The Testing of Diana Mallory by Mrs. Humphry Ward (dark books to read txt) 📕

to himself.

The rest of the morning passed heavily. Diana wrote some letters, and devoutly hoped the rain would stop. In the intervals of her letter-writing, or her study of the clouds, she tried to make friends with Miss Drake and Mrs. Fotheringham. But neither effort came to good. Alicia, so expansive, so theatrical, so much the centre of the situation, when she chose, could be equally prickly, monosyllabic, and repellent when it suited her to be so. Diana talked timidly of dress, of London, and the Season. They were the subjects on which it seemed most natural to approach Miss Drake; Diana's attitude was inquiring and propitiatory. But Alicia could find none but careless or scanty replies till Madeleine Varley came up. Then Miss Drake's tongue was loosened. To her, as to an equal and intimate, she displayed her expert knowledge of shops and _modistes_, of "people" and their stories. Diana sat snubbed and silent, a little provincial outsider, for whom "seasons" are not made. Nor was it any better with Mrs. Fotheringham. At twelve o'clock that lady brought the London papers into the drawing-room. Further information had been received from the Afghan frontier. The English loss in the engagement already reported was greater than had been at first supposed; and Diana found the name of an officer she had known in India among the dead. As she pondered the telegram, the tears in her eyes, she heard Mrs. Fotheringham describe the news as "on the whole very satisfactory." The nation required the lesson. Whereupon Diana's tongue was loosed and would not be quieted. She dwelt hotly on the "sniping," the treacheries, the midnight murders which had preceded the expedition, Mrs. Fotheringham listened to her with flashing looks, and suddenly she broke into a denunciation of war, the military spirit, and the ignorant and unscrupulous persons at home, especially women, who aid and abet politicians in violence and iniquity, the passion of which soon struck Diana dumb. Here was no honorable fight of equal minds. She was being punished for her advocacy of the night before, by an older woman of tyrannical temper, toward whom she stood in the relation of guest to host. It was in vain to look round for defenders. The only man present was Mr. Barton, who sat listening with ill-concealed smiles to what was going on, without taking part in it.

Diana extricated herself with as much dignity as she could muster, but she was too young to take the matter philosophically. She went up-stairs burning with anger, the tears of hurt feeling in her eyes. It seemed to her that Mrs. Fotheringham's attack implied a personal dislike; Mr. Marsham's sister had been glad to "take it out of her." To this young cherished creature it was almost her first experience of the kind.

On the way up-stairs she paused to look wistfully out of a staircase window. Still raining--alack! She thought with longing of the open fields, and the shooters. Was there to be no escape all day from the ugly oppressive house, and some of its inmates? Half shyly, yet with a quickening of the heart, she remembered Marsham's farewell to her of that morning, his look of the night before. Intellectually, she was comparatively mature; in other respects, as inexperienced and impressionable as any convent girl.

"I fear luncheon is impossible!" said Lady Lucy's voice.

Diana looked up and saw her descending the stairs.

"Such a pity! Oliver will be so disappointed."

She paused beside her guest--an attractive and distinguished figure. On her white hair she wore a lace cap which was tied very precisely under her delicate chin. Her dress, of black satin, was made in a full plain fashion of her own; she had long since ceased to allow her dressmaker any voice in it; and her still beautiful hands flashed with diamonds, not however in any vulgar profusion. Lady Lucy's mother had been of a Quaker family, and though Quakerism in her had been deeply alloyed with other metals, the moral and intellectual self-dependence of Quakerism, its fastidious reserves and discrimination were very strong in her. Discrimination indeed was the note of her being. For every Christian, some Christian precepts are obsolete. For Lady Lucy that which runs--"Judge Not!"--had never been alive.

Her emphatic reference to Marsham had brought the ready color to Diana's cheeks.

"Yes--there seems no chance!--" she said, shyly, and regretfully, as the rain beat on the window.

"Oh, dear me, yes!" said a voice behind them. "The glass is going up. It'll be a fine afternoon--and we'll go and meet them at Holme Copse. Sha'n't we, Lady Lucy?"

Mr. Ferrier appeared, coming up from the library laden with papers. The three stood chatting together on the broad gallery which ran round the hall. The kindness of the two elders was so marked that Diana's spirits returned; she was not to be quite a pariah it seemed! As she walked away toward her room, Mr. Ferrier's eyes pursued her--the slim round figure, the young loveliness of her head and neck.

"Well!--what are you thinking about her?" he said, eagerly, turning to the mistress of the house.

Lady Lucy smiled.

"I should prefer it if she didn't talk politics," she said, with the slightest possible stiffness, "But she seems a very charming girl."

"She talks politics, my dear lady, because living alone with her father and with her books, she has had nothing else to talk about but politics and books. Would you rather she talked scandal--or Monte Carlo?"

The Quaker in Lady Lucy laughed.

"Of course if she married Oliver, she would subordinate her opinions to his."

