She released herself from Marsham, and, with her hand in his, she drew him slowly along the path, while she went on speaking, with an effort indeed, yet with a marvellous sense of deliverance--after the silence of years. She described the entire seclusion of their life at Portofino.
"Papa never spoke to me of mamma, and I never remember a picture of her. After his death I saw a closed locket on his breast for the first time. I would not have opened it for the world--I just kissed it--" Her voice broke again; but after a moment she quietly resumed. "He changed his name--I think--when I was about nine years old. I remember that somehow it seemed to give him comfort--he was more cheerful with me afterward--"
"And you have no idea what led him to go abroad?"
She shook her head. Marsham's changed and rapid tone had betrayed some agitation in the mind behind; but Diana did not notice it. In her story she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative influence on her own life--her father's melancholy, and the mystery in which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for the moment blinded as the old tyrannous grief overshadowed her.
"His life"--she said, slowly--"seemed for years--one long struggle to bear--what was really--unbearable. Then when I was about nineteen there was a change. He no longer shunned people quite in the same way, and he took me to Egypt and India. We came across old friends of his whom I, of course, had never seen before; and I used to wonder at the way in which they treated him--with a kind of reverence--as though they would not have touched him roughly for the world. Then directly after we got home to the Riviera his illness began--"
She dwelt on the long days of dumbness, and her constant sense that he wished--in vain--to communicate something to her.
"He wanted something--and I could not give it him--could not even tell what it was. It was misery! One day he managed to write: 'If you are in trouble, go to Riley & Bonner--ask them.' They were his solicitors, whom he had depended on from his boyhood. But since his death I have never wanted anything from them but a little help in business. They have been very good; but--I could not go and question them. If there was anything to know--papa had not been able to tell me--I did not want anybody else--to--"
Her voice dropped. Only half an hour since the flowering of life! What a change in both! She was pacing along slowly, her head thrown back; the oval of her face white among her furs, under the ghostly touch of the moonlight; a suggestion of something austere--finely remote--in her attitude and movement. His eyes were on the ground, his shoulders bent; she could not see his face.
"We must try and unravel it--together," he said, at last, with an effort. "Can you tell me your mother's name?"
"It was an old Staffordshire family. But she and papa met in America, and they married there. Her father died not long afterward, I think. And I have never heard of any relations but the one sister, Mrs. Merton. Her name was Wentworth. Oh!" It was an involuntary cry of physical pain.