The Testing of Diana Mallory written by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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THE TESTING OF DIANA MALLORY

by

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

Illustrated by W. Hatherell, R.I.

1908

[Illustration: "THERE SHE WAITED WHILE THE DAWN STOLE UPON THE NIGHT"]

BOOKS BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

THE TESTING OF DIANA MALLORY. Ill'd ... $1.50

LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER. Illustrated ... 1.50
Two volume edition ... 3.00

THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM ASHE. Ill'd ... 1.50
Two volume Autograph edition ... net 4.00

FENWICK'S CAREER. Illustrated ... 1.50
De Luxe edition, two volumes ... net 5.00

ELEANOR ... 1.50

LIFE OF W. T. ARNOLD ... net 1.50

TO
MY KIND HOSTS BEYOND THE ATLANTIC

FROM

A GRATEFUL TRAVELLER

JULY, 1908

Illustrations

"THERE SHE WAITED WHILE THE DAWN STOLE UPON THE NIGHT". . . Frontispiece

"THE MAN'S PULSES LEAPED ANEW". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

"YOU NEEDN'T BE CROSS WITH ME, DIANA" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

"'DEAR LADY,' HE SAID, GENTLY, 'I THINK YOU OUGHT TO GIVE WAY!'". . . 256

"ALICIA, UPRIGHT IN HER CORNER--OLIVER, DEEP IN HIS ARMCHAIR" . . . . 332

"SIR JAMES PLAYED DIANA'S GAME WITH PERFECT DISCRETION" . . . . . . . 462

"SIR JAMES MADE HIMSELF DELIGHTFUL TO THEM" . . . . . . . . . . . . . 492

"ROUGHSEDGE STOOD NEAR, RELUCTANTLY WAITING". . . . . . . . . . . . . 514

Part I

_"Action is transitory--a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle--this way or that--
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity_."
--THE BORDERERS.

The Testing of Diana Mallory

CHAPTER I

The clock in the tower of the village church had just struck the
quarter. In the southeast a pale dawn light was beginning to show above
the curving hollow of the down wherein the village lay enfolded; but the
face of the down itself was still in darkness. Farther to the south, in
a stretch of clear night sky hardly touched by the mounting dawn, Venus
shone enthroned, so large and brilliant, so near to earth and the
spectator, that she held, she pervaded the whole dusky scene, the
shadowed fields and wintry woods, as though she were their very soul
and voice.

"The Star of Bethlehem!--and Christmas Day!"

Diana Mallory had just drawn back the curtain of her bedroom. Her voice,
as she murmured the words, was full of a joyous delight; eagerness and
yearning expressed themselves in her bending attitude, her parted lips
and eyes intent upon the star.

The panelled room behind her was dimly lit by a solitary candle, just
kindled. The faint dawn in front, the flickering candle-light behind,
illumined Diana's tall figure, wrapped in a white dressing-gown, her
small head and slender neck, the tumbling masses of her dark hair, and
the hand holding the curtain. It was a kind and poetic light; but her
youth and grace needed no softening.

After the striking of the quarter, the church bell began to ring, with a
gentle, yet insistent note which gradually filled the hollows of the
village, and echoed along the side of the down. Once or twice the sound
was effaced by the rush and roar of a distant train; and once the call
of an owl from a wood, a call melancholy and prolonged, was raised as
though in rivalry. But the bell held Diana's strained ear throughout its
course, till its mild clangor passed into the deeper note of the clock
striking the hour, and then all sounds alike died into a profound yet
listening silence.

"Eight o'clock! That was for early service," she thought; and there
flashed into her mind an image of the old parish church, dimly lit for
the Christmas Eucharist, its walls and pillars decorated with ivy and
holly, yet austere and cold through all its adornings, with its bare
walls and pale windows. She shivered a little, for her youth had been
accustomed to churches all color and lights and furnishings--churches of
another type and faith. But instantly some warm leaping instinct met the
shrinking, and overpowered it. She smote her hands together.

"England!--England!--my own, own country!"

She dropped upon the window-seat half laughing, yet the tears in her
eyes. And there, with her face pressed against the glass, she waited
while the dawn stole upon the night, while in the park the trees emerged
upon the grass white with rime, while on the face of the down thickets
and paths became slowly visible, while the first wreaths of smoke began
to curl and hover in the frosty air.

