"So here we are in this hermitage; and except in a few pa.s.sing perfunctory words, I have never spoken to you of her.
Whether what I have done is wise I cannot tell. I could not help it; and if I had broken my word, remorse would have killed me. I shall not die, however, without telling you--if only I have warning enough.
"But supposing there is no warning--then all that I write now, and much else, will be in your hands some day. There are moments when I feel a rush of comfort at the notion that I may never have to watch your face as you hear the story; there are others when the longing to hold you--child as you still are--against my heart, and feel your tears--your tears for her--mingling with mine, almost sweeps me off my feet.
"And when you grow older my task in all its aspects will be harder still. You have inherited her beauty on a larger, ampler scale, and the time will come for lovers. You will hear of your mother then for the first time; my mind trembles even now at the thought of it. For the story may work out ill, or well, in a hundred different ways; and what we did in love may one day be seen as an error and folly, avenging itself not on us, but on our child.
"Nevertheless, my Diana, if it had to be done again, it must still be done. Your mother, before she died, was tortured by no common pains of body and spirit. Yet she never thought of herself--she was tormented for us. If her vision was clouded, her prayer unwise--in that hour, no argument, no resistance was possible.
"The man who loves you will love you well, my child. You are not made to be lightly or faithlessly loved. He will carry you through the pa.s.sage perilous if I am no longer there to help. To him--in the distant years--I commit you. On him be my blessing, and the blessing, too, of that poor ghost whose hands I seem to hold in mine as I write. Let him not be too proud to take it!"
Diana put down the book with a low sob that sounded through the quiet room. Then she opened the garden door and stepped on to the terrace. The night was cold but not frosty; there was a waning moon above the autumnal fulness of the garden and the woods.
A "spirit in her feet" impelled her. She went back to the house, found a cloak and hat, put out the lamps, and sent the servants to bed. Then noiselessly she once more undid the drawing-room door, and stole out into the garden and across the lawn. Soon she was in the lime-walk, the first yellow leaves crackling beneath her feet; then in the kitchen garden, where the apples shone dimly on the laden boughs, where sunflowers and dahlias and marigolds, tall white daisies and late roses--the ghosts of their daylight selves--dreamed and drooped under the moon; where the bees slept and only great moths were abroad. And so on to the climbing path and the hollows of the down. She walked quickly along the edge of it, through hanging woods of beech that clothed the hill-side. Sometimes the trees met in majestic darkness above her head, and the path was a glimmering mystery before her. Sometimes the ground broke away on her left--abruptly--in great chasms, torn from the hill-side, stripped of trees, and open to the stars. Down rushed the steep slopes to the plain, clad in the decaying leaf and mast of former years, and at the edges of these precipitous glades, or scattered at long intervals across them, great single trees emerged, the types and masters of the forest, their trunks, incomparably tall, and all their n.o.ble limbs, now thinly veiled by a departing leaf.a.ge, drawn sharp, in black and silver, on the pale background of the chalk plain. Nothing so grandiose as these climbing beech woods of middle England!--by day, as it were, some vast procession marching joyously over hill and dale to the music of the birds and the wind; and at night, a brooding host, silent yet animate, waiting the signal of the dawn.
Diana pa.s.sed through them, drinking in the exaltation of their silence and their strength, yet driven on by the mere weakness and foolishness of love. By following the curve of the down she could reach a point on the hill-side whence, on a rising ground to the north, Tallyn was visible. She hastened thither through the night. Once she was startled by a shot fired from a plantation near the path, trees began to rustle and dogs to bark, and she fled on, in terror lest the Tallyn keepers might discover her. Alack!--for whose pleasure were they watching now?
The trees fell back. She reached the bare shoulder of the down.
Northward and eastward spread the plain; and on the low hill in front her eyes discerned the pale patch of Tallyn, flanked by the darkness of the woods. And in that dim front, a light--surely a light?--in an upper window. She sank down in a hollow of the chalk, her eyes upon the house, murmuring and weeping.
So she watched with Oliver, as once--at the moment of her sharpest pain--he had watched with her. But whereas in that earlier night everything was in the man"s hands to will or to do, the woman felt herself now helpless and impotent. His wealth, his mother hedged him from her. And if not, he had forgotten her altogether for Alicia; he cared for her no more; it would merely add to his burden to be reminded of her. As to Alicia--the girl who could cruelly leave him there, in that house of torture, to go and dance and amuse herself--leave him in his pain, his mother in her sorrow--Diana"s whole being was shaken first with an anguish of resentful scorn, in which everything personal to herself disappeared. Then--by an immediate revulsion--the thought of Alicia was a thought of deliverance. Gone?--gone from between them?--the flaunting, triumphant, heartless face?
Suddenly it seemed to Diana that she was there beside him, in the darkened room--that he heard her, and looked up.
"Diana!"
"Oliver!" She knelt beside him--she raised his head on her breast--she whispered to him; and at last he slept. Then hostile forms crowded about her, forbidding her, driving her away--even Sir James Chide--in the name of her own youth. And she heard her own answer: "Dear friend!--think!--remember! Let me stay!--let me stay! Am I not the child of sorrow? Here is my natural place--my only joy."
And she broke down into bitter helpless tears, pleading, it seemed, with things and persons inexorable.
Meanwhile, in Beechcote village, that night, a man slept lightly, thinking of Diana. Hugh Roughsedge, bronzed and full of honors, a man developed and matured, with the future in his hands, had returned that afternoon to his old home.
