CHAPTER XXIII

RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN

Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected. Percy Dacier as the

model of her YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE, Diana supposed. Could she otherwise

have dared to sketch him? She certainly would not have done it now.

That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has

dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where

caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple

self-preservation. How could she have been induced to study and portray

him! It seemed a form of dementia.

She thought this while imagining the world to be interrogating her. When

she interrogated herself, she flew to Lugano and her celestial Salvatore,

that she might be defended from a charge of the dreadful weakness of her

sex. Surely she there had proof of her capacity for pure disengagement.

Even in recollection the springs of spiritual happiness renewed the

bubbling crystal play. She believed that a divineness had wakened in her

there, to strengthen her to the end, ward her from any complicity in her

sex's culprit blushing.

Dacier's cry of her name was the cause, she chose to think, of the

excessive circumspection she must henceforth practise; precariously

footing, embracing hardest earth, the plainest rules, to get back to

safety. Not that she was personally endangered, or at least not

spiritually; she could always fly in soul to her heights. But she had now

to be on guard, constantly in the fencing attitude. And watchful of

herself as well. That was admitted with a ready frankness, to save it

from being a necessitated and painful confession: for the

voluntary-acquiescence, if it involved her in her sex, claimed an

individual exemption. 'Women are women, and I am a woman but I am I, and

unlike them: I see we are weak, and weakness tempts: in owning the

prudence of guarded steps, I am armed. It is by dissembling, feigning

immunity, that we are imperilled.' She would have phrased it so, with

some anger at her feminine nature as well as at the subjection forced on

her by circumstances.

Besides, her position and Percy Dacier's threw the fancied danger into

remoteness. The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge;

and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him

down for an offence. She saw their situation as he did. The course of

folly must be bravely taken, if taken at all: Disguise degraded her to

the reptiles.

This was faced. Consequently there was no fear of it.

She had very easily proved that she had skill and self-possession to keep

him rational, and therefore they could continue to meet. A little

outburst of frenzy to a reputably handsome woman could be treated as the

froth of a passing wave. Men have the trick, infants their fevers.

Diana's days were spent in reasoning. Her nights were not so tuneable to

the superior mind. When asleep she was the sport of elves that danced her

into tangles too deliciously unravelled, and left new problems for the

wise-eyed and anxious morning. She solved them with the thought that in

sleep it was the mere ordinary woman who fell a prey to her tormentors;

awake, she dispersed the swarm, her sky was clear. Gradually the

persecution ceased, thanks to her active pen.

A letter from her legal adviser, old Mr. Braddock, informed her that no

grounds existed for apprehending marital annoyance, and late in May her

household had resumed its customary round.

She examined her accounts. The Debit and Credit sides presented much of

the appearance of male and female in our jog-trot civilization. They

matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the

leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male), which

deepened the blush of the comparison. Her father had noticed the same

funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts: 'Now then for

a look at Man and Wife': except that he made Debit stand for the portly

frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim

gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with

her. 'You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in

step or bundle into the Bench,' Dan Merion used to say.

Diana had not so much to rebuke in Mr. Debit; or not at the first

reckoning. But his ways were curious. She grew distrustful of him, after

dismissing him with a quiet admonition and discovering a series of ambush

bills, which he must have been aware of when he was allowed to pass as an

honourable citizen. His answer to her reproaches pleaded the

necessitousness of his purchases and expenditure: a capital plea; and

Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen

the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the

world's idea of fitness in couples. She would have costly furniture,

because it pleased her taste; and a French cook, for a like reason, in

justice to her guests; and trained servants; and her tribe of pensioners;

flowers she would have profuse and fresh at her windows and over the

rooms; and the pictures and engravings on the walls were (always for the

good reason mentioned) choice ones; and she had a love of old lace, she

loved colours as she loved cheerfulness, and silks, and satin hangings,

Indian ivory carvings, countless mirrors, Oriental woods, chairs and

desks with some feature or a flourish in them, delicate tables with

antelope legs, of approved workmanship in the chronology of European

upholstery, and marble clocks of cunning device to symbol Time,

mantelpiece decorations, illustrated editions of her favourite authors;

