CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT

From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness

to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend's help in some state of

fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her

body. She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had been

scattered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does. But she was

indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened world.

She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others, and made

the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being is to men.

She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would have deemed

it the reverse. It was in fact the painful gathering of the atoms

composing pride. For she had not only suffered; she had done wrongly: and

when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings the

wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had

thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against

him. In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure;

one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately

the more exquisitely rewarding. He hated treachery: she had been guilty

of doing what he most hated. She glorified him for the incapacity to

forgive; it was to her mind godlike. And her excuses of herself?

At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained

that there was none to exonerate. Little by little her story was

related--her version of the story: for not even as woman to woman, friend

to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state

of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night;

of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief. That was an

unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to

be betrayed. Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had

struck her down, rendered it difficult to be understood; and not till

Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she

perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania. The very word

Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse was her

own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation,

had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in

spurning her.

'You see what I am, Emmy,' Diana said.

'What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.'

'I proved myself unworthy of him.'

But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a

cause, the ties uniting her to him? Unworthiness of that kind, is not

commonly the capital offence in love. Tony's deep prostration and her

resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning

within herself. Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish in

the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and polished,

internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of love only

as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair object of

their courtship.

Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray the secret;

and the ascent unhelped to get a survey of it and her and the conditions,

was mountainous. She toiled up but to enter the regions of cloud; sure

nevertheless that the obscurity was penetrable and excuses to be

discovered somewhere. Having never wanted money herself, she was unable

perfectly to realize the urgency of the need: she began however to

comprehend that the very eminent gentleman, before whom all human

creatures were to bow in humility, had for an extended term considerably

added to the expenses of Tony's household, by inciting her to give those

little dinners to his political supporters, and bringing comrades

perpetually to supper-parties, careless of how it might affect her

character and her purse. Surely an honourable man was bound to her in

honour? Tony's remark: 'I have the reptile in me, dear,' her exaggeration

of the act, in her resigned despair,--was surely no justification for his

breaking from her, even though he had discovered a vestige of the common

'reptile,' to leave her with a stain on her name?--There would not have

been a question about it if Tony had not exalted him so loftily,

refusing, in visible pain, to hear him blamed.

Danvers had dressed a bed for Lady Dunstane in her mistress's chamber,

where often during the night Emma caught a sound of stifled weeping or

the long falling breath of wakeful grief. One night she asked whether

Tony would like to have her by her side.

'No, dear,' was the answer in the dark; 'but you know my old pensioners,

the blind fifer and his wife; I've been thinking of them.'

'They were paid as they passed down the street yesterday, my love.'

'Yes, dear, I hope so. But he flourishes his tune so absurdly. I've been

thinking, that is the part I have played, instead of doing the female's

duty of handing round the tin-cup for pennies. I won't cry any more.'

She sighed and turned to sleep, leaving Emma to disburden her heart in

tears.

For it seemed to her that Tony's intellect was weakened. She not merely

abased herself and exalted Dacier preposterously, she had sunk her

intelligence in her sensations: a state that she used to decry as the sin

of mankind, the origin of error and blood.

Strangely too, the proposal came from her, or the suggestion of it,

notwithstanding her subjectedness to the nerves, that she should show her

face in public. She said: 'I shall have to run about, Emmy, when I can

fancy I am able to rattle up to the old mark. At present, I feel like a

wrestler who has had a fall. As soon as the stiffness is over, it's best

to make an appearance, for the sake of one's backers, though I shall

never be in the wrestling ring again.'

'That is a good decision--when you feel quite yourself, dear Tony,' Emma

replied.

'I dare say I have disgraced my sex, but not as they suppose. I feel my

new self already, and can make the poor brute go through fire on behalf

of the old. What is the task?--merely to drive a face!'

'It is not known.'

'It will be known.'

'But this is a sealed secret.'

'Nothing is a secret that has been spoken. It 's in the air, and I have

to breathe to live by it. And I would rather it were out. "She betrayed

him." Rather that, than have them think--anything! They will exclaim, How

could she! I have been unable to answer it to you--my own heart. How? Oh!

our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us; we cannot escape it. But I

have the answer for them, that I trust with my whole soul none of them

would have done the like.'

'None, my Tony, would have taken it to the soul as you do.'

'I talk, dear. If I took it honestly, I should be dumb, soon dust. The

moment we begin to speak, the guilty creature is running for cover. She

could not otherwise exist. I am sensible of evasion when I open my lips.'

'But Tony has told me all.'

'I think I have. But if you excuse my conduct, I am certain I have not.'

'Dear girl, accounting for it, is not the same as excusing.'

