Here Diana let the book fall in her lap, and sat meditating, gazing into the hollows of the wood fire. Love! It was the thing she had longed for,—the one joy she had missed! To be loved,—to be “dear to someone else” seemed to her the very acme of all desirable attainment. For with Tennyson’s hero in “Maud” she felt:
“If I be dear to some one else
I should be to myself more dear.”
Her thoughts went “homing” like doves down the air spaces of memory to the days when she had, or was fooled into believing she had, a lover whose love would last,—a bold, splendid creature, with broad shoulders and comely countenance, and “eyes which looked love to eyes that spake again,”—and when, as the betrothed bride of the Splendid Creature, she had thanked God night and morning for giving her so much happiness!—when the light in the skies and the flowers in the fields apparently took part in the joyous gratitude of her spirit, and when the very songs of the birds had seemed for her a special wedding chorus! She went over the incidents of that far-away period of her existence,—and presently she began to ask herself what, after all, did they amount to? Why, when they were all cruelly ended, had she shed such wild tears and prayed to God in such desperate agony? Was it worth while to have so shaken her physical and spiritual health for any Splendid Creature? For what had he done to merit such passionate regret?—such weeping and wailing? He had kissed her a great deal (when he was in the mood for kissing), and sometimes more than she quite cared for. He had embraced her in gusts of brief and eager passion, tinged with a certain sensuality which roused in her reluctant repulsion—he had called her by various terms of endearment such as “sweetest,” “dearest,” and “wood-nymph,” a name he had bestowed upon her on one occasion when he had met her by chance in a shady corner of Kew Gardens, and which he thought poetical, but which she privately considered silly,—but what real meaning could be attached to these expressions? When, all suddenly, his regiment was ordered to India, and she had to part from him, he had sworn fidelity, and with many protestations of utmost tenderness had told her that “as soon as cash would allow,” he would send for her to join him, and marry her out there,—and for this happy consummation she had waited, lovingly and loyally, seven years. Meanwhile his letters grew shorter and fewer,—till at last, when his father died and he came into a large fortune, he struck the final blow on the patient life that had been sacrificed to his humour. He wrote a last letter, telling her he was married,—and so everything of hope and promise fell away from her like the falling leaves of a withering flower, though her friend, Sophy Lansing, in hot indignation at the callous way in which she had been treated, advised her to “take on another man at once.” But poor Diana could not do this. Hers was a loyal and tender spirit,—she was unable to transfer her affections from one to another au grand galop. She thought of it all now in a half amused way, as she sat in her easy chair by the sparkling fire, in the charming room which she could for the present call her own, surrounded by every comfort and luxury, and she looked at her ringless hand,—that small, daintily-shaped hand, on which for so many wasted years her lover’s engagement ring had sparkled as a sign of constancy. Poor little hand!—it was shown off with effect at the moment, lying with a passive prettiness on the roseate silk of her “boudoir wrap”—as white as the white fur which just peeped beneath the palm. Suddenly she clenched it.
“I should like to punish him!” she said. “It may be small—it may be spiteful—but it is human! I should like to see him suffer for his treachery! I should have no pity on him or his fat wife!” Here she laughed at herself. “How absurd I am!” she went on—“making ‘much ado about nothing!’ The fat wife herself is a punishment for him, I’m sure! He’s rich, and has a big house in Mayfair and five very ugly children,—that ought to be enough for him! I saw his wife by chance at a bazaar quite lately—like a moving jelly!—rather like poor mother in the fit of her clothes,—and smiling the ghastly smile of that placid, ineffable content which marks the fool! If I could do nothing else I’d like to disturb that smug, self-satisfied constitution of oozing oil!—yes, I would!—and who knows if I mayn’t do it yet!”
She rose, and the antique book “Of Delusions” fell to the floor. Her slim figure, loosely draped in the folds of crimson silk and white fur, looked wonderfully graceful and well-poised, and had there been a mirror in the sitting-room, as there was in the bedroom, she might possibly have seen something in her appearance worthy of even men’s admiration. But her thoughts were far away from herself,—she had before her eyes the picture of her old lover grown slightly broader and heavier in build, with ugly furrows of commonplace care engraven on his once smooth and handsome face,—“hen-pecked” probably by his stout better-half and submitting to this frequently inevitable fate with a more or less ill grace, and again she laughed,—a laugh of purest unforced merriment.
“Here I am, like Hamlet, ‘exceeding proud and revengeful,’ and after all I ought to be devoutly thankful!” she said. “For, if I analyse myself honestly, I do not really consider I have lost anything in losing a man who would certainly have been an unfaithful husband. What I do feel is the slight on myself! That he should have callously allowed me to wait all those years for him, and then—have cast me aside like an old shoe, is an injury which I think I may justly resent—and which,—if I ever get the chance—I may punish!” Here her brows clouded, and she sighed. “What an impossible idea! I talk as if I were young, with all the world before me!—and with power to realise my dreams!—when really everything of that sort is over for me, and I have only to see how I can best live out the remainder of life!”
Then like a faint whisper stealing through the silence, came the words which Dimitrius had spoken on the first night of her arrival—that night when the moonlight had drenched the garden in a shower of pearl and silver,—“What would you give to be young?”
A thrill ran through her nerves as though they had been played upon by an electric vibration. Had Dimitrius any such secret as that which he hinted at?—or was he only deluding himself, and was his brain, by over much study, slipping off the balance? She had heard of the wisest scientists who, after astonishing the world by the brilliancy of their researches and discoveries, had suddenly sunk from their lofty pinnacles of attained knowledge to the depth of consulting “mediums,” who pretended to bring back the spirits of the dead that they might converse with their relatives and friends in bad grammar and worse logic,—might not Dimitrius be just as unfortunate in his own special “scientific” line?
Tired at last of thinking, she resolved to go to bed, and in her sleeping chamber, she found herself facing the long mirror again. Something she saw there this time appeared really to startle her, for she turned abruptly away from it, threw off her wrap, slipped into her night-gown, and brushed her hair hastily without looking at herself for another second. And kneeling at her bedside as she said her prayers she included an extra petition, uttered in a strangely earnest whisper: