CHAPTER XXXII

WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CROSSWAYS

Danvers accompanied Mr. Dacier to the house-door. Climbing the stairs,

she found her mistress in the drawing-room still.

'You must be cold, ma'am,' she said, glancing at the fire-grate.

'Is it a frost?' said Diana.

'It's midnight and midwinter, ma'am.'

'Has it struck midnight?'

The mantel-piece clock said five minutes past.

'You had better go to bed, Danvers, or you will lose your bloom. Stop;

you are a faithful soul. Great things are happening and I am agitated.

Mr. Dacier has told me news. He came back purposely.'

'Yes, ma'am,' said Danvers. 'He had a great deal to tell?'

'Well, he had.' Diana coloured at the first tentative impertinence she

had heard from her maid. 'What is the secret of you, Danvers? What

attaches you to me?'

'I'm sure I don't know, ma'am. I'm romantic.'

'And you think me a romantic object?'

'I'm sure I can't say, ma'am. I'd rather serve you than any other lady;

and I wish you was happy.'

'Do you suppose I am unhappy?'

'I'm sure--but if I may speak, ma'am: so handsome and clever a lady! and

young! I can't bear to see it.'

'Tush, you silly woman. You read your melting tales, and imagine. I must

go and write for money: it is my profession. And I haven't an idea in my

head. This news disturbs me. Ruin if I don't write; so I must.--I can't!'

Diana beheld the ruin. She clasped the great news for succour. Great

indeed: and known but to her of all the outer world. She was ahead of

all--ahead of Mr. Tonans!

The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans petrified by the great news, drinking

it, and confessing her ahead of him in the race for secrets, arose

toweringly. She had not ever seen the Editor in his den at midnight. With

the rumble of his machinery about him, and fresh matter arriving and

flying into the printing-press, it must be like being in the very

furnace-hissing of Events: an Olympian Council held in Vulcan's smithy.

Consider the bringing to the Jove there news of such magnitude as to

stupefy him! He, too, who had admonished her rather sneeringly for

staleness in her information. But this news, great though it was, and

throbbing like a heart plucked out of a breathing body, throbbed but for

a brief term, a day or two; after which, great though it was, immense, it

relapsed into a common organ, a possession of the multitude, merely

historically curious.

'You are not afraid of the streets at night?' Diana said to her maid, as

they were going upstairs.

'Not when we're driving, ma'am,' was the answer.

THE MAN OF TWO MINDS faced his creatrix in the dressing-room, still

delivering that most ponderous of sentences--a smothering pillow!

I have mistaken my vocation, thought Diana: I am certainly the flattest

proser who ever penned a line.

She sent Dangers into the bedroom on a trifling errand, unable to bear

the woman's proximity, and oddly unwilling to dismiss her.

She pressed her hands on her eyelids. Would Percy have humiliated her so

if he had respected her? He took advantage of the sudden loss of her

habitual queenly initiative at the wonderful news to debase and stain

their intimacy. The lover's behaviour was judged by her sensations: she

felt humiliated, plucked violently from the throne where she had long

been sitting securely, very proudly. That was at an end. If she was to be

better than the loathsomest of hypocrites, she must deny him his

admission to the house. And then what was her life!

Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it

unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had

suffered. She was a dethroned woman. Deeper within, an unmasked actress,

she said. Oh, she forgave him! But clearly he took her for the same as

other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor. And sounding

herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better? Her face flamed.

She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating, and dropped them

when she surprised herself embracing the memory. He had brought political

news, and treated her as--name the thing! Not designedly, it might be:

her position invited it. 'The world had given her to him.' The world is

always a prophet of the mire; but the world is no longer an utterly

mistaken world. She shook before it.

She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an

adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the

verge of bankruptcy. She was an adventuress. When she held The Crossways

she had at least a bit of solid footing: now gone. An adventuress without

an idea in her head: witness her dullard, The Man of Two Minds, at his

work of sermonizing his mistress.

The tremendous pressure upon our consciousness of the material cause,

when we find ourselves cast among the breakers of moral difficulties and

endeavour to elude that mudvisaged monster, chiefly by feigning

unconsciousness, was an experience of Diana's, in the crisis to which she

was wrought. Her wits were too acute, her nature too direct, to permit of

a lengthened confusion. She laid the scourge on her flesh smartly.--I

gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest, base as my

enemies proclaim me. I covered my woman's vile weakness with an air of

intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away, exposing

me to myself, as well as to him, the most ordinary of reptiles. I kept up

a costly household for the sole purpose of seeing him and having him near

me. Hence this bitter need of money!--Either it must be money or

disgrace. Money would assist her quietly to amend and complete her work.

Yes, and this want of money, in a review of the last two years, was the

material cause of her recklessness. It was, her revived and uprising

pudency declared, the principal; the only cause. Mere want of money.

And she had a secret worth thousands! The secret of a day, no more:

anybody's secret after some four and twenty hours.

She smiled at the fancied elongation and stare of the features of Mr.

Tonans in his editorial midnight den.

What if he knew it and could cap it with something novel and stranger?

Hardly. But it was an inciting suggestion.