'Who can account for it! I was caught in a whirl--Oh! nothing

supernatural: my weakness; which it pleases me to call a madness--shift

the ninety-ninth! When I drove down that night to Mr. Tonans, I am

certain I had my clear wits, but I felt like a bolt. I saw things, but at

too swift a rate for the conscience of them. Ah! let never Necessity draw

the bow of our weakness: it is the soul that is winged to its perdition.

I remember I was writing a story, named THE MAN OF TWO MINDS. I shall

sign it, By the Woman of Two Natures. If ever it is finished. Capacity

for thinking should precede the act of writing. It should; I do not say

that it does. Capacity for assimilating the public taste and reproducing

it, is the commonest. The stuff is perishable, but it pays us for our

labour, and in so doing saves us from becoming tricksters. Now I can see

that Mr. Redworth had it in that big head of his--the authoress outliving

her income!'

'He dared not speak.'

'Why did he not dare?'

'Would it have checked you?'

'I was a shot out of a gun, and I am glad he did not stand in my way.

What power charged the gun, is another question. Dada used to say, that

it is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him. "So fare ye well,

old Nickie Ben." My dear, I am a black sheep; a creature with a spotted

reputation; I must wash and wash; and not with water--with

sulphur-flames.' She sighed. 'I am down there where they burn. You should

have let me lie and die. You were not kind. I was going quietly.'

'My love!' cried Emma, overborne by a despair that she traced to the

woman's concealment of her bleeding heart, 'you live for me. Do set your

mind on that. Think of what you are bearing, as your debt to Emma. Will

you?'

Tony bowed her head mechanically.

'But I am in love with King Death, and must confess it,' she said. 'That

hideous eating you forced on me, snatched me from him. And I feel that if

I had gone, I should have been mercifully forgiven by everybody.'

'Except by me,' said Emma, embracing her. 'Tony would have left her

friend for her last voyage in mourning. And my dearest will live to know

happiness.'

'I have no more belief in it, Emmy.'

'The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.'

'Yes; we distil that fine essence through the senses; and the act is

called the pain of life. It is the death of them. So much I understand of

what our existence must be. But I may grieve for having done so little.'

'That is the sound grief, with hope at the core--not in love with itself

and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes;

especially the chief one.'

'Name it.'

'It is best named Amor.'

There was a writhing in the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love to

be respected; not shadowed by her misfortune. Her still-flushed senses

protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she was

obliged to think Emma's cold condemnatory intellect came of the no

knowledge of it.

A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, was a sharp trial of

Diana's endurance of the irony of Fate. She had spoken of the irony in

allusion to her freedom. Now that, according to a communication from her

lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which

paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily.

'Read it and tear it all to strips,' she said in an abhorrence to Emma,

who rejoined: 'Shall I go at once and see him?'

'Can it serve any end? But throw it into the fire. Oh! no simulation of

virtue. There was not, I think, a stipulated return for what I did. But I

perceive clearly--I can read only by events--that there was an

understanding. You behold it. I went to him to sell it. He thanks me,

says I served the good cause well. I have not that consolation. If I had

thought of the cause--of anything high, it would have arrested me. On the

fire with it!'

The letter and square slip were consumed. Diana watched the blackening

papers.

So they cease their sinning, Emmy; and as long as I am in torment, I may

hope for grace. We talked of the irony. It means, the pain of fire.'

'I spoke of the irony to Redworth,' said Emma; 'incidentally, of course.'

'And he fumed?'

'He is really not altogether the Mr. Cuthbert Dering of your caricature.

He is never less than acceptably rational. I won't repeat his truisms;

but he said, or I deduced from what he said, that a grandmother's maxims

would expound the enigma.'

'Probably the simple is the deep, in relation to the mysteries of life,'

said Diana, whose wits had been pricked to a momentary activity by the

letter. 'He behaves wisely; so perhaps we are bound to take his words for

wisdom. Much nonsense is talked and written, and he is one of the world's

reserves, who need no more than enrolling, to make a sturdy phalanx of

common sense. It's a pity they are not enlisted and drilled to express

themselves.' She relapsed. 'But neither he nor any of them could

understand my case.'

'He puts the idea of an irony down to the guilt of impatience, Tony.'

'Could there be a keener irony than that? A friend of Dada's waited

patiently for a small fortune, and when it arrived, he was a worn-out

man, just assisted to go decently to his grave.'

'But he may have gained in spirit by his patient waiting.'

'Oh! true. We are warmer if we travel on foot sunward, but it is a

discovery that we are colder if we take to ballooning upward. The

material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it. All life

is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit. I will brood on your

saying.'

'It is your own saying, silly Tony, as the only things worth saying

always, are!' exclaimed Emma, as she smiled happily to see her friend's

mind reviving, though it was faintly and in the dark.