“What’s the matter? What on earth is the matter?” they cried, simultaneously.
Mrs. May, cowering against the wall, pointed at her beautiful visitor.
“Take her away! Get hold of her!” she yelled. “Get hold of her quick! Send for the police! She’s mad! Aa-aah! You’ve let a lunatic into the house! She’s run away from some asylum! Lucy Preston, you ought to be ashamed of yourself to let her in. James, you’re a fool! Aa-aah!” Another wild scream. “Look how she’s staring at me! She says she’s my daughter Diana—my daughter who was drowned last year! She’s stark, raving mad! James, send for a doctor and a policeman to remove her!—take care!—she may turn round and bite you!—you can never tell. Oh, dear, oh, dear! To think that with my weak heart, you should let a mad girl into the house! Oh, cruel, cruel! And to think she should imagine herself to be my daughter Diana!”
Diana drew herself up like a queen addressing her subjects.
“I am your daughter Diana!” she said—“Though how I came to be born of such people I cannot tell! For I have nothing in common with you. But I have told you the truth. I was not drowned on the Devon coast in that cove near Rose Lea as I led you to imagine—I was tired of my life with you and ran away. I have been in Switzerland for a year and have just come back. I thought it was my duty to show myself to you alive—but I want you as little as you want me. I will go. Good-bye!—Good-bye you, who were my mother!”
As she said this Mrs. May uttered another yell, and showed signs of collapsing on the floor. Miss Preston hurried to her assistance, while Mr. May, his knees shaking under him,—for he was an arrant coward,—ventured cautiously to approach the beautiful “escaped lunatic.”
“There, there!” he murmured soothingly,—he had an idea that “there, there,” was a panacea for all the emotions of the sex feminine—“Come!—now—er—come with me, like a good girl! Be reasonable and gentle!—I’ll take care of you!—you know you are not allowed to go wandering about by yourself like this, with such strange ideas in your head!—Now come along quietly, and I’ll see what I can do——”
Diana laughed merrily.
“Oh, Pa! Poor old Pa! Just the same Pa! Don’t trouble yourself and don’t look so frightened! I won’t ‘bite’ you! My car is waiting and I have to be back at the hotel in time for dinner.” And she stepped lightly along out of the drawing-room without one backward glance at the moaning Mrs. May, supported by Miss Preston, while James Polydore followed her, vaguely wondering whether her mention of a car in waiting might not be something like crazed Ophelia’s call for “Come, my coach!”
Suddenly she said: