CHAPTER XXIV
THE VISION OF LOVE
A week after her visit to Somervell Street, the thing which Diana had dreaded came to pass.
She was attending a reception at the French Embassy, and as she made her way through the crowded rooms, followed by Olga Lermontof—who frequently added to the duties of accompanist those of dame de compagnie to the great prima donna—she came suddenly face to face with Max.
To many of us the anticipation of an unpleasant happening is far more agonising than the actual thing itself. The mind, brooding apprehensively upon what may conceivably occur, exaggerates the possibilities of the situation, enhancing all the disagreeable details, and oblivious of any mitigating circumstances which may, quite probably, accompany it. There is sound sense and infinite comfort, if you look for it, in the old saying which bids us not to cross our bridges till we come to them.
The fear of the unknown, the unexperienced, is a more haunting, insidious fear than any other, and sometimes one positively longs to hasten the advent of an unwelcome ordeal, in order that the worst may be known and the menace of the future be transformed into a memory of the past.
So it was with Diana. She had been for so long beset by her fear of the first meeting that she experienced a sensation almost of relief when her eyes fell at last upon the tall figure of her husband.
He was deep in conversation with the French Ambassador at the moment, but as Diana approached it was as though some sensitive, invisible live wire had vibrated, apprising him of her nearness, and he looked up suddenly, his blue eyes gazing straight into hers.
To Diana, the brief encounter proved amazingly simple and easy in contrast with the shrinking apprehensions she had formed. A slight bow from her, its grave return from him, and the dreaded moment was past.
It was only afterwards that she realised, with a sense of sick dismay, how terribly he had altered. She caught at the accompanist's arm with nervous force.
"Olga!" she whispered. "Did you see?"
The Russian's expression answered her. Her face wore a curious stunned look, and her mouth twitched as she tried to control the sudden trembling of her lips.
"Come outside—on to this balcony." Olga spoke with a fierce imperativeness as she saw Diana sway uncertainly and her face whiten.
Once outside in the cool shelter of the balcony, dimly lit by swaying Chinese lanterns, Diana sank into a chair, shaken and unnerved. For an instant her eyes strayed back to where, through the open French window, she could see Max still conversing with the Ambassador, but she averted them swiftly.
The change in him hurt her like the sudden stab of a knife. His face was worn and lined; there was something ascetic-looking in the hollowed line from cheek-bone to chin and in the stern, austere closing of the lips, while the eyes—the mocking blue eyes with the laughter always lurking at the back of them—held an expression of deep, unalterable sadness.
"Olga!" The word broke from Diana's white lips like a cry of appeal, tremulous and uncertain.
But Miss Lermontof made no response. She seemed quite unmoved by the distress of the woman sitting huddled in the chair before her, and her light green eyes shone with a curious savage glint like the eyes of a cat.
Diana spoke again nervously.
"Are you—angry with me?"
"Angry!" The Russian almost spat out the word. "Angry! Don't you see what you're doing?"
"What I'm doing?" repeated Diana. "What am I doing?"
Olga replied with a grim incisiveness.
"You're killing Max—that's all. This—this is going to break him—break him utterly."
There was a long silence, and the dewy dusk of the night, shaken into pearly mist where the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns illumined it, seemed to close round the two women, like a filmy curtain, shutting them off from the chattering throng in the adjoining room.
Presently a cart rattled past in the street below, rasping the tense silence.
Diana lifted her head.
"I didn't know!" she said helplessly. "I didn't know! . . ."
"And yet you professed to love him!" Olga spoke consideringly, an element of contemptuous wonder in her voice.
The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana's mind.
"You don't know what love means!"
Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls wheeling above it, and Max—Max standing tall and straight beside her, with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love illimitable in his eyes.
"You don't know what love means!"
The words penetrated to her innermost consciousness, cleaving their way sheer through the fog of doubt and mistrust and pride as the sharp blade of the surgeon's knife cuts deep into a festering wound. And before their clarifying, essential truth, Diana's soul recoiled in dumb dismay.
No, she hadn't known what love meant—love, which, with an exquisite unreasonableness, believes when there is ground for doubt—hadn't understood it as even this cynical, bitter-tongued Russian understood it. And she recognised the scorn on Olga's white, contemptuous face as the unlovely sheath of an ideal of love immeasurably beyond her own achieving.
