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

must have flinched a little under such a test as had been offered to him? His flinching had been nothing final or damnable. It was Diana, who, in her ignorance of the world, had expected him to take the sacrifice as though it were nothing and meant nothing--as no honest man of the world, in fact, could have taken it.

* * * * *

When Marsham descended he found Alicia already in possession of the drawing-room. Her gown of a brilliant shade of blue put the room out of joint, and beside the startling effect of her hair, all the washed-out decoration and conventional ornament which it contained made a worse effect than usual. There was nothing conventional or effaced about Alicia. She had become steadily more emphatic, more triumphant, more self-confident.

"Well, what have you been doing with yourself?--nothing but politics?" The careless, provocative smile with which the words were accomplished roused a kind of instant antagonism in Marsham.

"Nothing--nothing, at least, worth anybody's remembering."

"You spoke at Dunscombe last week."

"I did."

"And you went to help Mr. Collins at the Sheffield bye-election."

"I did. I am very much flattered that you know so much about my movements."

"I always know everything that you are doing," said Alicia, quietly--"you, and Cousin Lucy."

"You have the advantage of me then"; his laugh was embarrassed, but not amicable; "for I am afraid I have no idea what you have been doing since Easter!"

"I have been at home, flirting with the Curate," said Alicia, with a laugh. As she sat, with her head thrown back against the chair, the light sparkling on her white skin, on her necklace of yellow topazes, and the jewelled fan in her hands, the folds of blue chiffon billowing round her, there could be no doubt of her effectiveness. Marsham could not help laughing, too.

"Charming for the Curate! Did he propose to you?"

"Certainly. I think we were engaged for twenty-four hours."

"That you might see what it was like? _Et apres?_"

"He was afraid he had mistaken my character"

Marsham laughed out.

"Poor victim! May I ask what you did it for?"

He found himself looking at her with curiosity and a certain anger. To be engaged, even for twenty-four hours, means that you allow your betrothed the privileges of betrothal. And in the case of Alicia no man was likely to forego them. She was really a little too unscrupulous!

"What I did it for? He was so nice and good-looking!"

"And there was nobody else?"

"Nobody. Home was a desert."

"H'm!" said Marsham. "Is he broken-hearted?"

Alicia shrugged her shoulders a little.

"I don't think so. I write him such charming letters. It is all simmering down beautifully."

Marsham moved restlessly to and fro, first putting down a lamp, then fidgeting with an evening paper. Alicia never failed to stir in him the instinct of sex, in its combative and critical form; and hostile as he believed he was to her, her advent had certainly shaken him out of his depression.

She meanwhile watched him with her teasing eyes, apparently enjoying his disapproval.

"I know exactly what you are thinking," she said, presently.

"I doubt it."

"Heartless coquette!" she said, mimicking his voice. "Never mind--her turn will come presently!"

"You don't allow my thoughts much originality."

"Why should I? Confess!--you did think that?"

Her small white teeth flashed in the smile she gave him. There was an exuberance of life and spirits about her that was rather disarming. But he did not mean to be disarmed.

"I did not think anything of the kind," he said, returning to the fire and looking down upon her; "simply because I know you too well."

Alicia reddened a little. It was one of her attractions that she flushed so easily.

"Because you know me too well?" she repeated. "Let me see. That means that you don't believe my turn will ever come?"

Marsham smiled.

"Your turn for what?" he said, dryly.

"I think we are getting mixed up!" Her laugh was as musical as he remembered it. "Let's begin again. Ah! here comes Cousin Lucy!"

Lady Lucy entered, ushering in an elderly relation, a Miss Falloden, dwelling also in Eaton Square: a comfortable lady with a comfortable income; a social stopper of chinks, moreover, kind and talkative; who was always welcome on occasions when life was not too strenuous or the company too critical. Marsham offered her his arm, and the little party made its way to the dining-room.

* * * * *

"Do you go back to the House, Oliver, to-night?" asked his mother, as the entree went round.

He replied in the affirmative, and resumed his conversation with Alicia. She was teasing him on the subject of some of his Labor friends in the House of Commons. It appeared that she had made the Curate, who was a Christian Socialist, take her to a Labor Conference at Bristol, where all the leaders were present, and her account of the proceedings and the types was both amusing and malicious. It was the first time that Marsham had known her attempt any conversation of the kind, and he recognized that her cleverness was developing. But many of the remarks she made on persons well known to him annoyed him extremely, and he could not help trying to punish her for them. Alicia, however, was not easily punished. She evaded him with a mosquito-like quickness, returning to the charge as soon as he imagined himself to have scored with an irrelevance or an absurdity which would have been exasperating in a man, but had somehow to be answered and politely handled from a woman. He lost his footing continually; and as she had none to lose, she had, on the whole, the best of it.