"Would she!" said Mr. Ferrier--"I'm not so sure!"

Lady Lucy replied that if not, it would be calamitous. In which she spoke sincerely. For although now the ruler, and, if the truth were known, the somewhat despotic ruler of Tallyn, in her husband's lifetime she had known very well how to obey.

"I have asked various people about the Mallorys," she resumed. "But nobody seems to be able to tell me anything."

"I trace her to Sir Thomas of that ilk. Why not? It is a Welsh name!"

"I have no idea who her mother was," said Lady Lucy, musing. "Her father was very refined--_quite_ a gentleman."

"She bears, I think, very respectable witness to her mother," laughed Ferrier. "Good stock on both sides; she carries it in her face."

"That's all I ask," said Lady Lucy, quietly.

"But that you _do_ ask!" Her companion looked at her with an eye half affectionate, half ironic. "Most exclusive of women! I sometimes wish I might unveil your real opinions to the Radical fellows who come here."

Lady Lucy colored faintly.

"That has nothing to do with politics."

"Hasn't it? I can't imagine anything that has more to do with them."

"I was thinking of character--honorable tradition--not blood."

Ferrier shook his head.

"Won't do. Barton wouldn't pass you--'A man's a man for a' that'--and a woman too."

"Then I am a Tory!" said Lady Lucy, with a smile that shot pleasantly through her gray eyes.

"At last you confess it!" cried Ferrier, as he carried off his papers. But his gayety soon departed. He stood awhile at the window in his room, looking out upon the sodden park--a rather gray and sombre figure. Over his ugly impressiveness a veil of weariness had dropped. Politics and the strife of parties, the devices of enemies and the dissatisfaction of friends--his soul was tired of them. And the emergence of this possible love-affair--for the moment, ardent and deep as were the man's affections and sympathies, toward this Marsham household, it did but increase his sense of moral fatigue. If the flutter in the blood--and the long companionship of equal love--if these were the only things of real value in life--how had _his_ been worth living?


CHAPTER V

The last covert had been shot, and as Marsham and his party, followed by scattered groups of beaters, turned homeward over the few fields that separated them from the park, figures appeared coming toward them in the rosy dusk--Mr. Ferrier and Diana in front, with most of the other guests of the house in their train. There was a merry fraternization between the two parties--a characteristic English scene, in a characteristic setting: the men in their tweed shooting-suits, some with their guns over their shoulders, for the most part young and tall, clean-limbed and clear-eyed, the well-to-do Englishman at his most English moment, and brimming with the joy of life; the girls dressed in the same tweed stuffs, and with the same skilled and expensive simplicity, but wearing, some of them, over their cloth caps, bright veils, white or green or blue, which were tied under their chins, and framed faces aglow with exercise and health.

Marsham's eyes flew to Diana, who was in black, with a white veil. Some of the natural curls on her temples, which reminded him of a Vandyck picture, had been a little blown by the wind across her beautiful brow; he liked the touch of wildness that they gave; and he was charmed anew by the contrast between her frank young strength, and the wistful look, so full of _relation_ to all about it, as though seeking to understand and be one with it. He perceived too her childish pleasure in each fresh incident and experience of the English winter, which proved to her anew that she had come home; and he flattered himself, as he went straight to her side, that his coming had at least no dimming effect on the radiance that had been there before.

"I believe you are not pining for the Mediterranean!" he said, laughing, as they walked on together.

In a smiling silence she drew in a great breath of the frosty air while her eyes ranged along the chalk down, on the western edge of which they were walking, and then over the plain at their feet, the smoke wreaths that hung above the villages, the western sky filled stormily with the purples and grays and crimsons of the sunset, the woods that climbed the down, or ran in a dark rampart along its crest.

"No one can ever love it as much as I do!"--she said at last--"because I have been an exile. That will be my advantage always."

"Your compensation--perhaps."

"Mrs. Colwood puts it that way. Only I don't like having my grievance taken away."

"Against whom?"

"Ah! not against papa!" she said, hurriedly--"against Fate!"

"If you dislike being deprived of a grievance--so do I. You have returned me my Rossetti."

She laughed merrily.

"You made sure I should lose or keep it?"

"It is the first book that anybody has returned to me for years. I was quite resigned."

"To a damaging estimate of my character? Thank you very much!"

"I wonder"--he said, in another tone--"what sort of estimate you have of _my_ character--false, or true?"

"Well, there have been a great many surprises!" said Diana, raising her eyebrows.

"In the matter of my character?"

"Not altogether."

"My surroundings? You mean I talked Radicalism--or, as you would call it, Socialism--to you at Portofino, and here you find me in the character of a sporting Squire?"

"I hear"--she said, deliberately looking about her--"that this is the finest shoot in the county."

"It is. There is no denying it. But, in the first place, it's my mother's shoot, not mine--the estate is hers, not mine--and she wishes old customs to be kept up. In the next--well, of course, the truth is that I like it abominably!"

He had thrust his cap into his