her bed-chambers, too, gave the nest for sleep a dainty cosiness in

aerial draperies. Hence, more or less directly, the peccant bills. Credit

was reduced to reckon to a nicety the amount she could rely on

positively: her fixed income from her investments and the letting of The

Crossways: the days of half-yearly payments that would magnify her to

some proportions beside the alarming growth of her partner, who was proud

of it, and referred her to the treasures she could summon with her pen,

at a murmur of dissatisfaction. His compliments were sincere; they were

seductive. He assured her that she had struck a rich vein in an

inexhaustible mine; by writing only a very little faster she could double

her income; counting a broader popularity, treble it; and so on a tide of

success down the widening river to a sea sheer golden. Behold how it

sparkles! Are we then to stint our winged hours of youth for want of

courage to realize the riches we can command? Debit was eloquent, he was

unanswerable.

Another calculator, an accustomed and lamentably-scrupulous

arithmetician, had been at work for some time upon a speculative summing

of the outlay of Diana's establishment, as to its chances of swamping the

income. Redworth could guess pretty closely the cost of a house hold, if

his care for the holder set him venturing on aver ages. He knew nothing

of her ten per cent. investment and considered her fixed income a

beggarly regiment to marshal against the invader. He fancied however, in

his ignorance of literary profits, that a popular writer, selling several

editions, had come to an El Dorado. There was the mine. It required a

diligent worker. Diana was often struck by hearing Redworth ask her when

her next book might be expected. He appeared to have an eagerness in

hurrying her to produce, and she had to say that she was not a nimble

writer. His flattering impatience was vexatious. He admired her work, yet

he did his utmost to render it little admirable. His literary taste was

not that of young Arthur Rhodes, to whom she could read her chapters,

appearing to take counsel upon them while drinking the eulogies: she

suspected him of prosaic ally wishing her to make money, and though her

exchequer was beginning to know the need of it, the author's lofty mind

disdained such sordidness: to be excused, possibly, for a failing

productive energy. She encountered obstacles to imaginative composition.

With the pen in her hand, she would fall into heavy musings; break a

sentence to muse, and not on the subject. She slept unevenly at night,

was drowsy by day, unless the open air was about her, or animating

friends. Redworth's urgency to get her to publish was particularly

annoying when she felt how greatly THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE would have

been improved had she retained the work to brood over it, polish,

re-write passages, perfect it. Her musings embraced long dialogues of

that work, never printed; they sprang up, they passed from memory;

leaving a distaste for her present work: THE CANTATRICE: far more

poetical than the preceding, in the opinion of Arthur Rhodes; and the

story was more romantic; modelled on a Prima Donna she had met at the

musical parties of Henry Wilmers, after hearing Redworth tell of Charles

Rainer's quaint passion for the woman, or the idea of the woman. Diana

had courted her, studied and liked her. The picture she was drawing of

the amiable and gifted Italian, of her villain Roumanian husband, and of

the eccentric, high-minded, devoted Englishman, was good in a fashion;

but considering the theme, she had reasonable apprehension that her

CANTATRICE would not repay her for the time and labour bestowed on it. No

clever transcripts of the dialogue of the day occurred; no hair-breadth

'scapes, perils by sea and land, heroisms of the hero, fine shrieks of

the heroine; no set scenes of catching pathos and humour; no

distinguishable points of social satire--equivalent to a smacking of the

public on the chaps, which excites it to grin with keen discernment of

the author's intention. She did not appeal to the senses nor to a

superficial discernment. So she had the anticipatory sense of its

failure; and she wrote her best, in perverseness; of course she wrote

slowly; she wrote more and more realistically of the characters and the

downright human emotions, less of the wooden supernumeraries of her

story, labelled for broad guffaw or deluge tears--the grappling natural

links between our public and an author. Her feelings were aloof. They

flowed at a hint of a scene of THE YOUNG MINISTER. She could not put them

into THE CANTATRICE. And Arthur Rhodes pronounced this work poetical

beyond its predecessors, for the reason that the chief characters were

alive and the reader felt their pulses. He meant to say, they were

poetical inasmuch as they were creations.

