The Testing of Diana Mallory - Mrs. Humphry Ward (novels to read for beginners txt) 📗

Diana fled from, Lady Niton took up; and when Mrs. Fotheringham, bewildered by an avalanche of words, would say--"Give me time, please, Lady Niton--I must think!"--Lady Niton would reply, coolly--"Not unless you're accustomed to it"; while she finally capped her misdeeds by insisting that it was no good to say Mr. Barton had a warm heart if he were without that much more useful possession--a narrow mind.

Thus buttressed and befriended on almost all sides, Diana drank her cup of pleasure. Once in an interval between two dances, as she passed on Oliver Marsham's arm, close to Lady Lucy, that lady put up her frail old hand, and gently touched Diana's. "Do not overtire yourself, my dear!" she said, with effusion; and Oliver, looking down, knew very well what his mother's rare effusion meant, if Diana did not. On several occasions Mr. Perrier sought her out, with every mark of flattering attention, while it often seemed to Diana as if the protecting kindness of Sir James Chide was never far away. In her white _ingenue's_ dress she was an embodiment of youth, simplicity, and joy, such as perhaps our grandmothers knew more commonly than we, in our more hurried and complex day. And at the same time there floated round her something more than youth--something more thrilling and challenging than mere girlish delight--an effluence, a passion, a "swell of soul," which made this dawn of her life more bewitching even for its promise than for its performance.

For Marsham, too, the hours flew. He was carried away, enchanted; he had eyes for no one, time for no one but Diana; and before the end of the evening the gossip among the Tallyn guests ran fast and free. When at last the dance broke up, many a curious eye watched the parting between Marsham and Diana; and in their bedroom on the top floor Lady Lucy's two nieces sat up till the small hours discussing, first, the situation--was Oliver really caught at last?--and then, Alicia's refusal to discuss it. She had said bluntly that she was dog-tired--and shut her door upon them.

* * * * *

On a hint from his mother, Marsham went to say good-night to her in her room. She threw her arms round his neck, whispering: "Dear Oliver!--dear Oliver!--I just wished you to know--if it is as I think--that you had my blessing."

He drew back, a little shrinking and reluctant--yet still flushed, as it were, with the last rays Diana's sun had shed upon him.

"Things mustn't be hurried, mother."

"No--no--they sha'n't. But you know how I have wished to see you happy--how ambitious I have been for you!"

"Yes, mother, I know. You have been always very good to me." He had recovered his composure, and stood holding her hand and smiling at her.

"What a charming creature, Oliver! It is a pity, of course, her father has indoctrinated her with those opinions, but--"

"Opinions!" he said, scornfully--"what do they matter!" But he could not discuss Diana. His blood was still too hot within him.

"Of course--of course!" said Lady Lucy, soothingly. "She is so young--she will develop. But what a wife, Oliver, she will make--how she might help a man on--with her talents and her beauty and her refinement. She has such dignity, too, for her years."

He made no reply, except to repeat:

"Don't hurry it, mother--don't hurry it."

"No--no"--she said, laughing--"I am not such a fool. There will be many natural opportunities of meeting."

"There are some difficulties with the Vavasours. They have been disagreeable about the gardens. Ferrier and I have promised to go over and advise her."

"Good!" said Lady Lucy, delighted that the Vavasours had been disagreeable. "Good-night, my son, good-night!"

A minute later Oliver stood meditating in his own room, where he had just donned his smoking-jacket. By one of the natural ironies of life, at a moment when he was more in love than he had ever been yet, he was, nevertheless, thinking eagerly of prospects and of money. Owing to his peculiar relation to his mother, and his father's estate, marriage would be to him no mere satisfaction of a personal passion. It would be a vital incident in a politician's career, to whom larger means and greater independence were now urgently necessary. To marry with his mother's full approval would at last bring about that provision for himself which his father's will had most unjustly postponed. He was monstrously dependent upon her. It had been one of the chief checks on a strong and concentrated ambition. But Lady Lucy had long made him understand that to marry according to her wishes would mean emancipation: a much larger income in the present, and the final settlement of her will in his favor. It was amazing how she had taken to Diana! Diana had only to accept him, and his future was secured.

But though thoughts of this kind passed in tumultuous procession through the grooves of consciousness, they were soon expelled by others. Marsham was no mere interested schemer. Diana should help him to his career; but above all and before all she was the adorable brown-eyed creature, whose looks had just been shining upon him, whose soft hand had just been lingering in his! As he stood alone and spellbound in the dark, yielding himself to the surging waves of feeling which broke over his mind, the thought, the dream, of holding Diana Mallory in his arms--of her head against his breast--came upon him with a sudden and stinging delight.

