“Sophy,” said Mrs. Norton, with enthusiasm, when he had passed on, “Diana may say what she pleases, and I know she is cleverer than you and I; but for real understanding there is nothing like a gentleman! They know how to convey information, and they are so genuine. Now, ladies are always jealous. It must be jealousy. What a different account he gave! Mr. Hunstanton is a very nice man, and he understands what is due to people in our position. It will be a great advantage to be near them: for whatever Mrs. Hunstanton may say, of course they must have some society. Besides, my love,” added Mrs. Norton, “the great thing is your health. We can bear anything if your cough goes.”
“I think it is better since Thursday,” said Sophy. Thursday was the day of Diana’s visit, when this great step was decided upon.
“I think so too,” said the aunt. “You know how one’s toothache goes away when one knocks at the dentist’s door.”
This was perhaps not a very flattering simile: but that Sophy’s cough did improve immediately was very apparent. Diana from the great house looked on at the movements in the little one with that amused observation which Mrs. Hunstanton could not understand. That Sophy’s cough was better, that Mrs. Norton was no longer frightened to expose her niece to the cold winds, and even bore with equanimity Sophy’s adoption of the “short cut” across the park, which would have alarmed both of them a few weeks before, and that Mrs. Norton herself had no neuralgia when she drove out and in to Ireton to do the shopping which she found inevitable,—all this was very apparent to Diana. Mrs. Hunstanton, and even Miss Trelawny’s maid, remarked these circumstances with wrath, and the former hotly declared it to be utter cynicism and disbelief in human nature which made Diana laugh, and go on petting the little humbugs as much as ever. Is there always perhaps a little cynicism mingled with the toleration of the larger nature? Diana protested against it warmly, and felt herself injured by the imputation. She did not expect so much as the others did. It pleased herself to be kind and liberal to them. She did not want gratitude. Thus one part of the world will argue for ever, while another part receives the favours given and feels itself relieved from obligation by that very argument; and a third, incapable either of the generosity or the ingratitude, stands by and grows wroth and criticises. After all, it is the givers who have the best of it, though they have all the loss and the largest share of the pain,—which is a paradox, as most things that concern this paradoxical human nature must be.
The travellers went away, and Diana was left alone. Even in the heyday of health and life this is seldom desirable. She was alone in the world. So fortunate, so happy, so capable a woman, with “everything that heart could desire,” did her prosperity, her wealth and power, and beautiful surroundings do much for her? I think they did ameliorate her lot to an almost incalculable extent. Shut up in a limited space, in sordid circumstances, poor, with nothing to occupy her active faculties, she would have been like a caged lion. But she had abundance to do—occupations important and valuable and necessary, not the things done for the mere sake occupation which are the lot of so many women, and indeed also of many men. The work of the estate, taken up for the first time for many generations with genuine enthusiasm, exercised all her powers; and as she had the advantage over most reformers of being able actually to execute a great many of the reforms she had planned, her work kept her going as perhaps no other work could have done. A reforming despot, eager to set everything right, and really able in many cases to enact the part of Providence, redress wrongs, and do poetic justice among men,—what position could be more sustaining and encouraging to a vigorous and fanciful soul? Diana’s “work” occupied her like a profession. She was rich, for what use but the good of others? The most extravagant expenditure possible to herself personally, she thought, could not amount to half of her income—though she loved to have beautiful things about her, and to spend liberally with the generous habit of her nature. She never meant to marry, she never meant to save. The next Trelawny who should succeed her would find an unencumbered estate, and an improved one, please God, but hoards of money none. This was the intention of her life. You may believe, if you please, that some disgust of youth with the ordinary arrangements of humanity, some horror of false love, or unforgotten outrage of the heart, was at the bottom of the system upon which she had formed her future existence. But whatever this was, she had surmounted the pain of it, and her imagination had been caught by that ideal of the virgin princess, which had something captivating in it, though it is rarely recognised by the world. Then she had herself been poor, and knew how to give succour and who needed it.
But she kept the family lawyers of the Trelawny house, I allow, in a state of fever and exasperation very prejudicial to the health of these respectable gentlemen. They thought her mad, no less, when she proposed to them to give large slices of her income to this one and the other—not “the poor,” in the ordinary sense of the word. Subscriptions to hospitals, to orphanages, to charities in general, that they understood; but a civil list of pensions like the Queen’s—sometimes more liberal than her Majesty is permitted to give! “The young woman is mad!” said Mr. Seign and Mr. Cachet. But it was in favour of Diana’s sanity that she had her dresses from Paris, and drove a beautiful pair of horses, and bought pictures, and saw a great deal of society. Her conservatories were the pride of the county; her head gardener a man of such erudition that professors quailed before him. This did not look like insanity; neither did the great Christmas party which gathered in the Chase, when Mr. Cachet was one of the guests, and was forced to acknowledge that things had not been carried on with anything like so much splendour in old Sir John’s time. She was not a hermit nor an anchorite nor a monomaniac. As for her resolution not to marry, of course that meant solely that she had not yet been addressed by the right man; and when he appeared, no doubt he would make short work with the civil list. This calmed the tone of Messrs. Seign & Cachet’s remonstrances. They protested on principle against any new “eccentricity” of the feminine Squire of Trelawny; but they trusted in time and the chapter of accidents, and Diana’s beauty and her youth—for naturally when she has a large property, however it may be under other circumstances, a woman of thirty has by no means ceased to be young.
