Standing in the centre of the room, with the soft ivory chiffon and lace of her “rest gown” trailing about her like the delicate cirri floating across a summer sky, she appeared like a vision of something altogether beyond mere woman, and as the little gross, sensual man who had been her father looked at her, a sudden unnameable terror overcame him. His limbs shook—his brain reeled,—within himself a frightened sense of something supernatural paralysed his will—and he made for the door like a man groping in the dark. She threw it open for him with a queenly gesture of dismissal.
“Tell my mother,” she said, “that her daughter is truly alive, and that she has kissed you!—not as the ‘old’ but as the young Diana! Don’t forget!”
CHAPTER XXV
The chaotic condition of mind into which Mr. Polydore May found himself plunged by what to him was the inexplicable and crazy conduct of the inexplicable and crazy young woman who so obstinately maintained her right to consider herself his daughter, was nothing to the well-nigh raving state of Captain the Honourable Reginald Cleeve, who was faced with a still more intolerable position. He, when he had first called upon Diana as she had invited him to do, experienced something in the nature of a thunder-clap, when she explained, with much gracious, albeit cold composure, that she was his former betrothed whom he had “jilted” for a younger and wealthier woman. If he had been suddenly hypnotised by a remorseless conjurer, he could not have been more stricken into speechless and incredulous amazement. He sat in a chair opposite to his fair and smiling informant, staring helplessly, while she, having had tea brought in, prepared him a cup with hospitable ease and condescension.
“When you got the note I left for you at the hotel,” she said, “surely you recognised my handwriting?”
Still staring, he moistened his dry lips with his tongue and tried to speak.
“Your handwriting?” he stammered—“I—I thought it very like the handwriting of—of another Diana May I used to know——”
“Yes—another Diana May,” she said, bending her grave clear eyes upon him—“A Diana May whose life you ruthlessly spoiled,—whose trust in men and things you murdered—and why! Because you met a woman with more money, who was younger than I—I, who had aged through waiting patiently for you, as you had asked me to do—because you thought that by the time you returned from India I should be what Society calls passée! And for such callous and selfish considerations as these you deliberately sacrificed my happiness! But I have been given a strange and unexpected vengeance!—look at your wife and look at me!—which now is the ‘younger’ of the two?”
He moved uneasily—there was something in her aspect that stabbed him as though with physical force and pain.
“You—you must certainly know you are talking nonsense!” he said at last, trying to pull himself together. “Yours is the queerest craze I ever heard of! Here are you, a beautiful young girl in the very dawn of womanhood, pretending to be a middle-aged spinster who was accidentally drowned last year off the coast of Devon! I don’t know how you’ve come by the same name as hers—or why your handwriting should resemble hers,—it’s mere coincidence, no doubt—but that you should actually declare yourself as one and the same identity with hers, is perfectly ridiculous! I don’t deny that you seem to have got hold of the other Diana May’s story—I was engaged to her, that’s true—but I had to be away in India longer than was at first intended—seven years nearly. And seven years is a long time to keep faith with a woman who doesn’t grow younger——”