Diana Tempest Volume Ii Part 16

Archie had several cheap effects. To offer a chair with a glance and a smile was one of them. Perhaps he could not help it if the glance suggested unbounded homage, if the smile conveyed an admiration as concentrated as Liebig's extract. His faithful, tender eyes could wear the sweetest, the saddest, or the most reproachful expression to order.

Every slight pa.s.sing feeling was magnified by the beauty of the face that reflected it into a great emotion. He felt almost nothing, but he appeared to feel a great deal. A man who possesses this talisman is very dangerous.

Poor Madeleine, confident of her appearance in her new Cresser garment, with its gold-flowered waistcoat, firmly believed, as Archie silently pushed forward the chair, that she had inspired--had been so unfortunate as to inspire--"une grande pa.s.sion malheureuse." Almost all Archie's lovemaking, and that is saying a good deal, was speechless. He could look unutterable things, but he had not, as he himself expressed it, "the gift of the gab."

Madeleine was sorry for him, but she could not allow him to remain enraptured beside her in full view of Sir Henry's study windows.

"How delicious it is here!" she said, after dismissing him to the billiard-room. "I never lie in bed after a ball, do you, Di? I seem to crave for the suns.h.i.+ne and the face of nature after all the glitter and the worldliness of a ball-room."

"I don't find ball-rooms more worldly than other places--than this bench, for instance."

"Now, how strange that is of you, Di! This spot is quite sacred to _me_.

I come and read here."

Madeleine had, by degrees, sanctified all the seats in the garden; had taken the impious chill even off the iron ones, by reading her little manuals on each in turn.

"It was here," continued Madeleine, "that I persuaded dear Fred to go into the Church. It was settled he was to be a clergyman ever since he had that slight stroke as a boy; but when he went to college he must have got into a bad set, for he said he did not think he had a vocation.

And mother--you know what mother is--did not like to press it, and the whole thing was slipping through, when I had him to stay here, and talked to him very seriously, and explained that a living in the family _was_ the call."

"Madeleine," said Di, rising precipitately, "it is getting late. I must fly and pack."

If she stayed another moment she knew she should inevitably say something that would scandalize Madeleine.

"And I did not say it," she said with modest triumph that evening, as she sat in her grandmother's room before going to bed; having rejoined her at Garstone, a relation's house, whither Mrs. Courtenay had preceded her. "I refrained even from bad words. Granny, you know everything: why is it that the people who shock me so dreadfully, like Madeleine, are just the very ones who are shocked at me? You are not. All the really good earnest people I know are not. But _they_ are. What is the matter with them?"

"Oh, my dear, what is the matter with all insincere people? It is only one of the symptoms of an incurable disease."

"But the being shocked is genuine. They really feel it. There is something wrong somewhere, but I don't know where it is."

"It is not hard to find, Di," said Mrs. Courtenay, sadly; "and it is not worth growing hot about. You are only running a little tilt against religiosity. Most young persons do. But it is not worth powder and shot.

Keep your ammunition for a n.o.bler enemy. There is plenty of sin in the world. Strike at that whenever you can, but don't pop away at shadows."

"Ah! but, granny, these people do such harm. They bring such discredit on religion. That is what enrages me."

"My dear, you are wrong; they bring discredit upon nothing but their own lamentable caricatures of holy things. These people are solemn warnings--danger-signals on the broad paths of religiosity, which, remember, are very easy walking. There's no life so easy. The religious life is hard enough, G.o.d knows. Providence put those people there to make their creed hideous, and they do it. Upon my word, I think your indignation against them is positively unpardonable."

Di was silent.

"You don't mind being disliked by these creatures, do you, Di?"

"Yes, granny, I think I do. I believe, if I only knew the truth about myself, I want every one to like me; and it ruffles me because they make round eyes, and don't like me when their superiors often do."

"Mere pride and love of admiration on your part, my dear. You have no business with them. To be liked and admired by certain persons is a stigma in itself. Look at the kind of mediocrity and feebleness they set on pedestals, and be thankful you don't fit into their mutual admiration societies. That 'like cleaves to like,' is a saying we seldom get to the bottom of. These unfortunates find blots, faults, evil, in everything, especially everything original, because they are sensitive to blots and faults. They commit themselves out of their own mouths. 'Those that seek shall find,' is especially true of the fault-finders. The truth and beauty which others receptive of truth and beauty perceive, escape them.

Good nature sees good in others. The reverent impute reverence. This false reverence finds irreverence, as a mean nature takes for granted a low motive in its fellow. Oh dear me, Di! Have I expended on you for years the wisdom of a Socrates and a Solomon, that at one and twenty you should need to be taught your alphabet? Go to bed and pray for wisdom, instead of complaining of the lack of it in others."

Di had had but little leisure lately, and the unbounded leisure of her long visit at Garstone came as a relief.

"I shall have time to think here," she said to herself, as she looked out the first morning over the grey park and lake distorted by the little panes of old gla.s.s of her low window.

Two very old people lived at Garstone, who regarded their niece, Mrs.

