"Alicia upright in her corner--Oliver, deep in his armchair"
Then--in the very midst of it--he remembered, with a pang, another skirmish, another battle of words--with another adversary, in a different scene. The thrill of that moment in the Tallyn drawing-room, when he had felt himself Diana's conqueror; delighting in her rosy surrender, which was the mere sweet admission of a girl's limitations; and in its implied appeal, timid and yet proud, to a victor who was also a friend--all this he was conscious of, by association, while the sparring with Alicia still went on. His tongue moved under the stimulus of hers; but in the background of the mind rose the images and sensations of the past.
Lady Lucy, meanwhile, looked on, well pleased. She had not seen Oliver so cheerful, or so much inclined to talk, since "that unfortunate affair," and she was proportionately grateful to Alicia.
Marsham returned to the drawing-room with the ladies, declaring that he must be off in twenty minutes. Alicia settled herself in a corner of the sofa, and played with Lady Lucy's dog. Marsham endeavored, for a little, to do his duty by Miss Falloden; but in a few minutes he had drifted back to Alicia. This time she made him talk of Parliament, and the two or three measures in which he was particularly interested. She showed, indeed, a rather astonishing acquaintance with the details of those measures, and the thought crossed Marsham's mind: "Has she been getting them up?--and why?" But the idea did not make the conversation she offered him any the less pleasant. Quite the contrary. The mixture of teasing and deference which she showed him, in the course of it, had been the secret of her old hold upon him. She reasserted something of it now, and he was not unwilling. During the morose and taciturn phase through which he had been passing there had been no opportunity or desire to talk of himself, especially to a woman. But Alicia had always made him talk of himself, and he had forgotten how agreeable it might be.
He threw himself down beside her, and the time passed. Lady Lucy and Miss Falloden had retired into the back drawing-room, where the one knitted and the other gossiped. But as the clock struck a quarter to eleven Lady Lucy called, in some astonishment: "So you are not going back to the House, Oliver?"
He sprang to his feet.
"Heavens!" He looked at the clock, irresolute. "Well, there's nothing much on, mother. I don't think I need."
And he subsided again into his chair beside Alicia.
Miss Falloden looked at Lady Lucy with a meaning smile.
"I didn't know they were such friends!" she said, under her breath.
Lady Lucy made no reply. But her eyes travelled through the archway dividing the two rooms to the distant figures framed within it--Alicia, upright in her corner, the red gold of her hair shining against the background of a white azalea; Oliver, deep in his arm-chair, his long legs crossed, his hands gesticulating.
Lady Niton's sarcasms recurred to her. She was not sure whether she welcomed or disliked the idea. But, after all, why not?
"Ecco, Signorina! il Convento!"
The driver reined up his horse, pointing with his whip.
Diana and Muriel Colwood stood up eagerly in the carriage, and there at the end of the long white road, blazing on the mountain-side, terrace upon terrace, arch upon arch, rose the majestic pile of buildings which bears the name of St. Francis. Nothing else from this point was to be seen of Assisi. The sun, descending over the mountain of Orvieto, flooded the building itself with a level and blinding light, while upon Monte Subasio, behind, a vast thunder-cloud, towering in the southern sky, threw storm-shadows, darkly purple, across the mountain-side, and from their bosom the monastery, the churches, and those huge substructures which make the platform on which the convent stands, shone out in startling splendor.
The travellers gazed their fill, and the carriage clattered on.
As they neared the town and began to climb the hill Diana looked round her--at the plain through which they had come, at the mountains to the east, at the dome of the Portiuncula. Under the rushing light and shade of the storm-clouds, the blues of the hills, the young green of the vines, the silver of the olives, rose and faded, as it were, in waves of color, impetuous and magnificent. Only the great golden building, crowned by its double church, most famous of all the shrines of Italy, glowed steadily, amid the alternating gleam and gloom--fit guardian of that still living and burning memory which is St. Francis.
"We shall be happy here, sha'n't we?" said Diana, stealing a hand into her companion's. "And we needn't hurry away."
She drew a long breath. Muriel looked at her tenderly--enchanted whenever the old enthusiasm, the old buoyancy reappeared. They had now been in Italy for nearly two months. Muriel knew that for her companion the time had passed in one long wrestle for a new moral and spiritual standing-ground. All the glory of Italy had passed before the girl's troubled eyes as something beautiful but incoherent, a dream landscape, on which only now and then her full consciousness laid hold. For to the intenser feeling of youth, full reality belongs only to the world within; the world where the heart loves and suffers. Diana's true life was there; and she did not even admit the loyal and gentle woman who had taken a sister's place beside her to a knowledge of its ebb and flow. She bore herself cheerfully and simply; went to picture-galleries and churches; sketched and read--making no parade either of sorrow or of endurance. But the impression on Mrs. Colwood all the time was of a desperately struggling soul voyaging strange seas of grief alone. She sometimes--though rarely--talked with Muriel of her mother's case; she would sometimes bring her friend a letter of her father's, or a fragment of journal from that full and tragic store which the solicitors had now placed in her hands; generally escaping afterward from all comment; only able to bear a look, a pressure of the hand. But, as a rule, she kept her pain out of sight. In the long dumb debate with herself she had grown thin and pale. There was nothing, however, to be done, nothing to be said. The devoted friend could only watch and wait. Meanwhile, of Oliver Marsham not a word was ever spoken between them.
The travellers climbed the hill as the sun sank behind the mountains, made for the Subasio Hotel, found letters, and ordered rooms.
Among her letters, Diana opened one from Sir James Chide. "The House will be up on Thursday for the recess, and at last I have persuaded Ferrier to let me carry him off. He is looking worn out, and, as I tell him, will break down before the election unless he takes a holiday now. So he comes--protesting. We shall probably join you somewhere in Umbria--at Perugia or Assisi. If I don't find you at one or the other, I shall write to Siena, where you said you meant to be by the first week in June. And, by-the-way, I shouldn't wonder if Bobbie Forbes were with us. He amuses Ferrier, who is very fond of him. But, of course, you needn't see anything of him unless you like."
The letter was passed on to Muriel, who thought she perceived that the news it contained seemed to make Diana shrink into herself. She was much attached to Sir James Chide, and had evidently felt pleasure in the expectation of his coming out to join them. But Mr. Ferrier--and Bobbie Forbes--both of them associated with the Marshams and Tallyn? Mrs. Colwood noticed the look of effort in the girl's delicate face, and wished that Sir James had been inspired to come alone.
After unpacking, there still remained half an hour before dark. They hurried out for a first look at the double church.
The evening was cold and the wind chill. Spring comes tardily to the high mountain town, and a light powdering of snow still lay on the topmost slope of Monte Subasio. Before going into the church they turned up the street that leads to the Duomo and the temple of Minerva. Assisi seemed deserted--a city of ghosts. Not a soul in the street, not a light in the windows. On either hand, houses built of a marvellous red stone or marble, which seemed still to hold and radiate the tempestuous light which had but just faded from them; the houses of a small provincial aristocracy, immemorially old like the families which still possessed them; close-paned, rough-hewn, and poor--yet showing here and there a doorway, a balcony, a shrine, touched with divine beauty.
