The Testing of Diana Mallory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Marsham assented, and got up to take his leave. Involuntarily he looked round the drawing-room where he had first seen Diana the day before. Then it was flooded by spring sunshine--not more radiant than her face. Now a solitary lamp made a faint spot of light amid the shadows of the panelled walls. He and Mrs. Colwood spoke almost in whispers. The old house, generally so winning and sympathetic, seemed to hold itself silent and aloof--as though in this touch of calamity the living were no longer its master and the dead generations woke. And, up-stairs, Diana lay perhaps in her white bed, miserable and alone, not knowing that he was there, within a few yards of her.

Mrs. Colwood noiselessly opened a garden door and so dismissed him. It was moonlight outside, and instead of returning to the inn he took the road up the hill to the crest of the encircling down. Diverging a little to the left, he found himself on the open hill-side, at a point commanding the village and Beechcote itself, ringed by its ancient woods. In the village two dim lights, far apart, were visible; lights, he thought, of sickness or of birth?--for the poor sleep early. One of the Beechcote windows shone with a dim illumination. Was she there, and sleepless? The sky was full of light; the blanched chalk down on which he stood ran northward in a shining curve, bare in the moon; but in the hollow below, and on the horizon, the dark huddled woods kept watch, guarding the secrets of night. The owls were calling in the trees behind him--some in faint prolonged cry, one in a sharp shrieking note. And at whiles a train rushed upon the ear, held it, and died away; or a breeze crept among the dead beech leaves at his feet. Otherwise not a sound or show of life; Marsham was alone with night and himself.

Twenty-four hours--little more--since on that same hill-side he had held Diana in his arms in the first rapture of love. What was it that had changed? How was it--for he was frank with himself--that the love which had been then the top and completion of his life, the angel of all good-fortune within and without, had become now, to some extent, a burden to be borne, an obligation to be met?

Certainly, he loved her well. But she came to him now, bringing as her marriage portion, not easy joy and success, the full years of prosperity and ambition, but poverty, effort, a certain measure of disgrace, and the perpetual presence of a ghastly and heart-breaking memory. He shrank from this last in a positive and sharp impatience. Why should Juliet Sparling's crime affect him?--depress the vigor and cheerfulness of his life?

As to the effort before him, he felt toward it as a man of weak unpractised muscle who endeavors with straining to raise a physical weight. He would make the effort, but it would tax his whole strength. As he strolled along the down, dismally smoking and pondering, he made himself contemplate the then and now--taking stock, as it were, of his life. In this truth-compelling darkness, apart from the stimulus of his mother's tyranny, he felt himself to be two men: one in love with Diana, the other in love with success and political ambition, and money as the agent and servant of both. He had never for one moment envisaged the first love--Diana--as the alternative to, or substitute for the second love--success. As he had conceived her up to twenty-four hours before, Diana was to be, indeed, one of the chief elements and ministers of success. In winning her, he was, in fact, to make the best of both worlds. A certain cool analytic gift that he possessed put all this plainly before him. And now it must be a choice between Diana and all those other desirable things.

Take the poverty first. What would it amount to? He knew approximately what was Diana's fortune. He had meant--with easy generosity--to leave it all in her hands, to do what she would with. Now, until his mother came to her senses, they must chiefly depend upon it. What could he add to it? He had been called to the Bar, but had never practised. Directorships no doubt, he might get, like other men; though not so easily now, if it was to be known that his mother meant to make a pauper of him. And once a man whom he had met in political life, who was no doubt ignorant of his private circumstances, had sounded him as to whether he would become the London correspondent of a great American paper. He had laughed then, good-humoredly, at the proposal. Perhaps the thing might still be open. It would mean a few extra hundreds.

He laughed again as he thought of it, but not good-humoredly. The whole thing was so monstrous! His mother had close on twenty thousand a year! For all her puritanical training she liked luxury--of a certain kind--and had brought up her son in it. Marsham had never gambled or speculated or raced. It was part of his democratic creed and his Quaker Ancestry to despise such modes of wasting money, and to be scornful of the men who indulged in them. But the best of housing, service, and clothes; the best shooting, whether in England or Scotland; the best golfing, fishing, and travelling: all these had come to him year after year since his boyhood, without question. His mother, of course, had provided the majority of them, for his own small income and his allowance from her were absorbed by his personal expenses, his Parliamentary life, and the subscriptions to the party, which--in addition to his mother's--made him, as he was well aware, a person of importance in its ranks, quite apart from his record in the House.

Now all that must be given up. He would be reduced to an income--including what he imagined to be Diana's--of less than half his personal spending hitherto; and those vast perspectives implied in the inheritance at his mother's death of his father's half million must also be renounced.

No doubt he could just maintain himself in Parliament. But everything--judged by the standards he had been brought up in--would be difficult where everything till now had been ease.

He knew his mother too well to doubt her stubbornness, and his feeling was bitter, indeed. Bitter, too, against his father, who had left him in this plight. Why had his father distrusted and wronged him so? He recalled with discomfort certain collisions of his youth; certain disappointments at school and college he had inflicted on his father's ambition; certain lectures and gibes from that strong mouth, in his early manhood. Absurd! If his father had had to do with a really spendthrift and unsatisfactory son, there might have been some sense in it. But for these trifles--these suspicions--these foolish notions of a doctrinaire--to inflict this stigma and this yoke on him all his days!