To Diana, all this while, the coming or the going, the solitude or the company, even the good or ill humours of her mother, seemed to be of little importance. She lived her own shut-up, deadened, secret life through it all, and had no nerves of sensation near enough to the surface to be affected much by what went on outside of her. What though her mother was all the while in a rasped sort of state? it could not rasp Diana; she seemed to wear a coat of mail. Neighbours? no neighbours were anything to her one way or another; if she could be said to like anything, it was to be quite alone and see and hear nobody. Her marriage she looked at in the same dull way; with a thought, so far as she gave it a thought, that in the minister's house her life would be more quiet, and peace and good-will would replace the eager disquiet around her which, without minding it, Diana yet perceived. More quiet and better, she hoped her life would be; her life and herself; she thought the minister was getting a bad bargain of it, but since it was his pleasure, she thought it was a good thing for her; every time she met the gentle kind eyes and felt the warm clasp of his hand, Diana repeated the assurance to herself. The girl had sunk again into mental torpor; she did not see nor hear nor feel; she lived along a mechanical sort of life, having relapsed into her former stunned condition. Not crushed—there was too much of Diana's nature for one blow or perhaps many blows to effect that; not beaten down, like some other characters; she went on her way upright, alert, and strong, doing and expecting to do the work of life to its utmost measure; all the same, walking as a ghost might walk through the scenes of his former existence; with no longer any natural conditions to put her at one with them, and only conscious of her dead heart. This state of things had given way in the fall to a few months of incessant and very live pain; with her betrothal to the minister Diana had sunk again into the dulness of apathy. But with a constitution mental and physical like hers, so full of sound life-blood, so true and strong, in the nature of things this state of apathetic sleep could not last for ever. And the time of final waking came.
The winter had dragged its length away. Spring had come, with its renewal of all the farm and household activities. Diana stood up to her work and did it, day by day, with faultless accuracy, with blameless diligence. She was too useful a helper not to be missed unwillingly from any household that had once known her; and Mrs. Starling's temper did not improve. It had been arranged that Diana's marriage should take place about the first of June. Spring work over, and summer going on its orderly way, she could be easiest spared then, she thought; and Mrs. Starling, seeing it must be, made no particular objection. Beyond the time, nothing had been talked of yet concerning the occasion. So it was a hitherto untouched question, when Mrs. Starling asked her daughter one day,—"What sort of a wedding are you calculatin' to have?"
"What sort of a wedding? I don't know," said Diana. "What do you mean by a wedding?"
"The thing is, what you mean by it. Don't be a baby, Diana Starling!
Do you mean to ask your friends to see you married?"
"I don't want anybody, I am sure," said Diana. "And I am sure Mr.
Masters does not care."
"Are you going to be married in a black gown?"
"Black! No; but I do not care what kind of a gown it is, further than that."
"I don't think you care much about the whole thing," said Mrs. Starling, looking at her. "If I was you, I wouldn't be married just to please somebody else, without it pleased myself too. That's what I think."
Poor Diana thought of Mr. Masters' face as she had seen it the last time; and it seemed to her good to give somebody else pleasure, even if pleasure were gone and out of the question for her. This view of the question, naturally, she did not make public.
"What are you going to marry this man for?" said Mrs. Starling, standing straight up (she had been bending over some work) and looking hard at her daughter.