"Whereareall the people gone to?" cried Muriel, looking at the secret rose-colored walls, now withdrawing into the dusk, and at the empty street. "Not a soul anywhere!"
Presently they came to an open doorway--above it an inscription--"Bibliotheca dei Studii Franciscani." Everything stood open to the passer-by. They went in timidly, groped their way to the marble stairs, and mounted. All void and tenantless! At the top of the stairs was a library with dim bookcases and marble floors and busts; but no custode--no reader--not a sound!
"We seem to be all alone here--with St. Francis!" said Diana, softly, as they descended to the street--"or is everybody at church?"
They turned their steps back to the Lower Church. As they went in, darkness--darkness sudden and profound engulfed them. They groped their way along the outer vestibule or transept, finding themselves amid a slowly moving crowd of peasants. The crowd turned; they with it; and a blaze of light burst upon them.
Before them was the nave of the Lower Church, with its dark-storied chapels on either hand, itself bathed in a golden twilight, with figures of peasants and friars walking in it, vaguely transfigured. But the sanctuary beyond, the altar, the walls, and low-groined roof flamed and burned. An exposition of the Sacrament was going on. Hundreds of slender candles arranged upon and about the altar in a blazing pyramid drew from the habitual darkness in which they hide themselves Giotto's thrice famous frescos; or quickened on the walls, like flowers gleaming in the dawn, the loveliness of quiet faces, angel and saint and mother, the beauty of draped folds at their simplest and broadest, a fairy magic of wings and trumpets, of halos and crowns.
Now the two strangers understood why they had found Assisi itself deserted; emptied of its folk this quiet eve. Assisi was here, in the church which is at once the home and daily spectacle of her people. Why stay away among the dull streets and small houses of the hill-side, when there were these pleasures of eye and ear, this sensuous medley of light and color, this fellowship and society, this dramatic symbolism and movement, waiting for them below, in the church of their fathers?
So that all were here, old and young, children and youths, fathers just home from their work, mothers with their babies, girls with their sweethearts. Their happy yet reverent familiarity with the old church, their gay and natural participation in the ceremony that was going on, made on Diana's alien mind the effect of a great multitude crowding to salute their King. There, in the midst, surrounded by kneeling acolytes and bending priests, shone the Mystic Presence. Each man and woman and child, as they passed out of the shadow into the light, bent the knee, then parted to either side, each to his own place, like courtiers well used to the ways of a beautiful and familiar pageantry.
An old peasant in a blouse noticed the English ladies, beckoned to them, and with a kind of gracious authority led them through dark chapels, till he had placed them in the open space that spread round the flaming altar, and found them seats on the stone ledge that girdles the walls. An old woman saying her beads looked up smiling and made room. A baby or two ran out over the worn marble flags, gazed up at the gilt-and-silver angels hovering among the candles of the altar, and was there softly captured--wide-eyed, and laughing in a quiet ecstasy--by its watchful mother.
Diana sat down, bewildered by the sheer beauty of a marvellous and incomparable sight. Above her head shone the Giotto frescos, the immortal four, in which the noblest legend of Catholicism finds its loveliest expression, as it were the script, itself imperishable, of a dying language, to which mankind will soon have lost the key.
Yet only dying, perhaps, as the tongue of Cicero died--to give birth to the new languages of Europe.
For in Diana's heart this new language of the spirit which is the child of the old was already strong, speaking through the vague feelings and emotions which held her spellbound. What matter the garment of dogma and story?--the raiment of pleaded fact, which for the modern is no fact? In Diana, as in hundreds and thousands of her fellows, it had become--unconsciously--without the torment and struggle of an older generation--Poetry and Idea; and all the more invincible thereby.
Above her head, Poverty, gaunt and terrible in her white robe, her skirt torn with brambles, and her poor cheek defaced by the great iron hook which formerly upheld the Sanctuary lamp, married with St. Francis--Christ himself joining their hands.
So Love and Sorrow pledged each other in the gleaming color of the roof. Divine Love spoke from the altar, and in the crypt beneath their feet which held the tomb of the Poverello the ashes of Love slept.
The girl's desolate heart melted within her. In these weeks of groping, religion had not meant much to her. It had been like a bird-voice which night silences. All the energy of her life had gone into endurance. But now it was as though her soul plunged into the freshness of vast waters, which upheld and sustained--without effort. Amid the shadows and phantasms of the church--between the faces on the walls and the kneeling peasants, both equally significant and alive--those ghosts of her own heart that moved with her perpetually in the life of memory stood, or knelt, or gazed, with the rest: the piteous figure of her mother; her father's gray hair and faltering step; Oliver's tall youth. Never would she escape them any more; they were to be the comrades of her life, for Nature had given her no powers of forgetting. But here, in the shrine of St. Francis, it was as though the worst smart of her anguish dropped from her. From the dark splendor, the storied beauty of the church, voices of compassion and of peace spoke to her pain; the waves of feeling bore her on, unresisting; she closed her eyes against the lights, holding back the tears. Life seemed suspended, and suffering ceased.
"So we have tracked you!" whispered a voice in her ear. She looked up startled. Three English travellers had quietly made their way to the back of the altar. Sir James Chide stood beside her; and behind him the substantial form of Mr. Ferrier, with the merry snub-nosed face of Bobbie Forbes smiling over the great man's shoulder.
Diana--smiling back--put a finger to her lip; the service was at its height, and close as they were to the altar decorum was necessary. Presently, guided by her, they moved softly on to a remoter and darker corner.
"Couldn't we escape to the Upper Church?" asked Chide of Diana.
She nodded, and led the way. They stole in and out of the kneeling groups of the north transept, and were soon climbing the stairway that links the two churches, out of sight and hearing of the multitude below. Here there was again pale daylight. Greetings were interchanged, and both Chide and Ferrier studied Diana's looks with a friendly anxiety they did their best to conceal. Forbes also observed Juliet Sparling's daughter--hotly curious--yet also hotly sympathetic. What a story, by Jove!
Their footsteps echoed in the vast emptiness of the Upper Church. Apparently they had it to themselves.
"No friars!" said Forbes, looking about him. "That's a blessing, anyway! You can't deny, Miss Mallory, thatthey're a blot on the landscape. Or have you been flattering them up, as all the other ladies do who come here?"
"We have only just arrived. What's wrong with the friars?" smiled Diana.
"Well, we arrived this morning, and I've about taken their measure--though Ferrier won't allow it. But I saw four of them--great lazy, loafing fellows, Miss Mallory--much stronger than you or me--being dragged up these abominable hills--four of 'em--in onelegno--with one wretched toast-rack of a horse. And not one of them thought of walking. Each of them with his brown petticoats, and an umbrella as big as himself. Ugh! I offered to push behind, and they glared at me. What do you think St. Francis would have said to them? Kicked them out of thatlegno, pretty quick, I'll bet you!"
Diana surveyed the typical young Englishman indulging a typically Protestant mood.
"I thought there were only a few old men left," she said, "and that it was all very sad and poetic?"
"That used to be so," said Ferrier, glancing round the church, so as to make sure that Chide was safely occupied in seeing as much of the Giotto frescos on the walls as the fading light allowed. "Then the Pope won a law-suit. The convent is now the property of the Holy See, the monastery has been revived, and the place seems to swarm with young monks. However, it is you ladies that ruin them. You make pretty speeches to them, and look so charmingly devout."