The vision of Culver Point faded away, and an impalpable wall of darkness seemed to close about her. Dimly, as though it were some one else's voice speaking, she heard herself say slowly:—
"I thought I loved him." Then, after a pause, "Will you go? Please go. I should like to be . . . quiet . . . a little while."
For a moment Olga gazed down at her, eagerly, almost hungrily, as though silently beseeching her. Then, still silently, she went away.
Diana sat very still. Above her, the gay-coloured Chinese lanterns swayed to and fro in the little breeze that drifted up the street, and above again, far off in the sombre sky, the stars looked down—pitiless, unmoved, as they have looked down through all the ages upon the pigmy joys and sufferings of humanity.
For the first time Diana was awake to the limitations she had set to love.
The meeting with her husband had shaken her to the very foundations of her being, the shock of his changed appearance sweeping away at a single blow the whole fabric of artificial happiness that she had been trying to build up.
She had thought that the wound in her heart would heal, that she could teach herself to forget the past. And lo! At the first sight of his face the old love and longing had reawakened with a strength she was powerless to withstand.
The old love, but changed into something immeasurably more than it had ever been before, and holding in its depths a finer understanding. And with this clearer vision came a sudden new knowledge—a knowledge fraught with pain and yet bearing deep within it an unutterable sense of joy.
Max had cared all the time—cared still! It was written in the lines of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut mouth. Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married life, despite his inexplicable friendship for Adrienne, despite all that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger understanding which had come to her, that through it all he had loved her. With an absolute certainty of conviction, she knew that it was her hand which had graved those fresh lines about his mouth, brought that look of calm sadness to his eyes, and the realisation held a strange mingling of exquisite joy and keen anguish.
She hid her face in her hands, hid it from the stars and the shrouding dark, tremulously abashed at the wonderful significance of love.
She almost laughed to think how she had allowed so small a thing as the secret which Max could not tell her to corrode and eat into the heart of happiness. Looking back from the standpoint she had now gained, it seemed so pitifully mean and paltry, a profanation of the whole inner, hidden meaning of love.
So long as she and Max cared for each other, nothing else mattered, nothing in the whole world. And the long battle between love and pride—between love, that had turned her days and nights into one endless ache of longing to return to Max, and pride, that had barred the way inflexibly—was over, done with.
Love had won, hands down. She would go back to Max, and all thought that it might be weak-minded of her, humiliating to her self-respect, was swept aside. Love, the great teacher, had brought her through the dark places where the lesser gods hold sway, out into the light of day, and she knew that to return to Max, to give herself afresh to him, would be the veritable triumph, of love itself.
She would go back, back to the shelter of his love which had been waiting for her all the time, unswerving and unreproaching. She had read it in his eyes when they had met her own an hour ago.
"I want you—-body and soul I want you!" he had told her there by the cliffs at Culver.
And she had not given him all her soul. She had kept back that supreme belief in the beloved which is an integral part of love. But now, now she would go to him and give with both hands royally—faith and trust, blindly, as love demanded.
She smiled a little. Happiness and the haven of Max's arms seemed very near her just then.
She was very silent as she and Olga Lermontof drove home together from the Embassy, but just at the last, when the limousine stopped at Baroni's house, she leaned closer to Olga in the semi-darkness, and whispered a little breathlessly:—
"I'm going back to him, Olga."
Somehow the mere putting of it into words seemed to give it substance, convert it into an actual fact that could be talked about, just like the weather, or one's favourite play, or any other commonplace matter which can be spoken of because it has a knowledgeable existence. And the Russian's quick "Thank God!" set the seal of assuredness upon it.
"Yes—thank God," answered Diana simply.
The car, which was to take the accompanist on to Brutton Square, slipped away down the lamp-lit street, and Diana fled upstairs to her room.
She must be alone—alone with her thoughts. She no longer dreaded the night and its quiet solitude. It was a solitude pervaded by a deep, abiding peace, the anteroom of happiness.
To-morrow she would go to Max, and tell him that love had taught her belief and faith—all that he had asked of her and that she had so failed to give.
She lay long awake, gazing into the dark, dreamily conscious of utter peace and calm. To-morrow . . . to-morrow . . . Freely her eyes closed and she slept. Once she stirred and smiled a little in her sleep while the word "Max" fluttered from between her lips, almost as though it had been a prayer.