.
"Yes--thank God," answered Diana simply.
The car, which was to take the accompanist on to Brutton Square,
slipped away down the lamp-lit street, and Diana fled upstairs to her
room.
She must be alone--alone with her thoughts. She no longer dreaded the
night and its quiet solitude. It was a solitude pervaded by a deep,
abiding peace, the anteroom of happiness.
To-morrow she would go to Max, and tell him that love had taught her
belief and faith--all that he had asked of her and that she had so
failed to give.
She lay long awake, gazing into the dark, dreamily conscious of utter
peace and calm. To-morrow . . . to-morrow . . . Freely her eyes
closed and she slept. Once she stirred and smiled a little in her
sleep while the word "Max" fluttered from between her lips, almost as
though it had been a prayer.