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

any more--"Juliet Sparling" to all the world: the loafer at the street corner--the drunkard in the tavern--

The thought of this vast publicity, this careless or cruel scorn of the big world--toward one so frail, so anguished, so helpless in death--clutched Diana many times in each day and night. And it led to that perpetual image in the mind which we saw haunting her in the first hours of her grief, as though she carried her dying mother in her arms, passionately clasping and protecting her, their faces turned to each other, and hidden from all eyes besides.

Also, it deadened in her the sense of her own case--in relation to the gossip of the neighborhood. Ostrich-like, she persuaded herself that not many people could have known anything about her five days' engagement. Dear kind folk like the Roughsedges would not talk of it, nor Lady Lucy surely. And Oliver himself--never!

She had reached a point in the field walk where the hill-side opened to her right, and the little winding path was disclosed which had been to her on that mild February evening the path of Paradise. She stood still a moment, looking upward, the deep sob of loss rising in her throat.

But she wrestled with herself, and presently turned back to the house, calm and self-possessed. There were things to be thankful for. She knew the worst. And she felt herself singularly set free--from ordinary conventions and judgments. Nobody could ever quarrel with her if, now that she had come back, she lived her own life in her own way. Nobody could blame her--surely most people would approve her--if she stood aloof from ordinary society, and ordinary gayeties for a while, at any rate. Oh! she would do nothing singular or rude. But she was often tired and weak--not physically, but in mind. Mrs. Roughsedge knew--and Muriel.

Dear Hugh Roughsedge!--he was indeed a faithful understanding friend. She was proud of his letters; she was proud of his conduct in the short campaign just over; she looked forward to his return in the autumn. But he must not cherish foolish thoughts or wishes. She would never marry. What Lady Lucy said was true. She had probably no right to marry. She stood apart.

But--but--she must not be asked yet to give herself to any great mission--any set task of charity or philanthropy. Her poor heart fluttered within her at the thought, and she clung gratefully to the recollection of Marion's imperious words to her. That exaltation with which, in February, she had spoken to the Vicar of going to the East End to work had dropped--quite dropped.

Of course, there was a child in the village--a dear child--ill and wasting--in a spinal jacket, for whom one would do anything--just anything! And there was Betty Dyson--plucky, cheerful old soul. But that was another matter.

What, she asked, had she to give the poor? She wanted guiding and helping and putting in the right way herself. She could not preach to any one--wrestle with any one. And ought one to make out of others' woes plasters for one's own? To use the poor as the means of a spiritual "cure" seemed a dubious indecent thing; more than a touch in it of arrogance--or sacrilege.

* * * * *

Meanwhile she had been fighting her fight in the old ways. She had been falling back on her education, appealing to books and thought, reminding herself of what the life of the mind had been to her father in his misery, and of those means of cultivating it to which he would certainly have commended her. She was trying to learn a new foreign language, and, under Marion Vincent's urging, the table in the little sitting-room was piled with books on social and industrial matters, which she diligently read and pondered.

It was all struggle and effort. But it had brought her some reward. And especially through Marion Vincent's letters, and through the long day with Marion in London, which she had now to look back upon. For Miss Vincent and Frobisher had returned, and Marion was once more in her Stepney rooms. She was apparently not much worse; would allow no talk about herself; and though she had quietly relinquished all her old activities, her room was still the centre it had long been for the London thinker and reformer.

Diana found there an infinity to learn. The sages and saints, it seemed, are of all sides and all opinions. That had not been the lesson of her youth. In a comforting heat of prejudice her father had found relief from suffering, and his creeds had been fused with her young blood. Lately she had seen their opposites embodied in a woman from whom she shrank in repulsion--whose name never passed her lips--Oliver's sister--who had trampled on her in her misery. Yet here, in Marion's dingy lodging, she saw the very same ideas which Isabel Fotheringham made hateful, clothed in light, speaking from the rugged or noble faces of men and women who saw in them the salvation of their kind.

The intellect in Diana, the critical instinct resisted. And, moreover, to have abandoned any fraction of the conservative and traditional beliefs in which she had been reared was impossible for her of all women; it would have seemed to her that she was thereby leaving those two suffering ones, whom only her love sheltered, still lonelier in death. So, beneath the clatter of talk and opinion, run the deep omnipotent tides of our real being.

But if the mind resisted, the heart felt, and therewith, the soul--that total personality which absorbs and transmutes the contradictions of life--grew kinder and gentler within her.

One day, after a discussion on votes for women which had taken place beside Marion's sofa, Diana, when the talkers were gone, had thrown herself on her friend.

"Dear, you can't wish it!--you can't believe it! To brutalize--unsex us!"