"There was a fellow at San Damiano this morning," interrupted Bobbie, indignantly; "awfully good-looking--and the most affected cad I ever beheld. I'd like to have been his fag-master at Eton! I saw him making eyes at some American girls as we came in; then he came posing and sidling up to us, and gave us a little lecture on 'Ateismo.' Ferrier said nothing--stood there as meek as a lamb, listening to him--looking straight at him. I nearly died of laughing behind them."
"Come here, Bobbie, you reprobate!" cried Chide from a distance. "Hold your tongue, and bring me the guide-book."
Bobbie strolled off, laughing.
"Is it all a sham, then," said Diana, looking round her with a smile and a sigh: "St. Francis--and the 'Fioretti'--and the 'Hymn to the Sun'? Has it all ended in lazy monks--and hypocrisy?"
"Dante asked himself the same question eighty years after St. Francis's death. Yet here is this divine church!"--Ferrier pointed to the frescoed walls, the marvellous roof--"here is immortal art!--and here, in your mind and in mine, after six hundred years, is a memory--an emotion--which, but for St. Francis, had never been; by which indeed we judge his degenerate sons. Is that not achievement enough--for one child of man?"
"Six hundred years hence what modern will be as much alive as St. Francis is now?" Diana wondered, as they strolled on.
He turned a quiet gaze upon her.
"Darwin? At least I throw it out."
"Darwin!" Her voice showed doubt--the natural demur of her young ignorance and idealism.
"Why not? What faith was to the thirteenth century knowledge is to us. St. Francis rekindled the heart of Europe, Darwin has transformed the main conception of the human mind."
In the dark she caught the cheerful patience of the small penetrating eyes as they turned upon her. And at the same time--strangely--she became aware of a sudden and painful impression; as though, through and behind the patience, she perceived an immense fatigue and discouragement--an ebbing power of life--in the man beside her.
"Hullo!" said Bobbie Forbes, turning back toward them, "I thought there was no one else here."
For suddenly they had become aware of a tapping sound on the marble floor, and from the shadows of the eastern end there emerged two figures: a woman in front, lame and walking with a stick, and a man behind. The cold reflected light which filled the western half of the church shone full on both faces. Bobbie Forbes and Diana exclaimed, simultaneously. Then Diana sped along the pavement.
"Who?" said Chide, rejoining the other two.
"Frobisher--and Miss Vincent," said Forbes, studying the new-comers.
"Miss Vincent!" Chide's voice showed his astonishment. "I thought she had been very ill."
"So she has," said Ferrier--"very ill. It is amazing to see her here."
"And Frobisher?"
Ferrier made no reply. Chide's expression showed perplexity, perhaps a shade of coldness. In him a warm Irish heart was joined with great strictness, even prudishness of manners, the result of an Irish Catholic education of the old type. Young women, in his opinion, could hardly be too careful, in a calumnious world. The modern flouting of old decorums--small or great--found no supporter in the man who had passionately defended and absolved Juliet Sparling.
But he followed the rest to the greeting of the new-comers. Diana's hand was in Miss Vincent's, and the girl's face was full of joy; Marion Vincent, deathly white, her eyes, more amazing, more alive than ever, amid the emaciation that surrounded them, greeted the party with smiling composure--neither embarrassed, nor apologetic--appealing to Frobisher now and then as to her travelling companion--speaking of "our week at Orvieto"--making, in fact, no secret of an arrangement which presently every member of the group about her--even Sir James Chide--accepted as simply as it was offered to them.
As to Frobisher, he was rather silent, but no more embarrassed than she. It was evident that he kept an anxious watch lest her stick should slip upon the marble floor, and presently he insisted in a low voice that she should go home and rest.
"Come back after dinner," she said to him, in the same tone as they emerged on the piazza. He nodded, and hurried off by himself.
"You are at the Subasio?" The speaker turned to Diana. "So am I. I don't dine--but shall we meet afterward?"
"And Mr. Frobisher?" said Diana, timidly.
"He is staying at the Leone. But I told him to come back."
After dinner the whole party met in Diana's little sitting-room, of which one window looked to the convent, while the other commanded the plain. And from the second, the tenant of the room had access to a small terrace, public, indeed, to the rest of the hotel, but as there were no other guests the English party took possession.
Bobbie stood beside the terrace window with Diana, gossiping, while Chide and Ferrier paced the terrace with their cigars. Neither Miss Vincent nor Frobisher had yet appeared, and Muriel Colwood was making tea. Bobbie was playing his usual part of the chatterbox, while at the same time he was inwardly applying much native shrewdness and a boundless curiosity to Diana and her affairs.
Did she know--had she any idea--that in London at that moment she was one of the main topics of conversation?--in fact, the best talked-about young woman of the day?--that if she were to spend June in town--which of course she would not do--she would find herself asuccès fou--people tumbling over one another to invite her, and make a show of her? Everybody of his acquaintance was now engaged in retrying the Wing murder, since that statement of Chide's in theTimes. No one talked of anything else, and the new story that was now tacked on to the old had given yet another spin to the ball of gossip.
How had the story got out? Bobbie believed that it had been mainly the doing of Lady Niton. At any rate, the world understood perfectly that Juliet Sparling's innocent and unfortunate daughter had been harshly treated by Lady Lucy--and deserted by Lady Lucy's son.
Queer fellow, Marsham!--rather a fool, too. Why the deuce didn't he stick to it? Lady Lucy would have come round; he would have gained enormouskudos, and lost nothing. Bobbie looked admiringly at his companion, vowing to himself that she was worth fighting for. But his own heart was proof. For three months he had been engaged,sub rosa, to a penniless cousin. No one knew, least of all Lady Niton, who, in spite of her championship of Diana, would probably be furious when she did know. He found himself pining to tell Diana; he would tell her as soon as ever he got an opportunity. Odd!--that the effect of having gone through a lot yourself should be that other people were strongly drawn to unload their troubles upon you. Bobbie felt himself a selfish beast; but all the same his "Ettie" and his debts; the pros and cons of the various schemes for his future, in which he had hitherto allowed Lady Niton to play so queer and tyrannical a part--all these burned on his tongue till he could confide them to Diana.
Meanwhile the talk strayed to Ferrier and politics--dangerous ground! Yet some secret impulse in Diana drew her toward it, and Bobbie's curiosity played up. Diana spoke with concern of the great man's pallor and fatigue. "Not to be wondered at," said Forbes, "considering the tight place he was in, or would soon be in." Diana asked for explanations, acting a part a little; for since her acquaintance with Oliver Marsham she had become a diligent reader of newspapers. Bobbie, divining her, gave her the latest and most authentic gossip of the clubs; as to the various incidents and gradations of the now open revolt of the Left Wing; the current estimates of Ferrier's strength in the country; and the prospects of the coming election.
Presently he even ventured on Marsham's name, feeling instinctively that she waited for it. If there was any change in the face beside him the May darkness concealed it, and Bobbie chattered on. There was no doubt that Marsham was in a difficulty. All his sympathies at least were with the rebels, and their victory would be his profit.
"Yet as every one knows that Marsham is under great obligations to Ferrier, for him to join the conspiracy these fellows are hatching doesn't look pretty."