Yet the delight was under control--the control of a keen and practical intelligence. There rose in him a sharp sense of the unfathomed depths and possibilities in such a nature as Diana's. Once or twice that evening, through all her sweet forthcomingness, when he had forced the note a little, she had looked at him in sudden surprise or shrinking. No!--nothing premature! It seemed to him, as it had seemed to Bobbie Forbes, that she could only be won by the slow and gradual conquest of a rich personality. He set himself to the task.

* * * * *

Down-stairs Mr. Ferrier and Sir James Chide were sitting together in a remote corner of the hall. Mr. Ferrier, in great good-humor with the state of things, was discussing Oliver's chances, confidentially, with his old friend. Sir James sat smoking in silence. He listened to Ferrier's praises of Miss Mallory, to his generous appreciation of Marsham's future, to his speculations as to what Lady Lucy would do for her son, upon his marriage, or as to the part which a creature so brilliant and so winning as Diana might be expected to play in London and in political life.

Sir James said little or nothing. He knew Lady Lucy well, and had known her long. Presently he rose abruptly and went up-stairs to bed.

"Ought I to speak?" he asked himself, in an agony of doubt. "Perhaps a word to Ferrier?--"

No!--impossible!--impossible! Yet, as he mounted the stairs, over the house which had just seen the triumph of Diana, over that radiant figure itself, the second sight of the great lawyer perceived the brooding of a cloud of fate; nor could he do anything to avert or soften its downfall.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Diana's golden hour had found an unexpected epilogue. After her good-night to Marsham she was walking along the gallery corridor going toward her room, when she perceived Miss Vincent in front of her moving slowly and, as it seemed, with difficulty. A sudden impulse made Diana fly after her.

"Do let me help you!" she said, shyly.

Marion Vincent smiled, and put her hand in the girl's arm.

"How do people manage to live at all in these big houses, and with dinner-parties every night!" she said, laughing. "After a day in the East End I am never half so tired."

She was indeed so pale that Diana was rather frightened, and remembering that in the afternoon she had seen Miss Vincent descend from an upper floor, she offered a rest in her own room, which was close by, before the evidently lame woman attempted further stairs.

Marion Vincent hesitated a moment, then accepted. Diana hurried up a chair to the fire, installed her there, and herself sat on the floor watching her guest with some anxiety.

Yet, as she did so, she felt a certain antagonism. The face, of which the eyes were now closed, was nobly grave. The expression of its deeply marked lines appealed to her heart. But why this singularity--this eccentricity? Miss Vincent wore the same dress of dark woollen stuff, garnished with white frills, in which she had appeared the night before, and her morning attire, as Mr. Frobisher had foretold, had consisted of a precisely similar garment, adorned with a straight collar instead of frills. Surely a piece of acting!--of unnecessary self-assertion!

Yet all through the day--and the evening--Diana had been conscious of this woman's presence, in a strange penetrating way, even when they had had least to do with each other. In the intervals of her own joyous progress she had been often aware of Miss Vincent sitting apart, sometimes with Mr. Frobisher, who was reading or talking to her, sometimes with Lady Lucy, and--during the dance--with John Barton. Barton might have been the Jeremiah or the Ezekiel of the occasion. He sat astride upon a chair, in his respectable workman's clothes, his eyes under their shaggy brows, his weather-beaten features and compressed lips expressing an ill-concealed contempt for the scene before him. It was rumored that he had wished to depart before dinner, having concluded his consultation with Mr. Ferrier, but that Mrs. Fotheringham had persuaded him to remain for the night. His presence seemed to make dancing a misdemeanor, and the rich house, with its services and appurtenances, an organized crime. But if his personality was the storm-point of the scene, charged with potential lightning, Marion Vincent's was the still small voice, without threat or bitterness, which every now and then spoke to a quick imagination like Diana's its message from a world of poverty and pain. And sometimes Diana had been startled by the perception that the message seemed to be specially for her. Miss Vincent's eyes followed her; whenever Diana passed near her, she smiled--she admired. But always, as it seemed to Diana, with a meaning behind the smile. Yet what that meaning might be the girl could not tell.

At last, as she watched her, Marion Vincent looked up.

"Mr. Barton would talk to me just now about the history of his own life. I suppose it was the dance and the supper excited him. He began to testify! Sometimes when he does that he is magnificent. He said some fine things to-night. But I am run down and couldn't stand it."

Diana asked if Mr. Barton had himself gone through a great struggle with poverty.

"The usual struggle. No more than thousands of others. Only in him it is vocal--he can reflect upon it.--You had an easy triumph over him last night," she added, with a smile, turning to her companion.

"Who wouldn't have?"