The slow progress of a work not driven by the author's feelings

necessitated frequent consultations between Debit and Credit, resulting

in altercations, recriminations, discord of the yoked and divergent

couple. To restore them to their proper trot in harness, Diana

reluctantly went to her publisher for an advance item of the sum she was

to receive, and the act increased her distaste. An idea came that she

would soon cease to be able to write at all. What then? Perhaps by

selling her invested money, and ultimately The Crossways, she would have

enough for her term upon earth. Necessarily she had to think that short,

in order to reckon it as nearly enough. 'I am sure,' she said to herself,

'I shall not trouble the world very long.' A strange languor beset her;

scarcely melancholy, for she conceived the cheerfulness of life and added

to it in company; but a nervelessness, as though she had been left by the

stream on the banks, and saw beauty and pleasure sweep along and away,

while the sun that primed them dried her veins. At this time she was

gaining her widest reputation for brilliancy of wit. Only to welcome

guests were her evenings ever spent at home. She had no intimate

understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman with her

nature which she was undergoing below the surface. Perplexities she

acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness. 'But as I am sure not to

live very long, we may as well meet.' Her meetings with Percy Dacier were

therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to

discountenance them. It would have been cruel to exclude him from her

select little dinners of eight. Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and

the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art. She

heard it said of him, that the courted discarder of the sex, hitherto a

mere politician, was wonderfully humanized. Lady Pennon fell to talking

of him hopefully. She declared him to be one of the men who unfold

tardily, and only await the mastering passion. If the passion had come,

it was controlled. His command of himself melted Diana. How could she

forbid his entry to the houses she frequented? She was glad to see him.

He showed his pleasure in seeing her. Remembering his tentative

indiscretion on those foreign sands, she reflected that he had been

easily checked: and the like was not to be said of some others. Beautiful

women in her position provoke an intemperateness that contrasts

touchingly with the self-restraint of a particular admirer. Her

'impassioned Caledonian' was one of a host, to speak of whom and their

fits of lunacy even to her friend Emma, was repulsive. She bore with

them, foiled them, passed them, and recovered her equanimity; but the

contrast called to her to dwell on it, the self-restraint whispered of a

depth of passion . . . .

She was shocked at herself for a singular tremble 'she experienced,

without any beating of the heart, on hearing one day that the marriage of

Percy Dacier and Miss Asper was at last definitely fixed. Mary Paynham

brought her the news. She had it from a lady who had come across Miss

Asper at Lady Wathin's assemblies, and considered the great heiress

extraordinarily handsome.

'A golden miracle,' Diana gave her words to say. 'Good looks and gold

together are rather superhuman. The report may be this time true.' Next

afternoon the card of Lady Wathin requested Mrs. Warwick to grant her a

private interview.

Lady Wathin, as one of the order of women who can do anything in a holy

cause, advanced toward Mrs. Warwick, unabashed by the burden of her

mission, and spinally prepared, behind benevolent smilings, to repay

dignity of mien with a similar erectness of dignity. They touched fingers

and sat. The preliminaries to the matter of the interview were brief

between ladies physically sensible of antagonism and mutually too

scornful of subterfuges in one another's presence to beat the bush.

Lady Wathin began. 'I am, you are aware, Mrs. Warwick, a cousin of your

friend Lady Dunstane.'

'You come to me on business?' Diana said.

'It may be so termed. I have no personal interest in it. I come to lay

certain facts before you which I think you should know. We think it

better that an acquaintance, and one of your sex, should state the case

to you, instead of having recourse to formal intermediaries, lawyers--'

'Lawyers?'

'Well, my husband is a lawyer, it is true. In the course of his

professional vocations he became acquainted with Mr. Warwick. We have

latterly seen a good deal of him. He is, I regret to say, seriously

unwell.'

'I have heard of it.'

'He has no female relations, it appears. He needs more care than he can

receive from hirelings.'

'Are you empowered by him, Lady Wathin?'

'I am, Mrs. Warwick. We will not waste time in apologies. He is most

anxious for a reconciliation. It seems to Sir Cramborne and to me the

most desireable thing for all parties concerned, if you can be induced to

regard it in that light. Mr. Warwick may or may not live; but the

estrangement is quite undoubtedly the cause of his illness. I touch on

nothing connected with it. I simply wish that you should not be in

ignorance of his proposal and his condition.'

Diana bowed calmly. 'I grieve at his condition. His proposal has already

been made and replied to.'