She began to tremble as a lightning-flash made visible her fortunes

recovered, disgrace averted, hours of peace for composition stretching

before her: a summer afternoon's vista.

It seemed a duel between herself and Mr. Tonans, and she sure of her

triumph--Diana victrix!

'Danvers!' she called.

'Is it to undress, ma'am?' said the maid, entering to her.

'You are not afraid of the streets, you tell me. I have to go down to the

City, I think. It is urgent. Yes, I must go. If I were to impart the news

to you, your head would be a tolling bell for a month.'

'You will take a cab, ma'am.'

'We must walk out to find one. I must go, though I should have to go on

foot. Quick with bonnet and shawl; muffle up warmly. We have never been

out so late: but does it matter? You're a brave soul, I'm sure, and you

shall have your fee.'

'I don't care for money, ma'am.'

'When we get home you shall kiss me.'

Danvers clothed her mistress in furs and rich wrappings: Not paid for!

was Diana's desperate thought, and a wrong one; but she had to seem the

precipitated bankrupt and succeeded. She was near being it. The boiling

of her secret carried her through the streets rapidly and unobservantly

except of such small things as the glow of the lights on the pavements

and the hushed cognizance of the houses, in silence to a thoroughfare

where a willing cabman was met. The destination named, he nodded alertly

he had driven gentlemen there at night from the House of Commons, he

said.

'Our Parliament is now sitting, and you drive ladies,' Diana replied.

'I hope I know one, never mind the hour,' said he of the capes.

He was bidden to drive rapidly.

'Complexion a tulip: you do not often see a pale cabman,' she remarked to

Danvers, who began laughing, as she always expected to do on an excursion

with her mistress.

'Do you remember, ma'am, the cabman taking us to the coach, when you

thought of going to the continent?'

'And I went to The Crossways? I have forgotten him.'

'He declared you was so beautiful a lady he would drive you to the end of

England for nothing.'

'It must have been when I was paying him. Put it out of your mind,

Danvers, that there are individual cabmen. They are the painted flowers

of our metropolitan thoroughfares, and we gather them in rows.'

'They have their feelings, ma'am.'

'Brandied feelings are not pathetic to me.'

'I like to think kindly of them,' Danvers remarked, in reproof of her

inhumanity; adding: 'They may overturn us!' at which Diana laughed. Her

eyes were drawn to a brawl of women and men in the street. 'Ah! that

miserable sight!' she cried. 'It is the everlasting nightmare of London.'

Danvers humped, femininely injured by the notice of it. She wondered her

mistress should deign to.

Rolling on between the blind and darkened houses, Diana transferred her

sensations to them, and in a fit of the nerves imagined them beholding a

funeral convoy without followers.

They came in view of the domed cathedral, hearing, in a pause of the

wheels, the bell of the hour. 'Faster--faster! my dear man,' Diana

murmured, and they entered a small still square of many lighted windows.

'This must be where the morrow is manufactured,' she said. 'Tell the man

to wait.--Or rather it's the mirror of yesterday: we have to look

backward to see forward in life.'

She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself. Her

card, marked: 'Imperative-two minutes,' was taken up to Mr. Tonans. They

ascended to the editorial ante-room. Doors opened and shut, hasty feet

traversed the corridors, a dull hum in dumbness told of mighty business

at work. Diana received the summons to the mighty head of the

establishment. Danvers was left to speculate. She heard the voice of Mr.

Tonans: 'Not more than two!' This was not a place for compliments. Men

passed her, hither and yonder, cursorily noticing the presence of a

woman. She lost, very strangely to her, the sense of her sex and became

an object--a disregarded object. Things of more importance were about.

Her feminine self-esteem was troubled; all idea of attractiveness

expired. Here was manifestly a spot where women had dropped from the

secondary to the cancelled stage of their extraordinary career in a world

either blowing them aloft like soap-bubbles or quietly shelving them as

supernumeraries. A gentleman--sweet vision!--shot by to the editor's

door, without even looking cursorily. He knocked. Mr. Tonans appeared and

took him by the arm, dictating at a great rate; perceived Danvers,

frowned at the female, and requested him to wait in the room, which the

gentleman did, not once casting eye upon a woman. At last her mistress

returned to her, escorted so far by Mr. Tonans, and he refreshingly bent

his back to bow over her hand: so we have the satisfaction of knowing

that we are not such poor creatures after all! Suffering in person,

Danvers was revived by the little show of homage to her sex.

They descended the stairs.

'You are not an Editor of a paper, but you may boast that you have been

near the nest of one,' Diana said, when they resumed their seats in the

cab. She breathed deeply from time to time, as if under a weight, or

relieved of it, but she seemed animated, and she dropped now and again a

funny observation of the kind that tickled Danvers and caused the maid to

boast of her everywhere as better than a Play.

At home, Danvers busied her hands to supply her mistress a cup of

refreshing tea and a plate of biscuits.

Diana had stunned herself with the strange weight of the expedition, and

had not a thought. In spite of tea at that hour, she slept soundly

through the remainder of the night, dreamlessly till late into the

morning.