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

the half-penitent remark that Mrs. Colwood would have said good-bye to her guests, and that--she--she supposed they would soon have to know.

"Well, as I want you to marry me in six weeks," said Marsham, joyously, "I suppose they will."

"Six weeks!" She gasped. "Oh, how unreasonable!"

"Dearest!--A fortnight would do for frocks. And whom have we to consult but ourselves? I know you have no near relations. As for cousins, it doesn't take long to write them a few notes, and ask them to the wedding."

Diana sighed.

"My only cousins are the Mertons. They are all in Barbadoes but Fanny."

Her tone changed a little. In her thoughts, she added, hurriedly: "I sha'n't have any bridesmaids!"

Marsham, discreetly, made no reply. Personally, he hoped that Miss Merton's engagements might take her safely back to Barbadoes before the wedding-day. But if not, he and his would no doubt know how to deal with her--civilly and firmly--as people must learn to deal with their distasteful relations. Meanwhile on Diana's mind there had descended a sudden cloud of thought, dimming the ecstasy of her joy. The February day was dying in a yellowish dusk, full of beauty. They were walking along a narrow avenue of tall limes which skirted the Beechcote lands, and took them past the house. Above their heads the trees met in a brown-and-purple tracery of boughs, and on their right, through the branches, they saw a pale full moon, throning it in a silver sky. The mild air, the movements of the birds, the scents from the earth and bushes spoke of spring; and suddenly Diana perceived the gate leading to the wood where that very morning the subtle message of the changing year had come upon her, rending and probing. A longing to tell Marsham all her vague troubles rose in her, held back by a natural shrinking. But the longing prevailed, quickened by the loyal sense that she must quickly tell him all she knew about herself and her history, since there was nobody else to tell him.

"Oliver!"--she began, hurriedly--"I ought to tell you--I don't think you know. My name wasn't Mallory to begin with--my father took that name."

Marsham gave a little start.

"Dear--how surprising!--and how interesting! Tell me all you can--from the year One."

He smiled upon her, with a sparkling look that asked for all her history. But secretly he had been conscious of a shock. Lately he had made a few inquiries about the Welsh Mallorys. And the answers had been agreeable; though the old central stock of the name, to which he presumed Diana belonged, was said to be extinct. No doubt--so he had reflected--it had come to an end in her father.

"Mallory was the name of my father's mother. He took it for various reasons--I never quite understood--and I know a good deal of property came to him. But his original name--my name--was Sparling."

"Sparling!" A pause. "And have you any Sparling relations."

"No. They all died out--I think--but I know so little!--when I was small. However, I have a box of Sparling papers which I have never examined. Perhaps--some day--we might look at them together."

Her voice shook a little.

"You have never looked at them?"

"Never."

"But why, dearest?"

"It always seemed to make papa so unhappy--anything to do with his old name. Oliver!"--she turned upon him suddenly, and for the first time she clung to him, hiding her face against his shoulder--"Oliver!--I don't know what made him unhappy--I don't know why he changed his name. Sometimes I think--there may have been some terrible thing between him--and my mother."

He put his arm round her, close and tenderly.

"What makes you think that?" Then he whispered to her--"Tell your lover--your husband--tell him everything."

She shrank in delicious tremor from the great word, and it was a few moments before she could collect her thoughts. Then she said--still resting against him in the dark--and in a low rapid voice, as though she followed the visions of an inner sense:

"She died when I was only four. I just remember--it is almost my first recollection of anything--seeing her carried up-stairs--" She broke off. "And oh! it's so strange!--"

"Strange? She was ill?"

"Yes, but--what I seem to remember never explains itself--and I did not dare to ask papa. She hadn't been with us--for a long time. Papa and I had been alone. Then one day I saw them carrying her up-stairs--my father and two nurses--I ran out before my nurse could catch me--and saw her--she was in her hat and cloak. I didn't know her, and when she called me, I ran away. Then afterward they took me in to see her in bed--two or three times--and I remember once"--Diana began to sob herself--"seeing her cry. She lay sobbing--and my father beside her; he held her hand--and I saw him hide his eyes upon it. They never noticed me; I don't know that they saw me. Then they told me she was dead--I saw her lying on the bed--and my nurse gave me some flowers to put beside her--some violets. They were the only flowers. I can see her still, lying there--with her hands closed over them."

She released herself from Marsham, and, with her hand in his, she drew him slowly along the path, while she went on speaking, with an effort indeed, yet with a marvellous sense of deliverance--after the silence of years. She described the entire seclusion of their life at Portofino.