"He won't join it!" said Diana, sharply.
"Well, a good many people think he's in it already. Oh, I dare say it's all rot!" the speaker added, hastily; "and, besides, it's not at all certain that Marsham himself will get in next time."
"Get in!" It was a cry of astonishment--passing on into constraint. "I thought Mr. Marsham's seat was absolutely safe."
"Not it." Bobbie began to flounder. "The fact is it's not safe at all; it's uncommonly shaky. He'll have a squeak for it. They're not so sweet on him down there as they used to be."
Gracious!--if she were to ask why! The young man was about hastily to change the subject when Sir James and his companion came toward them.
"Can't we tempt you out, Miss Mallory?" said Ferrier. "There is a marvellous change!" He pointed to the plain over which the night was falling. "When we met you in the church it was still winter, or wintry spring. Now--in two hours--the summer's come!"
And on Diana's face, as she stepped out to join him, struck a buffet of warm air; a heavy scent of narcissus rose from the flower-boxes on the terrace; and from a garden far below came the sharp thin prelude of a nightingale.
For about half an hour the young girl and the veteran of politics walked up and down--sounding each other--heart reaching out to heart--dumbly--behind the veil of words. There was a secret link between them. The politician was bruised and weary--well aware that just as Fortune seemed to have brought one of her topmost prizes within his grasp, forces and events were gathering in silence to contest it with him. Ferrier had been twenty-seven years in the House of Commons; his chief life was there, had always been there; outside that maimed and customary pleasure he found, besides, a woman now white-haired. To rule--to lead that House had been the ambition of his life. He had earned it; had scorned delights for it; and his powers were at their ripest.
Yet the intrigue, as he knew, was already launched that might, at the last moment, sweep him from his goal. Most of the men concerned in it he either held for honest fanatics or despised as flatterers of the mob--ignobly pliant. He could and would fight them all with good courage and fair hope of victory.
But Lucy Marsham's son!--that defection, realized or threatened, was beginning now to hit him hard. Amid all their disagreements of the past year his pride had always refused to believe that Marsham could ultimately make common cause with the party dissenters. Ferrier had hardly been able to bring himself, indeed, to take the disagreements seriously. There was a secret impatience, perhaps even a secret arrogance, in his feeling. A young man whom he had watched from his babyhood, had put into Parliament, and led and trained there!--that he should take this hostile and harassing line, with threat of worse, was a matter too sore and intimate to be talked about. He did not mean to talk about it. To Lady Lucy he never spoke of Oliver's opinions, except in a half-jesting way; to other people he did not speak of them at all. Ferrier's affections were deep and silent. He had not found it possible to love the mother without loving the son--had played, indeed, a father's part to him since Henry Marsham's death. He knew the brilliant, flawed, unstable, attractive fellow through and through. But his knowledge left him still vulnerable. He thought little of Oliver's political capacity; and, for all his affection, had no great admiration for his character. Yet Oliver had power to cause him pain of a kind that no other of his Parliamentary associates possessed.
The letters of that morning had brought him news of an important meeting in Marsham's constituency, in which his leadership had been for the first time openly and vehemently attacked. Marsham had not been present at the meeting, and Lady Lucy had written, eagerly declaring that he could not have prevented it and had no responsibility. But could the thing have been done within his own borders without, at least, a tacit connivance on his part?
The incident had awakened a peculiarly strong feeling in the elder man, because during the early days of the recess he had written a series of letters to Marsham on the disputed matters that were dividing the party; letters intended not only to recall Marsham's own allegiance, but--through him--to reach two of the leading dissidents--Lankester and Barton--in particular, for whom he felt a strong personal respect and regard.
These letters were now a cause of anxiety to him. His procedure in writing them had been, of course, entirely correct. It is the business of a party leader to persuade. But he had warned Oliver from the beginning that only portions of them could or should be used in the informal negotiations they were meant to help. Ferrier had always been incorrigibly frank in his talk or correspondence with Marsham, ever since the days when as an Oxford undergraduate, bent on shining at the Union, Oliver had first shown an interest in politics, and had found in Ferrier, already in the front rank, the most stimulating of teachers. These remarkable letters accordingly contained a good deal of the caustic or humorous discussion of Parliamentary personalities, in which Ferrier--Ferrier at his ease--excelled; and many passages, besides, in connection with the measures desired by the Left Wing of the party, steeped in the political pessimism, whimsical or serious, in which Ferrier showed perhaps his most characteristic side at moments of leisure or intimacy; while the moods expressed in outbreaks of the kind had little or no effect on his pugnacity as a debater or his skill as a party strategist, in face of the enemy.
But, by George! if they were indiscreetly shown, or repeated, some of those things might blow up the party! Ferrier uncomfortably remembered one or two instances during the preceding year, in which it had occurred to him--as the merest fleeting impression--that Oliver had repeated a saying or had twisted an opinion of his unfairly--puzzling instances, in which, had it been any one else, Ferrier would have seen the desire to snatch a personal advantage at his, Ferrier's, expense. But how entertain such a notion in the case of Oliver! Ridiculous!
He would write no more letters, however. With the news of the Dunscombe meeting the relations between himself and Oliver entered upon a new phase. Toward Lucy's son he must bear himself--politically--henceforward, not as the intimate confiding friend or foster-father, but as the statesman with greater interests than his own to protect. This seemed to him clear; yet the effort to adjust his mind to the new conditions gave him deep and positive pain.
But what, after all, were his grievances compared with those of this soft-eyed girl? It pricked his conscience to remember how feebly he had fought her battle. She must know that he had done little or nothing for her; yet there was something peculiarly gentle, one might have thought pitiful, in her manner toward him. His pride winced under it.
Sir James, too, must have his private talk with Diana--when he took her to the farther extremity of the little terrace, and told her of the results and echoes which had followed the publication, in theTimes, of Wing's dying statement.
Diana had given her sanction to the publication with trembling and a torn mind. Justice to her mother required it. There she had no doubt; and her will, therefore, hardened to the act, and to the publicity which it involved. But Sir Francis Wing's son was still living, and what for her was piety must be for him stain and dishonor. She did not shrink; but the compunctions she could not show she felt; and, through Sir James Chide, she had written a little letter which had done something to soften the blow, as it affected a dull yet not inequitable mind.
"Does he forgive us?" she asked, in a low voice, turning her face toward the Umbrian plain, with its twinkling lights below, its stars above.
"He knows he must have done the same in our place," said Sir James.
After a minute he looked at her closely under the electric light which dominated the terrace.
"I am afraid you have been going through a great deal," he said, bending over her. "Put it from you when you can. You don't know how people feel for you"
She looked up with her quick smile.
"I don't always think of it--and oh! I am so thankful toknow! I dream of them often--my father and mother--but not unhappily. They aremine--much, much more than they ever were."
She clasped her hands, and he felt rather than saw the exaltation, the tender fire in her look.
All very well! But this stage would pass--must pass. She had her own life to live. And if one man had behaved like a selfish coward, all the more reason to invoke, to hurry on the worthy and the perfect lover.
