“I do, I do! Oh, how could you ever think it of me, Diana? and why do you speak to me so formally? If we were to go away to-morrow and never to come back again, do you think that would make me less grateful to you? And me hoity-toity! was I ever?—could I ever be?—does any one think it possible?”
“Do you know what that is?” said Diana. “I found it in my desk to-day.”
Mrs. Norton looked at the paper through her tears. She knew very well what it was. Though she was not rich, she prided herself on having travelled abroad in her time, and knowing all about such matters. It was a banker’s letter recommending herself to the correspondents of the firm—one of those documents which make the traveller’s path easy, and are of more use than any passport—as long as they hold out.
“Now,” said Diana, with a threatening aspect, “if you make any objections or say anything disagreeable, I am your landlady, and I shall evict you. If you refuse to go I shall take your roof off. I shall turn out all your furniture; and anybody who pleases may take your china. There! the power of threatening can no further go. And now I must hurry home, for I have a great deal to do to-day. Give me some of Sophy’s mignonette. Tell her she is a little goose, and that young Mr. Snodgrass prefers pink to blue; and if you were not very inexorable and unkind, his poor uncle—but of course if you will not listen to him, what does it matter what I say? Sophy, good-bye—I have no time to stay.”
“But, Diana, Diana!” said Mrs. Norton, breathless, with the letter in her hand, rushing to the door after the hasty visitor.
“I have not another moment—there are people waiting: good-bye till the evening,” cried Diana, half-way across the lawn, with her blue gown over her arm.
“She will wet her feet, she will catch cold, she will get rheumatism. Oh, if she knew what it was to have neuralgia like me! But Italy!” said Mrs. Norton to herself. She went back to her little drawing-room in a flutter of excitement. Italy! It had been the pride of her life to have been at Geneva once in her early days, and in this one expedition she had found a parallel to all she had heard of wonderful and stupendous since then. “I can understand it,” she had said, “because, when I was at Geneva——” With this the greatest traveller, and even Mr. Hunstanton himself, had been quelled. But now Italy! It took away the little lady’s breath. She went in and looked at the banker’s letter. Surely it would turn into a bit of rag again in her hands. It could not be real. Italy—and a hundred pounds! Mrs. Norton was dumb. She gasped for breath: she had not composure enough to call down Sophy, blissfully occupied in looking up her ribbons, and unaware that there was anything to hear.
Diana went back with a smile on her face. The power of doing such things as this is most likely sweeter when it is newly acquired than when people have possessed it all their life. She liked the indulgence. To be very rich, is it not to be in some sort a god upon earth, putting right the wrongs of fortune, and remedying its injustice? It was not so always: had she herself been ill in the old days, she must have borne it, and died in patience without hope of relief; and now to be able to forestall the first possibility of danger to another seemed very sweet to her. Yet she was not unaware, and the recollection made her smile again, that there was something absurd in the choice of Sophy Norton as the recipient of her bounty. There was many a consumptive girl in the county to whom the help would have been invaluable—but Sophy was not consumptive or unhealthy. She had a cough which was no more dangerous than a toothache, and which had only attracted the notice of her friend from the fact of the supposed dampness of the little Red House in the park. What a curious commentary it was on the inequalities of fortune, and the duty of the rich to bear the burdens of the poor! Mrs. Norton was not exactly poor: she had enough to keep a house comfortably enough, therefore it was to her that the rent-free cottage naturally fell; and Sophy had no more need of transportation to a warm climate than one of the elm-trees had, therefore of course it was Sophy who had the means thrust into her hand. What a curious travesty of need and of duty! and what could the great lady say for herself who was so glad to offer this pleasure and favour to her semi-dependants? She did nothing but smile, with an acute sense of those difficulties of life which no one can explain and scarcely any one overcome. Had Diana known the people to whom this favour would have been most a favour—to whom it might have been life and death—probably they would have been proud persons who would have rebelled at even the most delicate help. No man can save his brother. Those who want help most are those who will not accept, who cannot get it, whose wants are as far removed from the ken of the helpful by natural independence or by ignorance as if there were no help-givers in the world. Her own feelings even were to herself the strangest commentary upon her sincere desire to be of use to her fellow-creatures. This was a joke, a piece of self-indulgence, not noble neighbourliness, such as it was in Diana to do if need were. She laughed at herself and her banker’s letter, and the little show of violence with which she had insisted on its acceptance. Who could tell how near at hand and in what imminent need might be the other whom to save Diana would have strained every nerve? And how blind and poor and miserable is human nature, which cannot clear up even these initial difficulties! She went on sighing before the smile had died off her face, feeling amid all her power and capabilities how limited and how poor!
CHAPTER III.
TO ITALY.
“I did not think Diana had been such a fool,” was the remark of Mrs. Hunstanton, when the arrangement was proposed to her. She made no objection to the joint journey. The invalid boy for whom they travelled, and in whom all her hopes were concentrated, was on the whole a fatiguing companion, dear as he was both to father and mother; and as Mrs. Norton was one of the women who are utterly beyond fatigue in the amusement of children, there was compensation for the risk of being bored by the helplessness of the two little women. But that Miss Trelawny should carry her “infatuation” about these trifling persons to the length of sending them off like an anxious mother because the girl had a cough, filled her with an angry surprise. If she had a cough, what had Diana to do with it? She had an aunt of her own to look after her, and they had, Mrs. Hunstanton supposed, enough to live on, or what business had they there at Diana’s table meeting the best people in the county? Her unaccountable fondness for them irritated her friend. What could she see in such commonplace persons? for indeed the mixture of amusement and habit and indulgence in Diana’s affection was incomprehensible to Mrs. Hunstanton, who either was fond of people or disliked them, and disapproved of such complications of feeling. To tell the truth, the Nortons themselves took Diana’s kindness as proof of a deep and absorbing love, and asked each other, with a gentle complacency, what they had done to make her so fond of them. “Not that I should wonder at any one being fond of you, my darling,” the aunt said; a sentiment which the niece echoed warmly, both putting Diana’s love down to the credit of the other. Diana herself smiled a little when they talked to her of her love. Yes; she supposed she was fond of them in a way, poor little souls! and she laughed at the indignation of Mrs. Hunstanton, which was so naïve and open. It was no harm to that good woman, did not take anything from her, that her friend should pet and spoil these little women. Still it irritated her; and to think of this extravagant indulgence of their weaknesses angered her almost beyond bearing. “As for their coming with us, they are welcome to come, I am sure,” she said, thinking, not without a little relief, of Reginald, who was “a handful” on a long journey. She saw in her mind’s eye Mrs. Norton devoting herself to the boy, petting him—for it was her nature to be always petting somebody—reading to him, finding out endless stores of conundrums and foolish games for his amusement; and she was mollified. It was possible even that, though of themselves bores, they might be a kind of acquisition on the journey; but what Diana could mean by it! Mrs. Hunstanton shrugged her shoulders, and made up her mind that human creatures in general were more inscrutable than any other mystery on the face of the earth. She had occasion to learn this truth nearer home. There was her own husband always dancing about on somebody’s business, meddling with somebody’s affairs. No such temptation disturbed her mind. She was interested about her own people, loved them, and would have spent her last sixpence and her last hour in serving them. But people who did not belong to you! What right had you to be disturbed and deranged by their affairs?