"Papa never spoke to me of mamma, and I never remember a picture of her. After his death I saw a closed locket on his breast for the first time. I would not have opened it for the world--I just kissed it--" Her voice broke again; but after a moment she quietly resumed. "He changed his name--I think--when I was about nine years old. I remember that somehow it seemed to give him comfort--he was more cheerful with me afterward--"

"And you have no idea what led him to go abroad?"

She shook her head. Marsham's changed and rapid tone had betrayed some agitation in the mind behind; but Diana did not notice it. In her story she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative influence on her own life--her father's melancholy, and the mystery in which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for the moment blinded as the old tyrannous grief overshadowed her.

"His life"--she said, slowly--"seemed for years--one long struggle to bear--what was really--unbearable. Then when I was about nineteen there was a change. He no longer shunned people quite in the same way, and he took me to Egypt and India. We came across old friends of his whom I, of course, had never seen before; and I used to wonder at the way in which they treated him--with a kind of reverence--as though they would not have touched him roughly for the world. Then directly after we got home to the Riviera his illness began--"

She dwelt on the long days of dumbness, and her constant sense that he wished--in vain--to communicate something to her.

"He wanted something--and I could not give it him--could not even tell what it was. It was misery! One day he managed to write: 'If you are in trouble, go to Riley & Bonner--ask them.' They were his solicitors, whom he had depended on from his boyhood. But since his death I have never wanted anything from them but a little help in business. They have been very good; but--I could not go and question them. If there was anything to know--papa had not been able to tell me--I did not want anybody else--to--"

Her voice dropped. Only half an hour since the flowering of life! What a change in both! She was pacing along slowly, her head thrown back; the oval of her face white among her furs, under the ghostly touch of the moonlight; a suggestion of something austere--finely remote--in her attitude and movement. His eyes were on the ground, his shoulders bent; she could not see his face.

"We must try and unravel it--together," he said, at last, with an effort. "Can you tell me your mother's name?"

"It was an old Staffordshire family. But she and papa met in America, and they married there. Her father died not long afterward, I think. And I have never heard of any relations but the one sister, Mrs. Merton. Her name was Wentworth. Oh!" It was an involuntary cry of physical pain.

"Diana!--Did I hurt your hand? my darling!"

The sudden tightness of his grip had crushed her fingers. She smiled at him, as he kissed them, in hasty remorse.

"And her Christian name?" he asked, in a low voice.

"Juliet."

There was a pause. They had turned back, and were walking toward the house. The air had grown much colder; frosty stars were twinkling, and a chilly wind was blowing light clouds across the moon. The two figures moved slowly in and out of the bands of light and shadow which crossed the avenue.

Diana stopped suddenly.

"If there were something terrible to know!"--she said, trembling--"something which would make you ashamed of me!--"

Her tall slenderness bent toward him--she held out her hands piteously. Marsham's manhood asserted itself. He encircled her again with his strong arm, and she hid her face against him. The contact of her soft body, her fresh cheek, intoxicated him afresh. In the strength of his desire for her, it was as though he were fighting off black vultures of the night, forces of horror that threatened them both. He would not believe what yet he already knew to be true. The thought of his mother clamored at the door of his mind, and he would not open to it. In a reckless defiance of what had overtaken him, he poured out tender and passionate speech which gradually stilled the girl's tumult of memory and foreboding, and brought back the heaven of their first moment on the hill-side. Her own reserve broke down, and from her murmured words, her sweetness, her infinite gratitude, Marsham might divine still more fully the richness of that harvest which such a nature promised to a lover.

* * * * *

"I won't tell any one--but Muriel--till you have seen Lady Lucy," said Diana, as they approached the house, and found Marsham's horse waiting at the door.

He acquiesced, and it was arranged that he should go up to town the following day, Sunday--see Lady Lucy--and return on the Monday.

Then he rode away, waving his hand through the darkness.

* * * * *

Marsham's horse carried him swiftly through country roads, where the moon made magic, and peace reigned. But the mind of the rider groped in confusion and despair, seeing no way out.

Only one definite purpose gathered strength--to throw himself on the counsel of Sir James Chide. Chide had known--from the beginning!


CHAPTER X

Marsham reached Felton Hall about six o'clock. The house, a large Georgian erection, belonging to pleasant easy-going people with many friends, was full of guests, and the thought of the large party which he must face at dinner and in the evening had been an