Courtenay, as still quite a young person, in spite of her tall granddaughter. Time seemed to have forgotten the dear old couple, and they in turn had forgotten it. It never mattered what time of day it was. Nothing depended on the hour. In the course of the morning the butler would open both the folding doors at the end of the long "parlour" leading to the chapel, and would announce, "Prayers are served." Long prayers they were. Long meals were served too, with long intervals between them, during which, in spite of a week of heavy rain, Di escaped regularly into the gardens and so away to the park. The house oppressed her. She was restless and ill at ease. She was never missed because she was never wanted; and she wandered for hours in the park, listening to the low cry of the deer, standing on the bridge over the artificial 1745 lake, or pacing mile on mile a sheltered path under the park wall. The thinking for which she had such ample opportunity did not come off. It s.h.i.+rked regularly. A certain vague trouble of soul was upon her, like the unrest of nature at the spring of the year. And day after day she watched the autumn leaves drop from the trees into the water, and there was a great silence in her heart, and underneath the silence a fear--or was it a hope? She knew not.

There was one subject to which Di's thoughts returned, and ever returned, in spite of herself. John was that subject. Gradually, as the days wore on, her shamed remorse at having wounded him gave place to the old animosity against him. She had never been angry with any of her numerous lovers before. She had, on the contrary, been rather sorry for them. But she was desperately angry with John. It seemed to her--why she would have been at a loss to explain--that he had taken a very great liberty in venturing to love her, and in daring to a.s.sert that they were suited to other.

She went through silent paroxysms of rage against him, sitting on a fallen tree among the bracken with clenched hands. Her sense of his growing power over her, over her thought, over her will, was intolerable. Why so fierce? why such a fool? she asked herself over and over again. He could not marry her against her will. Indeed, he had said he did not want to. Why, then, all this silly indignation about nothing?

There was no answer until one day Mrs. Courtenay happened to mention to Mrs. Garstone, in her presence, the probability of John's eventually marrying Lady Alice Fane--"a very charming and suitable person," etc.

Then suddenly it became clear to Di that, though she would never marry him herself, the possibility of his marrying any one else was not to be borne for a moment. John, of course, was to--was to remain unmarried all his life. Her sense of the ludicrous showed her in a lightning-flash where she stood.

To discover a new world is all very well for people like Columbus, who want to find one. But to discover a new world by mistake when quite content with the old one, and to be swept towards it uncertain of your reception by the natives a.s.sembling on the beach, is another thing altogether. For the second time in her life Di was frightened.

"Then all these horrible feelings are being in love," she said to herself, with a sense of stupefaction. "This is what other people have felt for me, and I treated it as of little consequence. This is what I have read about, and sung about, and always rather wished to feel. I am in love with John. Oh, I hope to G.o.d he will never find it out!"

Probably no man will ever understand the agonies of humiliation, of furious unreasoning antagonism, which a proud woman goes through when she becomes aware that she is falling in love. Pride and love go as ill together in the beginning as they go exceeding well together later on.

To be loved is incense at first, until the sense of justice--fortunately rare in women--is aroused. "Shall I take all, and give nothing?"

Pride, often a very tender pride for the lover himself, asks that question. Directly it is asked the battle begins.

"I will not give less than all. How _can_ I give all?" The very young are spared the conflict, because the future husband is regarded only as the favoured ball-partner, the perpetual admirer of a new existence. But women who know something of life--of the great demands of marriage--of the absolute sacrifice of individual existence which it involves--when they begin to tremble beneath the sway of a deep human pa.s.sion suffer much, fear greatly until the perfect love comes that casts out fear.

Some natures, and very lovable they are, give all, counting not the cost. Others, a very few, count the cost and then give all.

Di was one of these.

CHAPTER XIV.

"Austerity in women is sometimes the accompaniment of a rare power of loving. And when it is so their attachment is strong as death; their fidelity as resisting as the diamond."--AMIEL.

The newspapers arrived at tea-time at Garstone. Every afternoon Mrs.

Garstone and Mrs. Courtenay drove out along the straight high-road to D---- to fetch the papers and post the letters; four miles in and four miles out; the grey pair one day and the bays the next, in the old yellow chariot. It was the rule of the house. And after tea and rusks, and a poached egg under a cover for Mr. Garstone, that gentleman read the papers aloud in a voice that trembled and halted like the spinnet in the southern parlour.

"Is Parliament prorogued yet?" Mrs. Garstone asked regularly every afternoon.

Mr. Garstone, without answering, struck his key-note at the births, and quavered slowly through the marriages and deaths. Before he had arrived on this particular afternoon at the fact that Princess Beatrice had walked with Prince Henry of Battenberg, Mrs. Garstone was already nodding between her little rows of white curls. Mrs. Courtenay was awake, but she looked too solemnly attentive to continue in one stay.

"The remains of the Dean of Gloucester," continued Mr. Garstone, "will be interred at Gloucester Cathedral on Friday next."

The information was received, like most sedatives, without comment.

Latest intelligence. Colliery explosion at Snarley.

"Di, has not John coal-pits at Snarley?" asked Mrs. Courtenay, becoming suddenly wide awake.

"Yes," said Di.

"Explosion of fire-damp," continued Mr. Garstone, slower than ever. "No particulars known. Great loss of life apprehended. Mr. Tempest of Overleigh, to whom the mine belonged, instantly left G.o.dalmington Court, where he was the guest of Lord Carradock, and proceeded at once to the spot, where he organized a rescue party led by himself. Mr. Tempest was the first to descend the shaft. The gravest anxiety was felt respecting the fate of the rescuing party. Vast crowds a.s.sembled at the pit's mouth. No further news obtainable up to date of going to press."