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

feeling he had not been able to hide from Lady Lucy.

"Most interesting--most interesting," murmured Ferrier, as the story came to an end. "A tragic and memorable case."

He pondered a little, his eyes on the carpet, while the others waited. Then he turned to Lady Lucy and took her hand.

"Dear lady!" he said, gently, "I think--you ought to give way!"

Lady Lucy's face quivered a little. She decidedly withdrew her hand.

"I am sorry you are both against me," she said, looking from one to the other. "I am sorry you help Oliver to think unkindly of me. But if I must stand alone, I must. I cannot give way."

Ferrier raised his eyebrows with a little perplexed look. Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he went to stand by the fire, staring down into it a minute or two, as though the flames might bring counsel.

"Miss Mallory is still ignorant, Oliver--is that so?" he said, at last.

"Entirely. But it is not possible she should continue to be so. She has begun to make inquiries, and I agree with Sir James it is right she should be told--"

"I propose to go down to Beechcote to-morrow," put in Sir James.

"Have you any idea what view Miss Mallory would be likely to take of the matter--as affecting her engagement?"

"She could have no view that was not unselfish and noble--like herself," said Marsham, hotly. "What has that to do with it?"

"She might release you," was Ferrier's slow reply.

Marsham flushed.

"And you think I should be such a hound as to let her!"

Sir James only just prevented himself from throwing a triumphant look at his hostess.

"You will, of course, inform her of your mother's opposition?" said Ferrier.

"It will be impossible to keep it from her."

"Poor child!" murmured Ferrier--"poor child!"

Then he looked at Lady Lucy.

"May I take Oliver into the inner room a little while?" he asked, pointing to a farther drawing-room.

"By all means. I shall be here when you return."

Sir James had a few hurried words in private with Marsham, and then took his leave. As he and Lady Lucy shook hands, he gave her a penetrating look.

"Try and think of the girl!" he said, in a low voice; "_the girl_--in her first youth."

"I think of my son," was the unmoved reply. "Good-bye, Sir James. I feel that we are adversaries, and I wish it were not so."

Sir James walked away, possessed by a savage desire to do some damage to the cathedral in pith, as he passed it on his way to the door; or to shake his fist in the faces of Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury, whose portraits adorned the staircase. The type of Catholic woman which he most admired rose in his mind; compassionate, tender, infinitely soft and loving--like the saints; save where "the faith" was concerned--like the saints, again. This Protestant rigidity and self-sufficiency were the deuce!

But he would go down to Beechcote, and he and Oliver between them would see that child through.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Ferrier and Marsham were in anxious conclave. Ferrier counselled delay. "Let the thing sleep a little. Don't announce the engagement. You and Miss Mallory will, of course, understand each other. You will correspond. But don't hurry it. So much consideration, at least, is due to your mother's strong feeling."

Marsham assented, but despondently.

"You know my mother; time will make no difference."

"I'm not so sure--I'm not so sure," said Ferrier, cheerfully. "Did your mother say anything about--finances?"

Marsham gave a gloomy smile.

"I shall be a pauper, of course--that was made quite plain to me."

"No, no!--that must be prevented!" said Ferrier, with energy.

Marsham was not quick to reply. His manner as he stood with his back to the fire, his distinguished head well thrown back on his straight, lean shoulders, was the manner of a proud man suffering humiliation. He was thirty-six, and rapidly becoming a politician of importance. Yet here he was--poor and impotent, in the midst of great wealth, wholly dependent, by his father's monstrous will, on his mother's caprice--liable to be thwarted and commanded, as though he were a boy of fifteen. Up till now Lady Lucy's yoke had been tolerable; to-day it galled beyond endurance.

Moreover, there was something peculiarly irritating at the moment in Ferrier's intervention. There had been increased Parliamentary friction of late between the two men, in spite of the intimacy of their personal relations. To be forced to owe fortune, career, and the permission to marry as he pleased to Ferrier's influence with his mother was, at this juncture, a bitter pill for Oliver Marsham.

Ferrier understood him perfectly, and he had never displayed more kindness or more tact than in the conversation which passed between them. Marsham finally agreed that Diana must be frankly informed of his mother's state of mind, and that a waiting policy offered the only hope. On this they were retiring to the front drawing-room when Lady Lucy opened the communicating door.

"A letter for you, Oliver."

He took it, and turned it over. The handwriting was unknown to him.

"Who brought this?" he asked of the butler standing behind his mother.

"A servant, sir, from Beechcote Manor, He was told to wait for an answer."

"I will send one. Come when I ring."