CHAPTER XXIII
"How is she?"
Mrs. Colwood shook her head sadly.
"Not well--and not happy."
The questioner was Hugh Roughsedge. The young soldier had walked up to Beechcote immediately after luncheon, finding it impossible to restrain his impatience longer. Diana had not expected him so soon, and had slipped out for her daily half-hour with Betty Dyson, who had had a slight stroke, and was failing fast. So that Mrs. Colwood was at Roughsedge"s discretion. But he was not taking all the advantage of it that he might have done. The questions with which his mind was evidently teeming came out but slowly.
Little Mrs. Colwood surveyed him from time to time with sympathy and pleasure. Her round child-like eyes under their long lashes told her everything that as a woman she wanted to know. What an improvement in looks and manner--what indefinable gains in significance and self-possession! Danger, command, responsibility, those great tutors of men, had come in upon the solid yet malleable stuff of which the character was made, moulding and polishing, striking away defects, disengaging and accenting qualities. Who could ever have foreseen that Hugh might some day be described as "a man of the world"? Yet if that vague phrase were to be taken in its best sense, as describing a personality both tempered and refined by the play of the world"s forces upon it, it might certainly be now used of the man before her.
He was handsomer than ever; bronzed by Nigerian sun, all the superfluous flesh marched off him; every muscle in his frame taut and vigorous. And at the same time a new self-confidence--apparently quite unconscious, and the inevitable result of a strong and testing experience--was enabling him to bring his powers to bear and into play, as he had never yet done.
She recalled, with some confusion, that she--and Diana?--had tacitly thought of him as good, but stupid. On the contrary, was she, perhaps, in the presence of some one destined to do great things for his country?
to lay hold--without intending it, as it were, and by the left hand--oh high distinction? Were women, on the whole, bad judges of young men? She recalled a saying of Dr. Roughsedge, that "mothers never know how clever their sons are." Perhaps the blindness extends to other eyes than mothers?
Meanwhile, she got from him all the news she could. He had been, it seemed, concerned in the vast operation of bringing a new African Empire into being. She listened, dazzled, while in the very simplest, baldest phrases he described the curbing of slave-raiders, the winning of populations, the grappling with the desert, the opening out of river highways, whereof in his seven months he had been the fascinated beholder. As to his own exploits, he was ingeniously silent; but she knew them already. A military expedition against two revolted and slave-raiding emirs, holding strong positions on the great river; a few officers borrowed from home to stiffen a local militia; hot fighting against great odds; half a million of men released from a reign of h.e.l.l; tyranny broken, and the British _pax_ extended over regions a third as large as India--smiling prosperity within its pale, b.e.s.t.i.a.l devastation and cruelty without--these things she knew, or had been able to imagine from the newspapers. According to him, it had been all the doing of other men. She knew better; but soon found it of no use to interrupt him.
Meanwhile she dared not ask him why he had come home. The campaign, indeed, was over; but he had been offered, it appeared, an administrative appointment.
"And you mean to go back?"
"Perhaps." He colored and looked restlessly out of the window.
Mrs. Colwood understood the look, and felt it was, indeed, hard upon him that he must put up with her so long. In reality, he too was conscious of new pleasure in an old acquaintance. He had forgotten what a dear little thing she was: how prettily round-faced, yet delicate--ethereal--in all her proportions, with the kindest eyes. She too had grown--by the mere contact with Diana"s fate. Within her tiny frame the soul of her had risen to maternal heights, embracing and sustaining Diana.
He would have given the world to question her. But after her first answer to his first inquiry he had fallen tongue-tied on the subject of Diana, and Nigeria had absorbed conversation. She, on her side, wished him to know many things, but did not see how to begin upon them.
At last she attempted it.
"You have heard of our election? And what happened?"
He nodded. His mother had kept him informed. He understood Marsham had been badly hurt. Was it really so desperate?
In a cautious voice, watching the window, Muriel told what she knew. The recital was pitiful; but Hugh Roughsedge sat impa.s.sive, making no comments. She felt that in this quarter the young man was adamant.
"I suppose"--he turned his face from her--"Miss Mallory does not now go to Tallyn."
"No." She hesitated, looking at her companion, a score of feelings mingling in her mind. Then she broke out: "But she would like to!"
His startled look met hers; she was dismayed at what she had done. Yet, how not to give him warning?--this loyal young fellow, feeding himself on futile hopes!
"You mean--she still thinks--of Marsham?"
"Of nothing else," she said, impetuously--"of nothing else!"
He frowned and winced.
She resumed: "It is like her--so like her!--isn"t it?"
Her soft pitiful eyes, into which the tears had sprung, pressed the question on him.
"I thought there was a cousin--Miss Drake?" he said, roughly.
Mrs. Colwood hesitated.
"It is said that all that is broken off."
He was silent. But his watch was on the garden. And suddenly, on the long gra.s.s path, Diana appeared, side by side with the Vicar. Roughsedge sprang up. Muriel was arrested by Diana"s face, and by something rigid in the carriage of the head. What had the Vicar been saying to her?--she asked herself, angrily. Never was there anything less discreet than the Vicar"s handling of human nature!--female human nature, in particular.
Hugh Roughsedge opened the gla.s.s door, and went to meet them. Diana, at sight of him, gave a bewildered look, as though she scarcely knew him--then a perfunctory hand.