Suddenly, on a path which climbed the hill-side till it was lost in the
beech wood which crowned the summit, she saw a flock of sheep, and
behind them a shepherd boy running from side to side. At the sight, her
eyes kindled again. "Nothing changes," she thought, "in this country
life!" On the morning of Charles I.'s execution--in the winters and
springs when Elizabeth was Queen--while Becket lay dead on Canterbury
steps--when Harold was on his way to Senlac--that hill, that path were
there--sheep were climbing it, and shepherds were herding them. "It has
been so since England began--it will be so when I am dead. We are only
shadows that pass. But England lives always--always--and shall live!"

And still, in a trance of feeling, she feasted her eyes on the quiet
country scene.

The old house which Diana Mallory had just begun to inhabit stood upon
an upland, but it was an upland so surrounded by hills to north and east
and south that it seemed rather a close-girt valley, leaned over and
sheltered by the downs. Pastures studded with trees sloped away from the
house on all sides; the village was hidden from it by boundary woods;
only the church tower emerged. From the deep oriel window where she sat
Diana could see a projecting wing of the house itself, its mellowed red
brick, its Jacobean windows and roof. She could see also a corner of the
moat with its running stream, a moat much older than the building it
encircled, and beneath her eyes lay a small formal garden planned in the
days of John Evelyn--with its fountain and its sundial, and its beds in
arabesque. The cold light of December lay upon it all; there was no
special beauty in the landscape, and no magnificence in the house or its
surroundings. But every detail of what she saw pleased the girl's
taste, and satisfied her heart. All the while she was comparing it with
other scenes and another landscape, amid which she had lived till now--a
monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and crumbled by the sun, dry
palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust and tormented with a plague
of motor-cars, white villas crowded among high walls, a wilderness of
hotels, and everywhere a chattering unlovely crowd.

"Thank goodness!--that's done with," she thought--only to fall into a
sudden remorse. "Papa--papa!--if you were only here too!"

She pressed her hands to her eyes, which were moist with sudden tears.
But the happiness in her heart overcame the pang, sharp and real as it
was. Oh! how blessed to have done with the Riviera, and its hybrid empty
life, for good and all!--how blessed even, to have done with the Alps
and Italy!--how blessed, above all, to have come _home!_--home into the
heart of this English land--warm mother-heart, into which she, stranger
and orphan, might creep and be at rest.

The eloquence of her own thoughts possessed her. They flowed on in a
warm, mute rhetoric, till suddenly the Comic Spirit was there, and
patriotic rapture began to see itself. She, the wanderer, the exile,
what did she know of England--or England of her? What did she know of
this village even, this valley in which she had pitched her tent? She
had taken an old house, because it had pleased her fancy, because it had
Tudor gables, pretty panelling, and a sundial. But what natural link had
she with it, or with these peasants and countrymen? She had no true
roots here. What she had done was mere whim and caprice. She was an
alien, like anybody else--like the new men and prowling millionaires,
who bought old English properties, moved thereto by a feeling which was
none the less snobbish because it was also sentimental.

She drew herself up--rebelling hotly--yet not seeing how to disentangle
herself from these associates. And she was still struggling to put
herself back in the romantic mood, and to see herself and her experiment
anew in the romantic light, when her maid knocked at the door, and
distraction entered with letters, and a cup of tea.

* * * * *

An hour later Miss Mallory left her room behind her, and went tripping
down the broad oak staircase of Beechcote Manor.

By this time romance was uppermost again, and self-congratulation. She
was young--just twenty-two; she was--she knew it--agreeable to look
upon; she had as much money as any reasonable woman need want; she had
already seen a great deal of the world outside England; and she had
fallen headlong in love with this charming old house, and had now, in
spite of various difficulties, managed to possess herself of it, and
plant her life in it. Full of ghosts it might be; but _she_ was its
living mistress henceforth; nor was it either ridiculous or snobbish
that she should love it and exult in it--quite the contrary. And she
paused on the slippery stairs, to admire the old panelled hall below,
the play of wintry sunlight on the oaken surfaces she herself had
rescued from desecrating paint, and the effect of some old Persian rugs,
which had only arrived from London the night before, on the dark
polished boards. For Diana, there were two joys connected with the old
house: the joy of entering in, a stranger and conqueror, on its guarded
and matured beauty, and the joy of adding to that beauty by a deft
modernness. Very deft, and tender, and skilful it must be. But no one
could say that time-worn Persian rugs, with their iridescent blue and
greens and rose reds--or old Italian damask and cut-velvet from Genoa,
or Florence, or Venice--were out of harmony with the charming Jacobean
rooms. It was the horrible furniture of the Vavasours, the ancestral
possessors of the place, which had been an offence and a disfigurement.
In moving it out and replacing it, Diana felt that she had become the
spiritual child of the old house, in spite of her alien blood. There is
a kinship not of the flesh; and it thrilled all through her.