The butler departed, and Marsham went hurriedly into the inner room, closing the door behind him. Ferrier and Lady Lucy were left, looking at each other in anxiety. But before they could put it into words, Marsham reappeared, in evident agitation. He hurried to the bell and rang it.

Lady Lucy pointedly made no inquiry. But Ferrier spoke.

"No bad news, I hope?"

Marsham turned.

"She has been told?" he said, hoarsely, "Mrs. Colwood, her companion, speaks of 'shock.' I must go down at once."

Lady Lucy said nothing. She, too, had grown white.

The butler appeared. Marsham asked for the Sunday trains, ordered some packing, went down-stairs to speak to the Beechcote messenger, and returned.

Ferrier retired into the farthest window, and Marsham approached his mother.

"Good-bye, mother. I will write to you from Beechcote, where I shall stay at the little inn in the village. Have you no kind word that I may carry with me?"

Lady Lucy looked at him steadily.

"I shall write myself to Miss Mallory, Oliver."

His pallor gave place to a flush of indignation.

"Is it necessary to do anything so cruel, mother?"

"I shall not write cruelly."

He shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

"Considering what you have made up your mind to do, I should have thought least said, soonest mended. However, if you must, you must. I can only prepare Diana for your letter and soften it when it comes."

"In your new love, Oliver, have you quite forgotten the old?" Lady Lucy's voice shook for the first time.

"I shall be only too glad to remember it, when you give me the opportunity," he said, sombrely.

"I have not been a bad mother to you, Oliver. I have claims upon you."

He did not reply, and his silence wounded Lady Lucy to the quick. Was it her fault if her husband, out of an eccentric distrust of the character of his son, and moved by a kind of old-fashioned and Spartan belief that a man must endure hardness before he is fit for luxury, had made her and not Oliver the arbiter and legatee of his wealth? But Oliver had never wanted for anything. He had only to ask. What right had she to thwart her husband's decision?

"Good-bye, mother," said Marsham again. "If you are writing to Isabel you will, I suppose, discuss the matter with her. She is not unlikely to side with you--not for your reason, however--but because of some silly nonsense about politics. If she does, I beg she will not write to me. It could only embitter matters."

"I will give her your message. Good-bye, Oliver." He left the room, with a gesture of farewell to Ferrier.

* * * * *

Ferrier came back toward the fire. As he did so he was struck--painfully struck--by a change in Lady Lucy. She was not pale, and her eyes were singularly bright. Yet age was, for the first time, written in a face from which Time had so far taken but his lightest toll. It moved him strangely; though, as to the matter in hand, his sympathies were all with Oliver. But through thirty years Lady Lucy had been the only woman for him. Since first, as a youth of twenty, he had seen her in her father's house, he had never wavered. She was his senior by five years, and their first acquaintance had been one of boy-adoration on his side and a charming elder-sisterliness on hers. Then he had declared himself, and she had refused him in order to marry Henry Marsham and Henry Marsham's fortune. It seemed to him then that he would soon forget her--soon find a warmer and more generous heart. But that was mere ignorance of himself. After awhile he became the intimate friend of her husband, herself, and her child. Something, indeed, had happened to his affection for her. He felt himself in no danger beside her, so far as passion was concerned; and he knew very well that she would have banished him forever at a moment's notice rather than give her husband an hour's uneasiness. But to be near her, to be in her world, consulted, trusted, and flattered by her, to slip daily into his accustomed chair, to feel year by year the strands of friendship and of intimacy woven more closely between him and her--between him and hers--these things gradually filled all the space in his life left by politics or by thought. They deprived him of any other home, and this home became a necessity.

Then Henry Marsham died. Once more Ferrier asked Lady Lucy to marry him, and again she refused. He acquiesced; their old friendship was resumed; but, once more, with a difference. In a sense he had no longer any illusions about her. He saw that while she believed herself to be acting under the influence of religion and other high matters, she was, in truth, a narrow and rather cold-hearted woman, with a strong element of worldliness, disguised in much placid moralizing. At the bottom of his soul he resented her treatment of him, and despised himself for submitting to it. But the old habit had become a tyranny not to be broken. Where else could he go for talk, for intimacy, for rest? And for all his disillusion there were still at her command occasional felicities of manner and strains of feeling--ethereally delicate and spiritual, like a stanza from the _Christian Year_--that moved him and pleased his taste as nothing else had power to move and please; steeped, as they were, in a far-off magic of youth and memory.

So he stayed by her, and she knew very well that he would stay by her to the end.

He sat down beside her and took her hand.