Presently Marion Vincent appeared, and with her Frobisher, and an unknown man with a magnificent brow, dark eyes of a remarkable vivacity, and a Southern eloquence both of speech and gesture. He proved to be a famous Italian, a poet well known to European fame, who, having married an English wife, had settled himself at Assisi for the study of St. Francis and the Franciscan literature. He became at once the centre of a circle which grouped itself on the terrace, while he pointed to spot after spot, dimly white on the shadows of the moon-lit plain, linking each with the Franciscan legend and the passion of Franciscan poetry. The slopes of San Damiano, the sites of Spello, Bevagna, Cannara; Rivo Torto, the hovering dome of the Portiuncula, the desolate uplands that lead to the Carceri; one after another, the scenes and images--grotesque or lovely--simple or profound--of the vast Franciscan story rose into life under his touch, till they generated in those listening the answer of the soul of to-day to the soul of the Poverello. Poverty, misery, and crime--still they haunt the Umbrian villages and the Assisan streets; the shadows of them, as the north knows them, lay deep and terrible in Marion Vincent's eyes. But as the poet spoke the eternal protest and battle-cry of Humanity swelled up against them--overflowed, engulfed them. The hearts of some of his listeners burned within them.
And finally he brought them back to the famous legend of the hidden church: deep, deep in the rock--below the two churches that we see to-day; where St. Francis waits--standing, with his arms raised to heaven, on fire with an eternal hope, an eternal ecstasy.
"Waits for what?" said Ferrier, under his breath, forgetting his audience a moment. "The death of Catholicism?"
Sir James Chide gave an uneasy cough. Ferrier, startled, looked round, threw his old friend a gesture of apology which Sir James mutely accepted. Then Sir James got up and strolled away, his hands in his pockets, toward the farther end of the terrace.
The poet meanwhile, ignorant of this little incident, and assuming the sympathy of his audience, raised his eyebrows, smiling, as he repeated Ferrier's words:
"The death of Catholicism! No, Signor!--its second birth." And with a Southern play of hand and feature--the nobility of brow and aspect turned now on this listener, now on that--he began to describe the revival of faith in Italy.
"Ten years ago there was not faith enough in this country to make a heresy! On the one side, a moribund organization, poisoned by a dead philosophy; on the other, negation, license, weariness--a dumb thirst for men knew not what. And now!--if St. Francis were here--in every olive garden--in each hill town--on the roads and the by-ways--on the mountains--in the plains--his heart would greet the swelling of a new tide drawing inward to this land--the breath of a new spring kindling the buds of life. He would hear preached again, in the language of a new day, his own religion of love, humility, and poverty. The new faith springs from the very heart of Catholicism, banned and persecuted as new faiths have always been; but every day it lives, it spreads! Knowledge and science walk hand in hand with it; the future is before it. It spreads in tales and poems, like the Franciscan message; it penetrates the priesthood; it passes like the risen body of the Lord through the walls of seminaries and episcopal palaces; through the bulwarks that surround the Vatican itself. Tenderly, yet with an absolute courage, it puts aside old abuses, old ignorances!--like St. Francis, it holds out its hand to a spiritual bride--and the name of that bride is Truth! And in his grave within the rock--on tiptoe--the Poverello listens--the Poverello smiles!"
The poet raised his hand and pointed to the convent pile, towering under the moonlight. Diana's eyes filled with tears. Sir James had come back to the group, his face, with its dignified and strenuous lines, bent--half perplexed, half frowning--on the speaker. And the magic of the Umbrian night stole upon each quickened pulse.
But presently, when the group had broken up and Ferrier was once more strolling beside Diana, he said to her:
"A fine prophecy! But I had a letter this morning from another Italian writer. It contains the following passage: 'The soul of this nation is dead. The old enthusiasms are gone. We have the most selfish, the most cynicalbourgeoisiein Europe. Happy the men of 1860! They had some illusions left--religion, monarchy, country. We too have men whowould give themselves--if they could. But to what? No one wants them any more--nessuno li vuole piu!' Well, there are the two. Which will you believe?"
"The poet!" said Diana, in a low faltering voice. But it was no cry of triumphant faith. It was the typical cry of our generation before the closed door that openeth not.
"That was good," said Marion Vincent, as the last of the party disappeared through the terrace window, and she and Diana were left alone--"but this is better."
She drew Diana toward her, kissed her, and smiled at her. But the smile wrung Diana's heart.
"Why have you been so ill?--and I never knew!" She wrapped a shawl round her friend, and, holding her hands, gazed into her face.
"It was all so hurried--there was so little time to think or remember. But now there is time."
"Now you are going to rest?--and get well?"
Marion smiled again.
"I shall have holiday for a few months--then rest."
"You won't live any more in the East End? You'll come to me--in the country?" said Diana, eagerly.
"Perhaps! But I want to see all I can in my holiday--before I rest! All my life I have lived in London. There has been nothing to see--but squalor. Do you know that I have lived next door to a fried-fish shop for twelve years? But now--think!--I am in Italy--and we are going to the Alps--and we shall stay on Lake Como--and--and there is no end to our plans--if only my holiday is long enough."
What a ghost face!--and what shining eyes!
"Oh, but make it long enough!" pleaded Diana, laying one of the emaciated hands against her cheek, and smitten by a vague terror.
"That does not depend on me," said Marion, slowly.
"Marion," cried Diana, "tell me what you mean!"
Marion hesitated a moment, then said, quietly:
"Promise, dear, to take it quite simply--just as I tell it. I am so happy. There was an operation--six weeks ago. It was quite successful--I have no pain. The doctors give me seven or eight months. Then my enemy will come back--and my rest with him."
A cry escaped Diana as she buried her face in her friend's lap. Marion kissed and comforted her.
"If you only knew how happy I am!" she said, in a low voice. "Ever since I was a child I seem to have fought--fought hard for every step--every breath. I fought for bread first--and self-respect--for myself--then for others. One seemed to be hammering at shut gates or climbing precipices with loads that dragged one down. Such trouble always!" she murmured, with closed eyes--"such toil and anguish of body and brain! And now it is all over!"--she raised herself joyously--"I am already on the farther side. I am like St. Francis--waiting. And meanwhile I have a dear friend--who loves me. I can't let him marry me. Pain and disease and mutilation--of all those horrors, as far as I can, he shall know nothing. He shall not nurse me; he shall only love and lead me. But I have been thirsting for beautiful things all my life--and he is giving them to me. I have dreamed of Italy since I was a baby, and here I am! I have seen Rome and Florence. We go on to Venice. And next week there will be mountains--and snow-peaks--rivers--forests--flowers--"
Her voice sank and died away. Diana clung to her, weeping, in a speechless grief and reverence. At the same time her own murdered love cried out within her, and in the hot despair of youth she told herself that life was as much finished for her as for this tired saint--this woman of forty--who had borne since her babyhood the burdens of the poor.
The Whitsuntide recess passed--for the wanderers in Italy--in a glorious prodigality of sun, a rushing of bud and leaf to "feed in air," a twittering of birds, a splendor of warm nights, which for once indorsed the traditional rhapsodies of the poets. The little party of friends which had met at Assisi moved on together to Siena and Perugia, except for Marion Vincent and Frobisher. They quietly bade farewell, and went their way.
When Marion kissed Diana at parting, she said, with emphasis:
"Now, remember!--you are not to come to London! You are not to go to work in the East End. I forbid it! You are to go home--and look lovely--and be happy!"