But just as her pause of daily homage to the place in which she found
herself was over, and she was about to run down the remaining stairs to
the dining-room, a new thought delayed her for a moment by the staircase
window--the thought of a lady who would no doubt be waiting for her at
the breakfast-table.

Mrs. Colwood, Miss Mallory's new chaperon and companion, had arrived the
night before, on Christmas Eve. She had appeared just in time for
dinner, and the two ladies had spent the evening together. Diana's first
impressions had been pleasant--yes, certainly, pleasant; though Mrs.
Colwood had been shy, and Diana still more so. There could be no
question but that Mrs. Colwood was refined, intelligent, and attractive.
Her gentle, almost childish looks appealed for her. So did her deep
black, and the story which explained it. Diana had heard of her from a
friend in Rome, where Mrs. Colwood's husband, a young Indian Civil
servant, had died of fever and lung mischief, on his way to England for
a long sick leave and where the little widow had touched the hearts of
all who came in contact with her.

Diana thought, with one of her ready compunctions, that she had not been
expansive enough the night before. She ran down-stairs, determined to
make Mrs. Colwood feel at home at once.

When she entered the dining-room the new companion was standing beside
the window looking out upon the formal garden and the lawn beyond it.
Her attitude was a little drooping, and as she turned to greet her
hostess and employer, Diana's quick eyes seemed to perceive a trace of
recent tears on the small face. The girl was deeply touched, though she
made no sign. Poor little thing! A widow, and childless, in a
strange place.

Mrs. Colwood, however, showed no further melancholy. She was full of
admiration for the beauty of the frosty morning, the trees touched with
rime, the browns and purples of the distant woods. She spoke shyly, but
winningly, of the comfort of her room, and the thoughtfulness with which
Miss Mallory had arranged it; she could not say enough of the
picturesqueness of the house. Yet there was nothing fulsome in her
praise. She had the gift which makes the saying of sweet and flattering
things appear the merest simplicity. They escaped her whether she would
or no--that at least was the impression; and Diana found it agreeable.
So agreeable that before they had been ten minutes at table Miss
Mallory, in response, was conscious on her own part of an unusually
strong wish to please her new companion--to make a good effect. Diana,
indeed, was naturally governed by the wish to please. She desired above
all things to be liked--that is, if she could not be loved. Mrs.
Colwood brought with her a warm and favoring atmosphere. Diana unfolded.

* * * * *

In the course of this first exploratory conversation, it appeared that
the two ladies had many experiences in common. Mrs. Colwood had been two
years, her two short years of married life, in India; Diana had
travelled there with her father. Also, as a girl, Mrs. Colwood had spent
a winter at Cannes, and another at Santa Margherita. Diana expressed
with vehemence her weariness of the Riviera; but the fact that Mrs.
Colwood differed from her led to all the more conversation.

"My father would never come home," sighed Diana. "He hated the English
climate, even in summer. Every year I used to beg him to let us go to
England. But he never would. We lived abroad, first, I suppose, for his
health, and then--I can't explain it. Perhaps he thought he had been so
long away he would find no old friends left. And indeed so many of them
had died. But whenever I talked of it he began to look old and ill. So I
never could press it--never!"

The girl's voice fell to a lower note--musical, and full of memory. Mrs.
Colwood noticed the quality of it.

"Of course if my mother had lived," said Diana, in the same tone, "it
would have been different."

"But she died when you were a child?"

"Eighteen years ago. I can just remember it. We were in London then.
Afterwards father took me abroad, and we never came back. Oh! the waste
of all those years!"

"Waste?" Mrs. Colwood probed the phrase a little. Diana insisted, first
with warmth, and then with an eloquence that startled her companion,
that for an Englishwoman to be brought up outside England, away from
country and countrymen, was to waste and forego a hundred precious
things that might have been gathered up. "I used to be ashamed when I
talked to English people. Not that we saw many. We lived for years and
years at a little villa near Rapallo, and in the summer we used to go up
into the mountains, away from everybody. But after we came back from a
long tour, we lived for a time at a hotel in Mentone--our own little
house was let--and I used to talk to people there--though papa never
liked making friends. And I made ridiculous mistakes about English
things--and they'd laugh. But one can't know--unless one has
_lived_--has breathed in a country, from one's birth. That's what
I've lost."