Marion raised herself on her elbow, and looked down the narrow cross street beneath the windows of her lodging. It was a stifling evening. The street was strewn with refuse, the odors from it filled the room. Ragged children with smeared faces were sitting or playing listlessly in the gutters. The public-house at the corner was full of animation, and women were passing in and out. Through the roar of traffic from the main street beyond a nearer sound persisted: a note of wailing--the wailing of babes.

"There are the unsexed!" said Marion, panting. "Is their brutalization the price we pay for our refinement?" Then, as she sank back: "Try anything--everything--to change that."

Diana pressed the speaker's hand to her lips.

But from Marion Vincent, the girl's thoughts, as she wandered in the summer garden, had passed on to the news which Mrs. Roughsedge had brought her. Oliver was speaking every night, almost, in the villages round Beechcote. Last week he had spoken at Beechcote itself. Since Mrs. Roughsedge's visit, Diana had borrowed the local paper from Brown, and had read two of Oliver's speeches therein reported. As she looked up to the downs, or caught through the nearer trees the lines of distant woods, it was as though the whole scene--earth and air--were once more haunted for her by Oliver--his presence--his voice. Beechcote lay on the high-road from Tallyn to Dunscombe, the chief town of the division. Several times a week, at least, he must pass the gate. At any moment they might meet face to face.

The sooner the better! Unless she abandoned Beechcote, they must learn to meet on the footing of ordinary acquaintances; and it were best done quickly.

Voices on the lawn! Diana, peeping through the trees, beheld the Vicar in conversation with Muriel Colwood. She turned and fled, pausing at last in the deepest covert of the wood, breathless and a little ashamed.

She had seen him once since her return. Everybody was so kind to her, the Vicar, the Miss Bertrams--everybody; only the pity and the kindness burned so. She wrestled with these feelings in the wood, but she none the less kept a thick screen between herself and Mr. Lavery.

She could never forget that night of her misery when--good man that he was!--he had brought her the message of his faith.

But the great melting moments of life are rare, and the tracts between are full of small frictions. What an incredible sermon he had preached on the preceding Sunday! That any minister of the national church--representing all sorts and conditions of men--should think it right to bring his party politics into the pulpit in that way! Unseemly! unpardonable!

Her dark eyes flashed--and then clouded. She had walked home from the sermon in a heat of wrath, had straightway sought out some blue ribbon, and made Tory rosettes for herself and her dog. Muriel had laughed--had been delighted to see her doing it.

But the rosettes were put away now--thrown into the bottom of a drawer. She would never wear them.

The Vicar, it seemed, was no friend of Oliver's--would not vote for him, and had been trying to induce the miners at Hartingfield to run a Labor man. On the other hand, she understood that the Ferrier party in the division were dissatisfied with him on quite other grounds: that they reproached him with a leaning to violent and extreme views, and with a far too lukewarm support of the leader of the party and the leader's policy. The local papers were full of grumbling letters to that effect.

Her brow knit over Oliver's difficulties. The day before, Mr. Lavery, meeting Muriel in the village street, had suggested that Miss Mallory might lend him the barn for a Socialist meeting--a meeting, in fact, for the harassing and heckling of Oliver.

Had he come now to urge the same plea again? A woman's politics were not, of course, worth remembering!

She moved on to a point where, still hidden, she could see the lawn. The Vicar was in full career; the harsh creaking voice came to her from the distance. What an awkward unhandsome figure, with his long, lank countenance, his large ears and spectacled eyes! Yet an apostle, she admitted, in his way--a whole-hearted, single-minded gentleman. But the barn he should not have.

She watched him depart, and then slowly emerged from her hiding-place. Muriel, putting loving hands on her shoulders, looked at her with eyes that mocked a little--tenderly.

"Yes, I know," said Diana--"I know. I shirked. Did he want the barn?"

"Oh no. I convinced him, the other day, you were past praying for."

"Was he shocked? 'It is a serious thing for women to throw themselves across the path of progress,'" said Diana, in a queer voice.

Muriel looked at her, puzzled. Diana reddened, and kissed her.

"What did he want, then?"

"He came to ask whether you would take the visiting of Fetter Lane--and a class in Sunday-school."

Diana gasped.

"What did you say?"

"Never mind. He went away quelled."

"No doubt he thought I ought to be glad to be set to work."

"Oh! they are all masterful--that sort."

Diana walked on.

"I suppose he gossiped about the election?"

"Yes. He has all sorts of stories--about the mines--and the Tallyn estates," said Muriel, unwillingly.

Diana's look flashed.

"Do you believe he has any power of collecting evidence fairly? I don't. He sees what he wants to see."

Mrs. Colwood agreed; but did not feel called upon to confirm Diana's view by illustrations. She