The girl breathed fast. So, involuntarily, did Mrs. Colwood.
"You don't mean to say"--the speaker threw her body forward, and brought her face close to Mrs. Colwood--"you are not going to tell me that you don't know about Diana's mother?"
She laid her hand upon Muriel's dress.
"Why should I know? Please, Miss Merton!" and with a resolute movement Mrs. Colwood tried to withdraw her dress.
"Why, everybody knows!--everybody!--everybody! Ask anybody in the world about Juliet Sparling--and you'll see. In the saloon, coming over, I heard people talk about her all one night--they didn't know who I was--and of course I didn't tell. And there was a book in the ship's library--Famous Trials--or some name of that sort--with the whole thing in it. You don't know--about--Diana's mother?"
The fierce, incredulous emphasis on the last word, for a moment, withered all reply on Mrs. Colwood's lips. She walked to the door mechanically, to see that it was fast shut. Then she returned. She sat down beside Diana's guest, and it might have been seen that she had silenced fear and dismissed hesitation. "After all," she said, with quiet command, "I think I will ask you, Miss Merton, to explain what you mean?"
The February afternoon darkened round the old house. There was a light powdering of snow on grass and trees. Yet still there were breathings and bird-notes in the air, and tones of color in the distance, which obscurely prophesied the spring. Through the wood behind the house the snow-drops were rising, in a white invading host, over the ground covered with the red-brown deposit of innumerable autumns. Above their glittering white, rose an undergrowth of laurels and box, through which again shot up the magnificent trunks--gray and smooth and round--of the great beeches, which held and peopled the country-side, heirs of its ancestral forest. Any one standing in the wood could see, through the leafless trees, the dusky blues and rich violets of the encircling hill--hung there, like the tapestry of some vast hall; or hear from time to time the loud wings of the wood-pigeons as they clattered through the topmost boughs.
Diana was still in the village. She had been spending her hour of escape mostly with the Roughsedges. The old doctor among his books was now sufficiently at his ease with her to pet her, teach her, and, when necessary, laugh at her. And Mrs. Roughsedge, however she might feel herself eclipsed by Lady Lucy, was, in truth, much more fit to minister to such ruffled feelings as Diana was now conscious of than that delicate and dignified lady. Diana's disillusion about her cousin was, so far, no very lofty matter. It hurt; but on her run to the village the natural common-sense Mrs. Colwood had detected had wrestled stoutly with her wounded feelings. Better take it with a laugh! To laugh, however, one must be distracted; and Mrs. Roughsedge, bubbling over with gossip and good-humor, was distraction personified. Stern Justice, in the person of Lord M.'s gamekeeper, had that morning brought back Diana's two dogs in leash, a pair of abject and convicted villains, from the delirium of a night's hunting. The son of Miss Bertram's coachman had only just missed an appointment under the District Council by one place on the list of candidates. A "Red Van" bursting with Socialist literature had that morning taken up its place on the village green; and Diana's poor housemaid, in payment for a lifetime's neglect, must now lose every tooth in her head, according to the verdict of the local dentist, an excellent young man, in Mrs. Roughsedge's opinion, but ready to give you almost too much pulling out for your money. On all these topics she overflowed--with much fun and unfailing good-humor. So that after half an hour spent with Mrs. Roughsedge and Hugh in the little drawing-room at the White Cottage, Diana's aspect was very different from what it had been when she arrived.
Hugh, however, had noticed her pallor and depression. He was obstinately certain that Oliver Marsham was not the man to make such a girl happy. Between the rich Radical member and the young officer--poor, slow of speech and wits, and passionately devoted to the old-fashioned ideals and traditions in which he had been brought up--there was a natural antagonism. But Roughsedge's contempt for his brilliant and successful neighbor--on the ground of selfish ambitions and unpatriotic trucklings--was, in truth, much more active than anything Marsham had ever shown--or felt--toward himself. For in the young soldier there slept potentialities of feeling and of action, of which neither he nor others were as yet aware.