Mrs. Colwood demurred.

"Think of the people who wish they had grown up without ever reading or
hearing about the Bible, so that they might read it for the first time,
when they could really understand it. You _feel_ England all the more
intensely now because you come fresh to her."

Diana sprang up, with a change of face--half laugh, half frown.

"Yes, I feel her! Above all, I feel her enemies!"

She let in her dog, a fine collie, who was scratching at the door. As
she stood before the fire, holding up a biscuit for him to jump at, she
turned a red and conscious face towards her companion. The fire in the
eyes, the smile on the lip seemed to say:

"There!--now we have come to it. This is my passion--my hobby--this is
_me_!"

"Her enemies! You are political?"

"Desperately!"

"A Tory?"

"Fanatical. But that's only part of it, 'What should they know of
England, that only England know!'"

Miss Mallory threw back her head with a gesture that became it.

"Ah, I see--an Imperialist?"

Diana nodded, smiling. She had seated herself in a chair by the
fireside. Her dog's head was on her knees, and one of her slender hands
rested on the black and tan. Mrs. Colwood admired the picture. Miss
Mallory's sloping shoulders and long waist were well shown by her simple
dress of black and closely fitting serge. Her head crowned and piled
with curly black hair, carried itself with an amazing self-possession
and pride, which was yet all feminine. This young woman might talk
politics, thought her new friend; no male man would call her prater,
while she bore herself with that air. Her eyes--the chaperon noticed it
for the first time--owed some of their remarkable intensity, no doubt,
to short sight. They were large, finely colored and thickly fringed, but
their slightly veiled concentration suggested an habitual, though quite
unconscious _struggle to see_--with that clearness which the mind behind
demanded of them. The complexion was a clear brunette, the cheeks rosy;
the nose was slightly tilted, the mouth fresh and beautiful though
large; and the face of a lovely oval. Altogether, an aspect of rich and
glowing youth: no perfect beauty; but something arresting,
ardent--charged, perhaps over-charged, with personality. Mrs. Colwood
said to herself that life at Beechcote would be no stagnant pool.

While they lingered in the drawing-room before church, she kept Diana
talking. It seemed that Miss Mallory had seen Egypt, India, and Canada,
in the course of her last two years of life with her father. Their
travels had spread over more than a year; and Diana had brought Mr.
Mallory back to the Riviera, only, it appeared, to die, after some eight
months of illness. But in securing to her that year of travel, her
father had bestowed his last and best gift upon her. Aided by his
affection, and stimulated by his knowledge, her mind and character had
rapidly developed. And, as through a natural outlet, all her starved
devotion for the England she had never known, had spent itself upon the
Englands she found beyond the seas; upon the hard-worked soldiers and
civilians in lonely Indian stations, upon the captains of English ships,
upon the pioneers of Canadian fields and railways; upon England, in
fact, as the arbiter of oriental faiths--the wrestler with the
desert--the mother and maker of new states. A passion for the work of
her race beyond these narrow seas--a passion of sympathy, which was also
a passion of antagonism, since every phase of that work, according to
Miss Mallory, had been dogged by the hate and calumny of base
minds--expressed itself through her charming mouth, with a quite
astonishing fluency. Mrs. Colwood's mind moved uneasily. She had
expected an orphan girl, ignorant of the world, whom she might mother,
and perhaps mould. She found a young Egeria, talking politics with
raised color and a throbbing voice, as other girls might talk of lovers
or chiffons. Egeria's companion secretly and with some alarm reviewed
her own equipment in these directions. Miss Mallory discoursed of India.
Mrs. Colwood had lived in it. But her husband had entered the Indian
Civil Service, simply in order that he might have money enough to marry
her. And during their short time together, they had probably been more
keenly alive to the depreciation of the rupee than to ideas of
England's imperial mission. But Herbert had done his duty, of course he
had. Once or twice as Miss Mallory talked the little widow's eyes filled
with tears again unseen. The Indian names Diana threw so proudly into
air were, for her companion, symbols of heart-break and death. But she
played her part; and her comments and interjections were all that was
necessary to keep the talk flowing.

