The Testing of Diana Mallory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"I shall mind very much if you don't stay out a full hour and get a good walk."

Diana ran off, followed by her dog. There was something in the manner both of the dog and its mistress that seemed to show impetuous escape--and relief.

"She looks tired out!" said the little companion to herself, as she turned to enter the hall. "How on earth is she going to get through six weeks of it?--or six months!"

The house as she walked back through it made upon her the odd impression of having suddenly lost some of its charm. The peculiar sentiment--as of a warmly human, yet delicately ordered life, which it had breathed out so freely only twenty-four hours before, seemed to her quick feeling to have been somehow obscured or dissipated. All its defects, old or new--the patches in the panelling, the darkness of the passages--stood out.

And "all along of Eliza!" All because of Miss Fanny Merton! Mrs. Colwood recalled the morning--Miss Merton's late arrival at the breakfast-table, and the discovery from her talk that she was accustomed to breakfast in bed, waited upon by her younger sisters; her conversation at breakfast, partly about the prices of clothes and eatables, partly in boasting reminiscence of her winnings at cards, or in sweepstakes on the "run," on board the steamer. Diana had then devoted herself to the display of the house, and her maid had helped Miss Merton to unpack. The process had been diversified by raids made by Miss Fanny on Diana's own wardrobe, which she had inspected from end to end, to an accompaniment of critical remark. According to her, there was very little that was really "shick" in it, and Diana should change her dressmaker. The number of her own dresses was large; and as to their colors and make, Mrs. Colwood, who had helped to put away some of them, could only suppose that tropical surroundings made tropical tastes. At the same time the contrast between Miss Fanny's wardrobe, and what she herself reported, in every tone of grievance and disgust, of the family poverty, was surprising, though no doubt a great deal of the finery had been as cheaply bought as possible.

By luncheon-time Diana had shown some symptoms of fatigue, perhaps--Mrs. Colwood hoped!--of revolt. She had been already sharply questioned as to the number of servants she kept and the wages they received, as to the people in the neighborhood who gave parties, and the ages and incomes of such young or unmarried men as might be met with at these parties. Miss Merton had boasted already of two love-affairs--one the unsuccessful engagement in Barbadoes, the other--"a near thing"--which had enlivened the voyage to England; and she had extracted a promise from Diana to ask the young solicitor she had met with in the train--Mr. Fred Birch--to lunch, without delay. Meanwhile she had not--of her own initiative--said one word of those educational objects, in pursuit of which she was supposed to have come to England. Diana had proposed to her the names of certain teachers both of music and languages--names which she had obtained with much trouble. Miss Fanny had replied, rather carelessly, that she would think about it.

It was at this that the eager sweetness of Diana's manner to her cousin had shown its first cooling. And Mrs. Colwood had curiously observed that at the first sign of shrinking on her part, Miss Fanny's demeanor had instantly changed. It had become sugared and flattering to a degree. Everything in the house was "sweet"; the old silver used at table, with the Mallory crest, was praised extravagantly; the cooking no less. Yet still Diana's tired silence had grown; and the watching eyes of this amazing young woman had been, in Mrs. Colwood's belief, now insolently and now anxiously, aware of it.

Insolence!--that really, if one came to think of it, had been the note of Miss Merton's whole behavior from the beginning--an ill-concealed, hardly restrained insolence, toward the girl, two years older than herself, who had received her with such tender effusion, and was, moreover, in a position to help her so materially. What could it--what did it mean?

Mrs. Colwood stood at the foot of the stairs a moment, lost in a trance of wonderment. Her heart was really sore for Diana's disappointment, for the look in her face, as she left the house. How on earth could the visit be shortened and the young lady removed?

The striking of three o'clock reminded Muriel Colwood that she was to take the new-comer out for an hour. They had taken coffee in the morning-room up-stairs, Diana's own sitting-room, where she wrote her letters and followed out the lines of reading her father had laid down for her. Mrs. Colwood returned thither; found Miss Merton, as it seemed to her, in the act of examining the letters in Diana's blotting-book; and hastily proposed to her to take a turn in the garden.