Thus Diana occupied herself through the dulness of the winter; but when spring began to thrill nature with its first touches through the gloom her energy flagged. There was no one with her. Were I to say that these two silly little women in the Red House had been “company” for Diana it would be folly; and yet she missed them and their chatter and their soft voices. How much domestic comfort there is in pleasant looks and smiles and soft tones, even when unaccompanied by high qualities! They had gone away without thinking much of her who was so much their superior, accepting her favours with light hearts, but quite easy in the thought that Diana liked to give. And she, foolish, bigger, nobler creature, missed them! How absurd it was, yet true! And she missed also the Hunstantons, her nearest neighbours, and her strength of winter flagged; and all those imaginations to which “in spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns” awoke in Diana’s mind—not to thoughts of love, but to those unnamed and unnamable disturbances, longings for something other than what we possess, which are not confined to youth alone. “Folk are longen to gon on pilgrimages,”—old characteristic of human nature never changed! Diana got up one morning with a sudden thought in her mind. She, who for these last two years had been helping all sorts of people to all sorts of pleasure, she had never been anywhere herself, except in the last months of old Lady Trelawny’s life, when she went to Cannes with her in an invalid pursuit of the warmth and sunshine. She made up her mind all at once to go to Italy too.
I don’t know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate for her, but it was the fact that her first rapid glance round all her horizon to try to remember if she knew any one who would like to be taken there with her—came to nothing. If she chose to go she must make up her mind to go for herself. Well, she said after an interval, why not go for myself? There was nothing unlawful in it, no more than in getting dresses from Paris, which she did without hesitation. Therefore, accordingly, with her usual rapidity, having placed everything on a safe footing that none of her enterprises might be arrested, Diana set off. She sent no warning letters before her. Perhaps this was rash: but it was not as if she expected any special warmth of welcome. She knew exactly how she would be received by all her friends,—how Sophy and her aunt would flutter about her; how Mrs. Hunstanton would raise her eyebrows, and proceed to immediate but probably silent speculations as to what had brought her; how Mr. Hunstanton would claim her interest in the histories of all his friends; even how sickly Reginald would inspect her to see what she had brought him. All this Diana knew beforehand. She went rapidly across the sea and land on the last wild days of March, and found herself whirled through the Tuscan plain among the almond-trees in the beginning of April. What a flush there was everywhere about of those almond-trees, useful and meant for fruiting, not kept merely to be the earliest ornaments of the garden, like ours! She seemed to be wandering through the backgrounds of all the Italian pictures she knew, seeing the soft evening light strike upon the little cones of hills, the old castles and convents. Was this the Val d’Arno, the country of dreams, and were these the Apennines? There was a vague elation, a sense of wondering joyous unreality, in the very names.
The Hunstantons “knew themselves” in all these places which are frequented by invalids, and knew where to go. They were established in an old palace on the sunny side of the river. There they had saved wood and kept themselves warm all the winter, and now began to talk of the risks of too much heat and the necessity of closing the persianis. Reginald was better, and as for Sophy’s cough, no one had heard it since she left England. It had been cured too soon; but only Mrs. Hunstanton recollected this fact, or ever had mentioned it. The Hunstantons had the second floor of the palace, being economical people; the Nortons had a little appartemento above. They lived separately, yet together; and Reginald had been so much happier with the Nortons to fall back upon, to find out conundrums for him, and play games with him, and fill up his idle moments, that his mother had forgotten all her objections to her fellow-travellers. Reginald was her very dear son, but he was not an interesting boy. Sometimes even fathers and mothers are conscious of this fact, but kind little Mrs. Norton was quite unconscious of it. “I do really believe that Diana, who thinks of everything, saw what an advantage it would be for Reginald, and that she sent them for that, as much as for Sophy’s ridiculous little pretence of a cough,” Mrs. Hunstanton had been saying on the very evening of Diana’s arrival. This was when she and her husband were alone after dinner on one of their “off-nights.” On alternate evenings they held small receptions,—little gossiping friendly parties which were not parties, and to which the English—of whom this lady had said that the less said of them the better—constantly came. One stranger only interfered on this evening with the conjugal tête-à-tête. He was an Italian—a Florentine—of the great house of the Pandolfini, but not a wealthy scion of the race.
“Yes; Sophy is an unselfish little thing. I always told you so. She likes to be of use.”