Diana's eyes gazed wistfully into hers.
"I am afraid--I hadn't thought lately of coming to London," she murmured. "I suppose--I'm a coward. And just now I should be no good to anybody."
"All right. I don't care for your reasons--so long as you go home--and don't uproot."
Marion held her close. She had heard all the girl's story, had shown her the most tender sympathy. And on this strange wedding journey of hers she knew that she carried with her Diana's awed love and yearning remembrance.
But now she was eager to be gone--to be alone again with her best friend, in this breathing-space that remained to them.
So Diana saw them off--the shabby, handsome man, with his lean, proud, sincere face, and the woman, so frail and white, yet so indomitable. They carried various bags and parcels, mostly tied up with string, which represented all their luggage; they travelled with the peasants, fraternizing with them where they could; and it was useless, as Diana saw, to press luxuries on either of them. Many heads turned to look at them, in the streets or on the railway platform. There was something tragic in their aspect; yet not a trace of abjectness; nothing that asked for pity. When Diana last caught sight of them, Marion had acontadino'schild on her knee, in the corner of a third-class carriage, and Frobisher opposite--he spoke a fluent Italian--was laughing and jesting with the father. Marion, smiling, waved her hand, and the train bore them away.
The others moved to Perugia, and the hours they spent together in the high and beautiful town were for all of them hours of well-being. Diana was the centre of the group. In the eyes of the three men her story invested her with a peculiar and touching interest. Their knowledge of it, and her silent acceptance of their knowledge, made a bond between her and them which showed itself in a hundred ways. Neither Ferrier, nor Chide, nor young Forbes could ever do too much for her, or think for her too loyally. And, on the other hand, it was her inevitable perception of their unspoken thoughts which gave her courage toward them--a kind of freedom which it is very difficult for women to feel or exercise in the ordinary circumstances of life. She gave them each--gratefully--a bit of her heart, in different ways.
Bobbie had adopted her as elder sister, having none of his own; and by now she knew all about his engagement, his distaste for the Foreign Office, his lack of prospects there, and his determination to change it for some less expensive and more remunerative calling. But Lady Niton was the dragon in the path. She had all sorts of ambitious projects for him, none of which, according to Forbes, ever came off, there being always some better fellow to be had. Diplomacy, in her eyes, was the natural sphere of a young man of parts and family, and as for the money, if he would only show the smallest signs of getting on, she would find it. But in the service of his country Bobbie showed no signs whatever of "getting on." He hinted uncomfortably, in his conversations with Diana, at the long list of his obligations to Lady Niton--money lent, influence exerted, services of many kinds--spread over four or five years, ever since, after a chance meeting in a country-house, she had appointed herself his earthly, providence, and he--an orphan of good family, with a small income and extravagant tastes--had weakly accepted her bounties.
"Now, of course, she insists on my marrying somebody with money. As if any chaperon would look at me! Two years ago I did make up to a nice girl--a real nice girl--and only a thousand a year!--nothing so tremendous, after all. But her mother twice carried her off, in the middle of a rattling ball, because she had engaged herself to me--just like sending a naughty child to bed! And the next time the mother made me takeherdown to supper, and expounded to me her view of a chaperon's duties: 'My business, Mr. Forbes'--you should have seen her stony eye--'is tomar, not to make. The suitable marriages make themselves, or are made in heaven. I have nothing to do with them, except to keep a fair field. The unsuitable marriages have to be prevented, and will be prevented. You understand me?' 'Perfectly,' I said. 'I understand perfectly. Tomaris human, and to make divine? Thank you. Have some more jelly? No? Shall I ask for your carriage? Good-night.' But Lady Niton won't believe a word of it! She thinks I've only to ask and have. She'll be rude to Ettie, and I shall have to punch her head--metaphorically. And how can you punch a person's head when they've lent you money?"
Diana could only laugh, and commend him to his Ettie, who, to judge from her letters, was a girl of sense, and might be trusted to get him out of his scrape.
Meanwhile, Ferrier, the man of affairs, statesman, thinker, and pessimist, found in his new friendship with Diana at once that "agreement," that relaxation, which men of his sort can only find in the society of those women who, without competing with them, can yet by sympathy and native wit make their companionship abundantly worth while; and also, a means, as it were, of vicarious amends, which he very eagerly took.
He was, in fact, ashamed for Lady Lucy; humiliated, moreover, by his own small influence with her in a vital matter. And both shame and humiliation took the form of tender consideration for Lady Lucy's victim.
It did not at all diminish the value of his kindness, that--most humanly--it largely showed itself in what many people would have considered egotistical confessions to a charming girl. Diana found a constant distraction, a constant interest, in listening. Her solitary life with her scholar father had prepared her for such a friend. In the overthrow of love and feeling, she bravely tried to pick up the threads of the old intellectual pleasures. And both Ferrier and Chide, two of the ablest men of their generation, were never tired of helping her thus to recover herself. Chide was an admirable story-teller; and his mere daily life had stored him with tales, humorous and grim; while Ferrier talked history and poetry, as they strolled about Siena or Perugia; and, as he sat at night among the letters of the day, had a score of interesting or amusing comments to make upon the politics of the moment. He reserved his "confessions," of course, for thetête-à-têteof country walks. It was then that Diana seemed to be holding in her girlish hands something very complex and rare; a nature not easily to be understood by one so much younger. His extraordinary gifts, his disinterested temper, his astonishing powers of work raised him in her eyes to heroic stature. And then some very human weakness, some natural vanity, such as wives love and foster in their husbands, but which, in his case appeared merely forlorn and eccentric--some deep note of loneliness--would touch her heart, and rouse her pity. He talked generally with an amazing confidence, not untouched perhaps with arrogance, of the political struggle before him; believed he should carry the country with him, and impose his policy on a divided party. Yet again and again, amid the flow of hopeful speculation, Diana became aware, as on the first evening of Assisi, of some hidden and tragic doubt, both of fate and of himself, some deep-rooted weariness, against which the energy of his talk seemed to be perpetually reacting and protesting. And the solitariness and meagreness of his life in all its personal and domestic aspects appalled her. She saw him often as a great man--a really great man--yet starved and shelterless--amid the storms that were beating up around him.
The friendship between him and Chide appeared to be very close, yet not a little surprising. They were old comrades in Parliament, and Chide was in the main a whole-hearted supporter of Ferrier's policy and views; resenting in particular, as Diana soon discovered, Marsham's change of attitude. But the two men had hardly anything else in common. Ferrier was an enormous reader, most variously accomplished; while his political Whiggery was balanced by a restless scepticism in philosophy and religion. For the rest he was an ascetic, even in the stream of London life; he cared nothing for most of the ordinary amusements; he played a vile hand at whist (bridge had not yet dawned upon a waiting world); he drank no wine, and was contentedly ignorant both of sport and games.
