The Testing of Diana Mallory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Why had her father been so unhappy? What was the meaning of that cloud under which she had grown up?

She had repeated to Muriel Colwood the stock explanations she had been accustomed to give herself of the manner and circumstances of her bringing-up. To-day they seemed to her own mind, for the first time, utterly insufficient. In a sudden crash and confusion of feeling it was as though she were tearing open the heart of the past, passionately probing and searching.

Certain looks and phrases of Fanny Merton were really working in her memory. They were so light--yet so ugly. They suggested something, but so vaguely that Diana could find no words for it: a note of desecration, of cheapening--a breath of dishonor. It was as though a mourner, shut in for years with sacred memories, became suddenly aware that all the time, in a sordid world outside, these very memories had been the sport of an unkind and insolent chatter that besmirched them.

Her mother!

In the silence of the wood the girl's slender figure stiffened itself against an attacking thought. In her inmost mind she knew well that it was from her mother--and her mother's death--that all the strangeness of the past descended. But yet the death and grief she remembered had never presented themselves to her as they appear to other bereaved ones. Why had nobody ever spoken to her of her mother in her childhood and youth?--neither father, nor nurses, nor her old French governess? Why had she no picture--no relics--no letters? In the box of "Sparling Papers" there was nothing that related to Mrs. Sparling; that she knew, for her father had abruptly told her so not long before his death. They were old family records which he could not bear to destroy--the honorable records of an upright race, which some day, he thought, "might be a pleasure to her."

Often during the last six months of his life, it seemed to her now, in this intensity of memory, that he had been on the point of breaking the silence of a lifetime. She recalled moments and looks of agonized effort and yearning. But he died of a growth in the throat; and for weeks before the end speech was forbidden them, on account of the constant danger of hemorrhage. So that Diana had always felt herself starved of those last words and messages which make the treasure of bereaved love. Often and often the cry of her loneliness to her dead father had been the bitter cry of Andromache to Hector; "I had from thee, in dying, no memorable word on which I might ever think in the year of mourning while I wept for thee."

Had there been a quarrel between her father and mother?--or something worse?--at which Diana's ignorance of life, imposed upon her by her upbringing, could only glance in shuddering? She knew her mother had died at twenty-six; and that in the two years before her death Mr. Mallory had been much away, travelling and exploring in Asia Minor. The young wife must have been often alone. Diana, with a sudden catching of the breath, envisaged possibilities of which no rational being of full age who reads a newspaper can be unaware.

Then, with an inward passion of denial, she shook the whole nightmare from her. Outrage!--treason!--to those helpless memories of which she was now the only guardian. In these easy, forgetting days, when the old passions and endurances look to us either affected or eccentric, such a life, such an exile as her father's, may seem strange even--so she accused herself--to that father's child. But that is because we are mean souls beside those who begot us. We cannot feel as they; and our constancy, compared to theirs, is fickleness.

So, in spirit, she knelt again beside her dead, embracing their cold feet and asking pardon.

The tears clouded her eyes; she wandered blindly on through the wood till she was conscious of sudden light and space. She had come to a clearing, where several huge beeches had been torn up by a storm some years before. Their place had been filled by a tangle of many saplings, and in their midst rose an elder-bush, already showing leaf, amid the bare winterly wood. The last western light caught the twinkling leaf buds, and made of the tree a Burning Bush, first herald of the spring.