In the midst of it voices were suddenly heard outside. Diana started.

"Carols!" she said, with flushing cheeks. "The first time I have heard
them in England itself!"

She flew to the hall, and threw the door open. A handful of children
appeared shouting "Good King Wenceslas" in a hideous variety of keys.
Miss Mallory heard them with enthusiasm; then turned to the butler
behind her.

"Give them a shilling, please, Brown."

A quick change passed over the countenance of the man addressed.

"Lady Emily, ma'am, never gave more than three-pence."

This stately person had formerly served the Vavasours, and was much
inclined to let his present mistress know it.

Diana looked disappointed, but submissive.

"Oh, very well, Brown--I don't want to alter any of the old ways. But I
hear the choir will come up to-night. Now they must have five
shillings--and supper, please, Brown."

Brown drew himself up a little more stiffly.

"Lady Emily always gave 'em supper, ma'am, but, begging your pardon, she
didn't hold at all with giving 'em money."

"Oh, I don't care!" said Miss Mallory, hastily. "I'm sure they'll like
it, Brown! Five shillings, please."

Brown withdrew, and Diana, with a laughing face and her hands over her
ears, to mitigate the farewell bawling of the children, turned to Mrs.
Colwood, with an invitation to dress for church.

"The first time for me," she explained. "I have been coming up and down,
for a month or more, two or three days at a time, to see to the
furnishing. But now I am _at home!_"

* * * * *

The Christmas service in the parish church was agreeable enough. The
Beechcote pew was at the back of the church, and as the new mistress of
the old house entered and walked down the aisle, she drew the eyes of a
large congregation of rustics and small shopkeepers. Diana moved in a
kind of happy absorption, glancing gently from side to side. This
gathering of villagers was to her representative of a spiritual and
national fellowship to which she came now to be joined. The old church,
wreathed in ivy and holly; the tombs in the southern aisle; the loaves
standing near the porch for distribution after service, in accordance
with an old benefaction; the fragments of fifteenth-century glass in the
windows; the school-children to her left; the singing, the prayers, the
sermon--found her in a welcoming, a child-like mood. She knelt, she
sang, she listened, like one undergoing initiation, with a tender
aspiring light in her eyes, and an eager mobility of expression.

Mrs. Colwood was more critical. The clergyman who preached the sermon
did not, in fact, please her at all. He was a thin High Churchman, with
an oblong face and head, narrow shoulders, and a spare frame. He wore
spectacles, and his voice was disagreeably pitched. His sermon was
nevertheless remarkable. A bare yet penetrating style; a stern view of
life; the voice of a prophet, and apparently the views of a
socialist--all these he possessed. None of them, it might have been
thought, were especially fitted to capture either the female or the
rustic mind. Yet it could not be denied that the congregation was
unusually good for a village church; and by the involuntary sigh which
Miss Mallory gave as the sermon ended, Mrs. Colwood was able to gauge
the profound and docile attention with which one at least had
listened to it.

After church there was much lingering in the churchyard for the exchange
of Christmas greetings. Mrs. Colwood found herself introduced to the
Vicar, Mr. Lavery; to a couple of maiden ladies of the name of Bertram,
who seemed to have a good deal to do with the Vicar, and with the Church
affairs of the village; and to an elderly couple, Dr. and Mrs.
Roughsedge, white-haired, courteous, and kind, who were accompanied by a
soldier son, in whom it was evident they took a boundless pride. The
young man, of a handsome and open countenance, looked at Miss Mallory as
much as good manners allowed. She, however, had eyes for no one but the
Vicar, with whom she started, _tete-a-tete_, in the direction of
the Vicarage.

Mrs. Colwood followed, shyly making acquaintance with the Roughsedges,
and the elder Miss Bertram. That lady was tall, fair, and faded; she had
a sharp, handsome nose, and a high forehead; and her eyes, which hardly
ever met those of the person with whom she talked, gave the impression
of a soul preoccupied, with few or none of the ordinary human
curiosities.

Mrs. Roughsedge, on the other hand, was most human, motherly, and
inquisitive. She wore two curls on either side of her face held by small
combs, a large bonnet, and an ample cloak. It was clear that whatever
adoration she could spare from her husband was lavished on her son. But
there was still enough good temper and good will left to overflow upon
the rest of mankind. She perceived in a moment that Mrs. Colwood was the
new "companion" to the heiress, that she was a widow, and sad--in spite
of her cheerfulness.

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