Chide, on the other hand, was as innocent of books as Lord Palmerston. All that was necessary for his career as a great advocate he could possess himself of in the twinkling of an eye; his natural judgment and acuteness were of the first order; his powers of eloquence among the most famous of his time; but it is doubtful whether Lady Niton would have found him much better informed about the politics of her youth than Barton himself; Sir James, too, was hazy about Louis Philippe, and could never remember, in the order of Prime Ministers, whether Canning or Lord Liverpool came first. With this, he was a simple and devout Catholic; loved on his holiday to serve the mass of some poor priest in a mountain valley; and had more than once been known to carry off some lax Catholic junior on his circuit to the performance of his Easter duties, willy-nilly--by a mixture of magnetism and authority. For all games of chance he had a perfect passion; would play whist all night, and conduct a case magnificently all day. And although he was no sportsman in the ordinary sense, having had no opportunities in a very penurious youth, he had an Irishman's love of horseflesh, and knew the Derby winners from the beginning with as much accuracy as Macaulay knew the Senior Wranglers.
Yet the two men loved, respected, and understood each other. Diana wondered secretly, indeed, whether Sir James could have explained to her the bond between Ferrier and Lady Lucy. That, to her inexperience, was a complete mystery! Almost every day Ferrier wrote to Tallyn, and twice a week at least, as the letters were delivered attable d'hôte,Diana could not help seeing the long pointed writing on the thin black-edged paper which had once been for her the signal of doom. She hardly suspected, indeed, how often she herself made the subject of the man's letters. Ferrier wrote of her persistently to Lady Lucy, being determined that so much punishment at least should be meted out to that lady. The mistress of Tallyn, on her side, never mentioned the name of Miss Mallory. All the pages in his letters which concerned her might never have been written, and he was well aware that not a word of them would ever reach Oliver. Diana's pale and saddened beauty; the dignity which grief, tragic grief, free from all sordid or ignoble elements, can infuse into a personality; the affection she inspired, the universal sympathy that was felt for her: he dwelt on these things, till Lady Lucy, exasperated, could hardly bring herself to open the envelopes which contained his lucubrations. Could any subject, in correspondence with herself, be more unfitting or more futile?--and what difference could it all possibly make to the girl's shocking antecedents?
One radiant afternoon, after a long day of sight-seeing, Diana and Mrs. Colwood retreated to their rooms to write letters and to rest; Forbes was hotly engaged in bargaining for an Umbrianprimitif, which he had just discovered in an old house in a back street, whither, no doubt, the skilful antiquario had that morning transported it from his shop; and Sir James had gone out for a stroll, on the splendid road which winds gradually down the hill on which Perugia stands, to the tomb of the Volumnii, on the edge of the plain, and so on to Assisi and Foligno, in the blue distance.
Half-way down he met Ferrier, ascending from the tomb. Sir James turned, and they strolled back together. The Umbrian landscape girdling the superb town showed itself unveiled. Every gash on the torn white sides of the eastern Apennines, every tint of purple or porcelain-blue on the nearer hills, every plane of the smiling valley as it wound southward, lay bathed in a broad and searching light which yet was a light of beauty--of infinite illusion.
"I must say I have enjoyed my life," said Ferrier, abruptly, as they paused to look back, "though I don't put it altogether in the first class!"
Sir James raised his eyebrows--smiled--and did not immediately reply.
"Chide, old fellow," Ferrier resumed, turning to him, "before I left England I signed my will. Do you object that I have named you one of the two executors?"
Sir James gave him a cordial glance.
"All right, I'll do my best--if need arises. I suppose, Johnnie, you're a rich man?"
The name "Johnnie," very rarely heard between them, went back to early days at the Bar, when Ferrier was for a time in the same chambers with the young Irishman who, within three years of being called, was making a large income; whereas Ferrier had very soon convinced himself that the Bar was not for him, nor he for the Bar, and being a man of means had "plumped" for politics.
"Yes, I'm not badly off," said Ferrier; "I'm almost the last of my family; and a lot of money has found its way to me first and last. It's been precious difficult to know what to do with it. If Oliver Marsham had stuck to that delightful girl I should have left it to him."
Sir James made a growling sound, more expressive than articulate.
"As it is," Ferrier resumed, "I have left half of it to my old Oxford college, and half to the University."
Chide nodded. Presently a slight flush rose in his very clear complexion, and he looked round on his companion with sparkling eyes.
"It is odd that you should have started this subject. I too have just signed a new will."
"Ah!" Ferrier's broad countenance showed a very human curiosity. "I believe you are scarcely more blessed with kindred than I?"
"No. In the main I could please myself. I have left the bulk of what I had to leave--to Miss Mallory."
"Excellent!" cried Ferrier. "She treats you already like a daughter."
"She is very kind to me," said Sir James, with a touch of ceremony that became him. "And there is no one in whom I feel a deeper interest."
"She must be made happy!" exclaimed Ferrier--"shemust! Is there no one--besides Oliver?"
Sir James drew himself up. "I hope she has put all thought of Oliver out of her mind long since. Well!--I had a letter from Lady Felton last week--dear woman that!--all the love-affairs in the county come to roost in her mind. She talks of young Roughsedge. Perhaps you don't know anything of the gentleman?"
He explained, so far as his own knowledge went. Ferrier listened attentively. A soldier? Good. Handsome, modest, and capable?--better. Had just distinguished himself in this Nigerian expedition--mentioned in despatches last week. Better still!--so long as he kept clear of the folly of allowing himself to be killed. But as to the feelings of the young lady?
Sir James sighed. "I sometimes see in her traces of--of inheritance--which make one anxious."
Ferrier's astonishment showed itself in mouth and eyes.
"What I mean is," said Sir James, hastily, "a dramatic, impassioned way of looking at things. It would never do if she were to get any damned nonsense about 'expiation,' or not being free to marry, into her head."
Ferrier agreed, but a little awkwardly, since the "damned nonsense" was Lady Lucy's nonsense, and both knew it.
They walked slowly back to Assisi, first putting their elderly heads together a little further on the subject of Diana, and then passing on to the politics of the moment--to the ever present subject of the party revolt, and its effect on the election.
"Pshaw!--let them attack you as they please!" said Chide, after they had talked awhile. "You are safe enough. There is no one else. You are like the hero in a novel, 'the indispensable.'"
Ferrier laughed.
"Don't be so sure. There is always a 'supplanter'--when the time is ripe."
"Where is he? Who is he?"
"I had a very curious letter from Lord Philip this morning," said Ferrier, thoughtfully.
Chide's expression changed.
Lord Philip Darcy, a brilliant but quite subordinate member of the former Liberal Government, had made but occasional appearances in Parliament during the five years' rule of the Tories. He was a traveller and explorer, and when in England a passionate votary of the Turf. An incisive tongue, never more amusing than when it was engaged in railing at the English workman and democracy in general, a handsome person, and a strong leaning to Ritualism--these qualities and distinctions had not for some time done much to advance his Parliamentary position. But during the preceding session he had been more regular in his attendance at the House, and had made a considerable impression there--as a man of eccentric, but possibly great ability. On the whole, he had been a loyal supporter of Ferrier's; but in two or three recent speeches there had been signs of coquetting with the extremists.
Ferrier, having mentioned the letter, relapsed into silence. Sir James, with a little contemptuous laugh, inquired what the nature of the letter might be.
"Oh, well, he wants certain pledges." Ferrier drew the letter from his pocket, and handed it to his friend. Sir James perused it, and handed it back with a sarcastic lip.
"He imagines you are going to accept that programme?"