Then--in the very midst of it--he remembered, with a pang, another skirmish, another battle of words--with another adversary, in a different scene. The thrill of that moment in the Tallyn drawing-room, when he had felt himself Diana's conqueror; delighting in her rosy surrender, which was the mere sweet admission of a girl's limitations; and in its implied appeal, timid and yet proud, to a victor who was also a friend--all this he was conscious of, by association, while the sparring with Alicia still went on. His tongue moved under the stimulus of hers; but in the background of the mind rose the images and sensations of the past.

Lady Lucy, meanwhile, looked on, well pleased. She had not seen Oliver so cheerful, or so much inclined to talk, since "that unfortunate affair," and she was proportionately grateful to Alicia.

Marsham returned to the drawing-room with the ladies, declaring that he must be off in twenty minutes. Alicia settled herself in a corner of the sofa, and played with Lady Lucy's dog. Marsham endeavored, for a little, to do his duty by Miss Falloden; but in a few minutes he had drifted back to Alicia. This time she made him talk of Parliament, and the two or three measures in which he was particularly interested. She showed, indeed, a rather astonishing acquaintance with the details of those measures, and the thought crossed Marsham's mind: "Has she been getting them up?--and why?" But the idea did not make the conversation she offered him any the less pleasant. Quite the contrary. The mixture of teasing and deference which she showed him, in the course of it, had been the secret of her old hold upon him. She reasserted something of it now, and he was not unwilling. During the morose and taciturn phase through which he had been passing there had been no opportunity or desire to talk of himself, especially to a woman. But Alicia had always made him talk of himself, and he had forgotten how agreeable it might be.

He threw himself down beside her, and the time passed. Lady Lucy and Miss Falloden had retired into the back drawing-room, where the one knitted and the other gossiped. But as the clock struck a quarter to eleven Lady Lucy called, in some astonishment: "So you are not going back to the House, Oliver?"

He sprang to his feet.

"Heavens!" He looked at the clock, irresolute. "Well, there's nothing much on, mother. I don't think I need."

And he subsided again into his chair beside Alicia.

Miss Falloden looked at Lady Lucy with a meaning smile.

"I didn't know they were such friends!" she said, under her breath.

Lady Lucy made no reply. But her eyes travelled through the archway dividing the two rooms to the distant figures framed within it--Alicia, upright in her corner, the red gold of her hair shining against the background of a white azalea; Oliver, deep in his arm-chair, his long legs crossed, his hands gesticulating.

Lady Niton's sarcasms recurred to her. She was not sure whether she welcomed or disliked the idea. But, after all, why not?


CHAPTER XVI

"Ecco, Signorina! il Convento!"

The driver reined up his horse, pointing with his whip.

Diana and Muriel Colwood stood up eagerly in the carriage, and there at the end of the long white road, blazing on the mountain-side, terrace upon terrace, arch upon arch, rose the majestic pile of buildings which bears the name of St. Francis. Nothing else from this point was to be seen of Assisi. The sun, descending over the mountain of Orvieto, flooded the building itself with a level and blinding light, while upon Monte Subasio, behind, a vast thunder-cloud, towering in the southern sky, threw storm-shadows, darkly purple, across the mountain-side, and from their bosom the monastery, the churches, and those huge substructures which make the platform on which the convent stands, shone out in startling splendor.

The travellers gazed their fill, and the carriage clattered on.

As they neared the town and began to climb the hill Diana looked round her--at the plain through which they had come, at the mountains to the east, at the dome of the Portiuncula. Under the rushing light and shade of the storm-clouds, the blues of the hills, the young green of the vines, the silver of the olives, rose and faded, as it were, in waves of color, impetuous and magnificent. Only the great golden building, crowned by its double church, most famous of all the shrines of Italy, glowed steadily, amid the alternating gleam and gloom--fit guardian of that still living and burning memory which is St. Francis.

"We shall be happy here, sha'n't we?" said Diana, stealing a hand into her companion's. "And we needn't hurry away."

She drew a long breath. Muriel looked at her tenderly--enchanted whenever the old enthusiasm, the old buoyancy reappeared. They had now been in Italy for nearly two months. Muriel knew that for her companion the time had passed in one long wrestle for a new moral and spiritual standing-ground. All the glory of Italy had passed before the girl's troubled eyes as something beautiful but incoherent, a dream landscape, on which only now and then her full consciousness laid hold. For to the intenser feeling of youth, full reality belongs only to the world within; the world where the heart loves and suffers. Diana's true life