'Oh, but, Mrs. Warwick, an immediate and decisive refusal of a proposal

so fraught with consequences . . . !'

'Ah, but, Lady Wathin, you are now outstepping the limits prescribed by

the office you have undertaken.'

'You will not lend ear to an intercession?'

'I will not.'

'Of course, Mrs. Warwick, it is not for me to hint at things that lawyers

could say on the subject.'

'Your forbearance is creditable, Lady Wathin.'

'Believe me, Mrs. Warwick, the step is--I speak in my husband's name as

well as my own--strongly to be advised.'

'If I hear one word more of it, I leave the country.'

'I should be sorry indeed at any piece of rashness depriving your

numerous friends of your society. We have recently become acquainted with

Mr. Redworth, and I know the loss you would be to them. I have not

attempted an appeal to your feelings, Mrs. Warwick.'

'I thank you warmly, Lady Wathin, for what you have not done.'

The aristocratic airs of Mrs. Warwick were annoying to Lady Wathin when

she considered that they were borrowed, and that a pattern morality could

regard the woman as ostracized: nor was it agreeable to be looked at

through eyelashes under partially lifted brows. She had come to appeal to

the feelings of the wife; at any rate, to discover if she had some and

was better than a wild adventuress.

'Our life below is short!' she said. To which Diana tacitly assented.

'We have our little term, Mrs. Warwick. It is soon over.'

'On the other hand, the platitudes concerning it are eternal.'

Lady Wathin closed her eyes, that the like effect might be produced on

her ears. 'Ah! they are the truths. But it is not my business to preach.

Permit me to say that I feel deeply for your husband.'

'I am glad of Mr. Warwick's having friends; and they are many, I hope.'

'They cannot behold him perishing, without an effort on his behalf.'

A chasm of silence intervened. Wifely pity was not sounded in it.

'He will question me, Mrs. Warwick.'

'You can report to him the heads of our conversation, Lady Wathin.'

'Would you--it is your husband's most earnest wish; and our house is open

to his wife and to him for the purpose; and it seems to us that . . .

indeed it might avert a catastrophe you would necessarily deplore:--would

you consent to meet him at my house?'

'It has already been asked, Lady Wathin, and refused.'

'But at my house-under our auspices!'

Diana glanced at the clock. 'Nowhere.'

'Is it not--pardon me--a wife's duty, Mrs. Warwick, at least to listen?'

'Lady Wathin, I have listened to you.'

'In the case of his extreme generosity so putting it, for the present,

Mrs. Warwick, that he asks only to be heard personally by his wife! It

may preclude so much.'

Diana felt a hot wind across her skin.

She smiled and said: 'Let me thank you for bringing to an end a mission

that must have been unpleasant to you.'

'But you will meditate on it, Mrs. Warwick, will you not? Give me that

assurance!'

'I shall not forget it,' said Diana.

Again the ladies touched fingers, with an interchange of the social

grimace of cordiality. A few words of compassion for poor Lady Dunstane's

invalided state covered Lady Wathin's retreat.

She left, it struck her ruffled sentiments, an icy libertine, whom any

husband caring for his dignity and comfort was well rid of; and if only

she could have contrived allusively to bring in the name of Mr. Percy

Dacier, just to show these arrant coquettes, or worse, that they were not

quite so privileged to pursue their intrigues obscurely as they imagined,

it would have soothed her exasperation.

She left a woman the prey of panic.

Diana thought of Emma and Redworth, and of their foolish interposition to

save her character and keep her bound. She might now have been free! The

struggle with her manacles reduced her to a state of rebelliousness, from

which issued vivid illuminations of the one means of certain escape; an

abhorrent hissing cavern, that led to a place named Liberty, her refuge,

but a hectic place.

Unable to write, hating the house which held her a fixed mark for these

attacks, she had an idea of flying straight to her beloved Lugano lake,

and there hiding, abandoning her friends, casting off the slave's name

she bore, and living free in spirit. She went so far as to reckon the

cost of a small household there, and justify the violent step by an

exposition of retrenchment upon her large London expenditure. She had but

to say farewell to Emma, no other tie to cut! One morning on the

Salvatore heights would wash her clear of the webs defacing and

entangling her.