“I do not consider myself entitled to do so,” answered Cleeve, coldly, “without her consent.”
Farnese bowed.
“I entirely understand! If you should see her, you will, perhaps, do me the kindness to mention my name and ask if she has ever heard it before?”
“I will certainly do that,” agreed Cleeve,—whereupon they parted, Captain the Honourable with his mind in a giddy whirl, and his passions at fever heat. Come what would he must see Diana before she went to Paris! He must ask her about this Dimitrius,—for the story he had just heard seemed to hang together with her own fantastic “obsession!” But no!—ten thousand times no!—it was not, it could not be possible that the “old” Diana could thus have been miraculously transformed! Even Science must have its limits! He glanced at his watch. It was past nine o’clock,—very late for a call—yet he would risk it. Taking a cab, he was driven with all speed to Diana’s flat,—the servant who opened the door to him looked at him in surprise.
“Miss May and Mrs. Beresford have gone to Paris,” she said. “They left this evening by the night boat train.”
He retreated, baffled and inwardly furious. For one moment he was recklessly moved to follow them across Channel next morning—then he remembered, with rather an angry shock, that he was “the father of a family.” Convention stepped in and held up a warning finger.
“No—it wouldn’t do,” he ruminated, vexedly. “She”—here he alluded to his fat wife—“she would make the devil’s own row, and I have enough of her sulks as it is. I’d better do nothing,—and just wait my chance. But—that exquisite Diana! What is she? I must know! I must be off with the ‘old’ love, before I’m on with the new! But is she the ‘old’? That’s the puzzle. Is she the ‘old,’ or a young Diana?” This was a question which was destined never to be answered, so far as he was concerned. Diana had gone from him,—gone in that swift, irrecoverable way which happens when one soul, advancing onward to higher planes of power, is compelled to leave another of grosser make (even though that other were lover or friend) to wallow in the styes of sensual and material life. She, clothed in her vesture of fire and light, as radiant as any spirit of legendary lore, was as far removed from the clay man of low desires as the highest star from the deepest earth. And though he did not know this, and never would have been able, had he known, to realise the forceful vitality of her existence, the same strange sense of physical weakness, tiredness and general incapacity which had before alarmed him came upon him now with such overwhelming weight that he could hardly drag his limbs across the fashionable square in which his own house was situated. A great helplessness possessed him,—and a thought, bitter as wormwood and sharp as flame, flashed through his brain: “I am getting old!” It was a thought he always put away from him—but just now it bore down upon him with a kind of thunderous gloom. Yes—he was “getting old,”—he, who had more or less contemptuously considered the “age” of the woman he had callously thrown over sufficient cause for the rupture,—he, too, was likely to be left out in the cold by the hurrying tide of warmer, quicker, youthful life. The vision of the radiant eyes, the exquisite features, the rose-leaf skin, and the supple, graceful form of the marvellous Diana who so persistently declared herself to be his former betrothed, floated before him in tempting, tantalising beauty,—and as he opened his own house-door with his latch-key to enter that abode of domestic bliss where his unwieldy wife talked commonplaces all day long and bored him to death, he uttered something like a groan.
“Whatever her fancy or craze may be,” he said, “she is young! Young and perfectly beautiful! It is I who am old!”
EPILOGUE
It was night in Paris,—a heavy night, laden with the almost tropical heat and languor common to the end of an unusually warm summer. The street-lamps twinkled dimly through vapour which seemed to ooze upwards from the ground, like smoke from the fissures of a volcano, and men walked along listlessly with heads uncovered to the faint and doubtful breeze, some few occasionally pausing to glance at the sky, the aspect of which was curiously divided between stars and clouds, brilliancy and blackness. From the southern side of the horizon a sombre mass of purple grey shadows crept slowly and stealthily onward, blotting out by gradual degrees the silvery glittering of Orion and drawing a nun-like veil over the full-orbed beauty of the moon, while at long intervals a faint roll of thunder suggested the possibility of an approaching storm. But the greater part of the visible heavens remained fair and calm, some of the larger planets sparkling lustrously with strange, flashing fire-gleams of sapphire and gold, and seeming to palpitate like immense jewels swung pendant in the vast blue dome of air.