The Testing of Diana Mallory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Diana colored and laughed.

"Ay," said the old woman, laughing too, with the merriment of a girl. "Sweethearts is noa good--but you mun ha' a sweetheart!"

Diana fled, pursued by Betty's raillery, and then by the thought of this lonely laughing woman, often tormented by pain, standing on the brink of ugly death, and yet turning back to look with this merry indulgent eye upon the past; and on this dingy old world, in which she had played so ragged and limping a part. Yet clearly she would play it again if she could--so sweet is mere life!--and so hard to silence in the breast.

Diana walked quickly through the woods, the prey of one of those vague storms of feeling which test and stretch the soul of youth.

To what horrors had she been listening?--the suffering of the blinded road-mender--the grotesque and hideous death of the young laborer in his full strength--the griefs of a childless and penniless old woman? Yet life had somehow engulfed the horrors; and had spread its quiet waves above them, under a pale, late-born sunshine. The stoicism of the poor rebuked her, as she thought of the sharp impatience and disappointment in which she had parted from Mrs. Colwood.

She seemed to hear her father's voice. "No shirking, Diana! You asked her--you formed absurd and exaggerated expectations. She is here; and she is not responsible for your expectations. Make the best of her, and do your duty!"

And eagerly the child's heart answered: "Yes, yes, papa!--dear papa!"

And there, sharp in color and line, it rose on the breast of memory, the beloved face. It set pulses beating in Diana which from her childhood onward had been a life within her life, a pain answering to pain, the child's inevitable response to the father's misery, always discerned, never understood.

This abiding remembrance of a dumb unmitigable grief beside which she had grown up, of which she had never known the secret, was indeed one of the main factors in Diana's personality. Muriel Colwood had at once perceived it; Marsham had been sometimes puzzled by the signs of it.

To-day--because of Fanny and this toppling of her dreams--the dark mood, to which Diana was always liable, had descended heavily upon her. She had no sooner rebuked it--by the example of the poor, or the remembrance of her father's long patience--than she was torn by questions, vehement, insistent, full of a new anguish.