"I don't know. But it is clear that the letter implies a threat if I don't."
"A threat of desertion? Let him."
"That letter wasn't written off his own bat. There is a good deal behind it. The plot, in fact, is thickening. From the letters of this morning I see that a regular press campaign is beginning."
He mentioned two party papers which had already gone over to the dissidents--one of some importance, the other of none.
"All right," said Chide; "so long as theHeraldand theFlagdo their duty. By-the-way, hasn't theHeraldgot a new editor?"
"Yes; a man called Barrington--a friend of Oliver's."
"Ah!--a good deal sounder on many points than Oliver!" grumbled Sir James.
Ferrier did not reply.
Chide noticed the invariable way in which Marsham's name dropped between them whenever it was introduced in this connection.
As they neared the gate of the town they parted, Chide returning to the hotel, while Ferrier, the most indefatigable of sight-seers, hurried off toward San Pietro.
He spent a quiet hour on the Peruginos, deciding, however, with himself in the end that they gave him but a moderate pleasure; and then came out again into the glow of an incomparable evening. Something in the light and splendor of the scene, as he lingered on the high terrace, hanging over the plain, looking down as though from the battlements, theflagrantia moeniaof some celestial city, challenged the whole life and virility of the man.
"Yet what ails me?" he thought to himself, curiously, and quite without anxiety. "It is as though I were listening--for the approach of some person or event--as though a door were open--or about to open--"
What more natural?--in this pause before the fight? And yet politics seemed to have little to do with it. The expectancy seemed to lie deeper, in a region of the soul to which none were or ever had been admitted, except some friends of his Oxford youth--long since dead.
And, suddenly, the contest which lay before him appeared to him under a new aspect, bathed in a broad philosophic air; a light serene and transforming, like the light of the Umbrian evening. Was it not possibly true that he had no future place as the leader of English Liberalism? Forces were welling up in its midst, forces of violent and revolutionary change, with which it might well be he had no power to cope. He saw himself, in a waking dream, as one of the last defenders of a lost position. The day of Utopias was dawning; and what has the critical mind to do with Utopias? Yet if men desire to attempt them, who shall stay them?
Barton, McEwart, Lankester--with their boundless faith in the power of a few sessions and measures to remake this old, old England--with their impatiences, their readiness at any moment to fling some wild arrow from the string, amid the crowded long-descended growths of English life: he felt a strong intellectual contempt both for their optimisms and audacities--mingled, perhaps; with a certain envy.
Sadness and despondency returned. His hand sought in his pocket for the little volume of Leopardi which he had taken out with him. On that king of pessimists, that prince of all despairs, he had just spent half an hour among the olives. Could renunciation of life and contempt of the human destiny go further?
Well, Leopardi's case was not his. It was true, what he had said to Chide. With all drawbacks, he had enjoyed his life, had found it abundantly worth living.
And, after all, was not Leopardi himself a witness to the life he rejected, to the Nature he denounced. Ferrier recalled his cry to his brother: "Love me, Carlo, for God's sake! I need love, love, love!--fire, enthusiasm, life."
"Fire, enthusiasm, life." Does the human lot contain these things, or no? If it does, have the gods mocked us, after all?
Pondering these great words, Ferrier strolled homeward, while the outpouring of the evening splendor died from Perusia Augusta, and the mountains sank deeper into the gold and purple of the twilight.
As for love, he had missed it long ago. But existence was still rich, still full of savor, so long as a man's will held his grip on men and circumstance.
All action, he thought, is the climbing of a precipice, upheld above infinity by one slender sustaining rope. Call it what we like--will, faith, ambition, the wish to live--in the end it fails us all. And in that moment, when we begin to imagine how and when it may fail us, we hear, across the sea of time, the first phantom tolling of the funeral bell.
There were times now when he seemed to feel the cold approaching breath of such a moment. But they were still invariably succeeded by a passionate recoil of life and energy. By the time he reached the hotel he was once more plunged in all the preoccupations, the schemes, the pugnacities of the party leader.
A month later, on an evening toward the end of June, Dr. Roughsedge, lying reading in the shade of his little garden, saw his wife approaching. He raised himself with alacrity.
"You've seen her?"
"Yes."
With this monosyllabic answer Mrs. Roughsedge seated herself, and slowly untied her bonnet-strings.
"My dear, you seem discomposed."
"I hatemen!" said Mrs. Roughsedge, vehemently.
The doctor raised his eyebrows. "I apologize for my existence. But you might go so far as to explain."
Mrs. Roughsedge was silent.
"How is that child?" said the doctor, abruptly. "Come!--I am as fond of her as you are."
Mrs. Roughsedge raised her handkerchief.
"That any man with a heart--" she began, in a stifled voice.
"Why you should speculate on anything so abnormal!" cried the doctor, impatiently. "I suppose your remark applies to Oliver Marsham. Is she breaking her own heart?--that's all that signifies."
"She is extremely well and cheerful."
"Well, then, what's the matter?"
Mrs. Roughsedge looked out of the window, twisting her handkerchief.
"Nothing--only--everything seems done and finished."
"At twenty-two?" The doctor laughed, "And it's not quite four months yet since the poor thing discovered that her doll was stuffed with sawdust. Really, Patricia!"
Mrs. Roughsedge slowly shook her head.
"I suspect what it all means," said her husband, "is that she did not show as much interest as she ought in Hugh's performance."
"She was most kind, and asked me endless questions. She made me promise to bring her the press-cuttings and read her his letters. She could not possibly have shown more sympathy."
"H'm!--well, I give it up."
"Henry!"--his wife turned upon him--"I am convinced that poor child will never marry!"
"Give her time, my dear, and don't talk nonsense!"
"It isn't nonsense! I tell you I felt just as I did when I went to see Mary Theed, years ago--you remember that pretty cousin of mine who became a Carmelite nun?--for the first time after she had taken the veil. She spoke to one from another world--it gave one the shivers!--and was just as smiling and cheerful over it as Diana--and it was just as ghastly and unbearable and abominable--as this is."
"Well, then," said the doctor, after a pause, "I suppose she'll take to good works. I hope you can provide her with a lot of hopeless cases in the village. Did she mention Marsham at all?"
"Not exactly. But she asked about the election--"
"The writs are out," interrupted the doctor. "I see the first borough elections are fixed for three weeks hence; ours will be one of the last of the counties; six weeks to-day."
"I told her you thought he would get in."
"Yes--by the skin of his teeth. All his real popularity has vanished like smoke. But there's the big estate--and his mother's money--and the collieries."
"The Vicar tells me the colliers are discontented--all through the district--and there may be a big strike--"
"Yes, perhaps in the autumn, when the three years' agreement comes to an end--not yet. Marsham's vote will run down heavily in the mining villages, but it'll serve--this time. They won't put the other man in."
Mrs. Roughsedge rose to take off her things, remarking, as she moved away, that Marsham was said to be holding meetings nightly already, and that Lady Lucy and Miss Drake were both hard at work.
"Miss Drake?" said the doctor, looking up. "Handsome girl! I saw Marsham in a dog-cart with her yesterday afternoon."
Mrs. Roughsedge flushed an angry red, but she said nothing. She was encumbered with parcels, and her husband rose to open the door for her. He stooped and looked into her face.