CHAPTER XXV

The chaotic condition of mind into which Mr. Polydore May found himself plunged by what to him was the inexplicable and crazy conduct of the inexplicable and crazy young woman who so obstinately maintained her right to consider herself his daughter, was nothing to the well-nigh raving state of Captain the Honourable Reginald Cleeve, who was faced with a still more intolerable position. He, when he had first called upon Diana as she had invited him to do, experienced something in the nature of a thunder-clap, when she explained, with much gracious, albeit cold composure, that she was his former betrothed whom he had “jilted” for a younger and wealthier woman. If he had been suddenly hypnotised by a remorseless conjurer, he could not have been more stricken into speechless and incredulous amazement. He sat in a chair opposite to his fair and smiling informant, staring helplessly, while she, having had tea brought in, prepared him a cup with hospitable ease and condescension.

“When you got the note I left for you at the hotel,” she said, “surely you recognised my handwriting?”

Still staring, he moistened his dry lips with his tongue and tried to speak.

“Your handwriting?” he stammered—“I—I thought it very like the handwriting of—of another Diana May I used to know——”

“Yes—another Diana May,” she said, bending her grave clear eyes upon him—“A Diana May whose life you ruthlessly spoiled,—whose trust in men and things you murdered—and why! Because you met a woman with more money, who was younger than I—I, who had aged through waiting patiently for you, as you had asked me to do—because you thought that by the time you returned from India I should be what Society callspassée! And for such callous and selfish considerations as these you deliberately sacrificed my happiness! But I have been given a strange and unexpected vengeance!—look at your wife and look at me!—which now is the ‘younger’ of the two?”

He moved uneasily—there was something in her aspect that stabbed him as though with physical force and pain.

“You—you must certainly know you are talking nonsense!” he said at last, trying to pull himself together. “Yours is the queerest craze I ever heard of! Here are you, a beautiful young girl in the very dawn of womanhood, pretending to be a middle-aged spinster who was accidentally drowned last year off the coast of Devon! I don’t know how you’ve come by the same name as hers—or why your handwriting should resemble hers,—it’s mere coincidence, no doubt—but that you should actually declare yourself as one and the same identity with hers, is perfectly ridiculous! I don’t deny that you seem to have got hold of the other Diana May’s story—Iwasengaged to her, that’s true—but I had to be away in India longer than was at first intended—seven years nearly. And seven years is a long time to keep faith with a woman who doesn’t grow younger——”

“Doesn’t grow younger—yes—I see!” echoed Diana, with an enigmatical smile. “And seven years is a long time for a woman to keep faith with a man under the same circumstances.Youhave not grown younger!”

He reddened. His personal vanity as “an officer and a gentleman” was far greater than that of any woman.

“If we live, we are bound to grow older——” he said.

“Sometimes,” acquiesced Diana, pleasantly. “It is not always necessary. In my case, for example——”

Looking at the fair and youthful outline of her features, the sense of extreme incongruity between what she actually was and what she resolutely avowed herself to be touched his innermost sense of humour, and he laughed outright.

“Of course you are playing!” he said—“Playing with yourself and me! You must be one of those queer psychists who imagine they are re-embodied spirits of the past—but I don’t mind if that sort of thing really amuses you! Only I wonder you don’t imagine yourself to be the reincarnation of some fairy princess—or even the Diana who was the goddess of the moon, rather than an ordinary spinster of the British middle-class, who, even in her best days, was nothing more than the usual type of pretty English girl.”

“To whom you wrote a good deal of ‘gush’ in your time—” said Diana composedly—“which she was fool enough to believe. Do you remember this letter?”

From a quaint blue velvet bag hanging at her side by a silver chain, she drew a folded paper and handed it to him.

With eyes that grew hot and dim in giddy perplexity, he read his own writing:

“How I love you, my own sweet little Diana! You are to me the most adorable girl in the world, and if ever I do an unkind thing to you or wrong you in any way, may God punish me for a treacherous brute! My one desire in life is to make you happy.”

His hand,—the massive, veiny hand of a man accustomed to “do himself well,” trembled, and the paper shook between his fingers.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, unsteadily—“It—it was written quite a long time ago!”

“You sent it to me,” replied Diana. “I returned all your other letters, but I kept that one,—and this.”

Another note was drawn daintily out from the blue velvet bag, and she handed it to him with a smile.

Again his burning eyes travelled along his own familiar scrawl:

“I am quite sure you will understand that time has naturally worked changes in you as well as in myself, and I am obliged to confess that the feelings I had for you no longer exist. But you are a sensible woman, and you are old enough now to realise that we are better apart.”

He lifted his head and tried to look at her. She met his shifting gaze with a clear and level splendour of regard that pierced his very soul with a subconscious sense of humiliation and conviction. Yet it was not possible for him to believe her story,—the whole suggestion was too fantastic and incredible. He gave her back the letters. She took them from his hand.

“Well!” she said, tentatively.

“Well!” he rejoined—then forced a difficult smile—“I wrote these things, certainly, but how you came by them I don’t know. Though, after all, you might easily have met the other Diana May, and she might have given you her confidence——”

“And her lover’s letters to keep?” said Diana, contemptuously. “So like her! Reginald Cleeve, you said just now that I was playing—playing with you and with myself. Believe me, I never was further from ‘play’ in my life! I’m in deadly earnest! I want——” She paused and laughed—then added: “I only want what I can have for the asking—you!”

He sprang up from his chair and came nearer to her, his face aglow with ardour. She motioned him back.

“Not yet!” she said,—and the seductive beauty of her face and form smote him as with a whip of steel—“It isn’t love at first sight, you know, like that of Romeo and Juliet! We areoldlovers! Andyou—you are married.”

“What does that matter?” he said, defiantly. “No man considers himself bound nowadays by the matrimonial tie!”

“No?” she queried, sweetly. “I’m so glad to know that! It makes me doubly thankful that I never married you!”

He made a closer step to her side and caught both her hands in his.

“Do you still persist,” he said, “in your idea that you are the old Diana?—the woman I was engaged to?—you, a mere girl?”

She smiled most entrancingly up into the feverish eyes that searched her face.

“I still persist!” she answered—“I have always loved telling the truth, no matter how unpleasant! Iamthe ‘old’ Diana to whom you were engaged, and whom you heartlessly ‘threw over.’ Her, and no other!—as ‘old’ as ever in years though not in looks!”

His grasp of her tightened.

“Then in Heaven’s name have your own way, you beautiful crazed creature!” he said, passionately,—“If that is your obsession or fancy, stick to it, and come back to me!”

She loosened her hands,—he tried to hold them, but they seemed to melt from his clasp in the most curious and uncanny way like melting snow. Drawing herself apart, she stood looking at him.

“Come back to you!” she echoed—“I never left you! It was you who leftme!—for no fault! And, now I suppose you would leave your wife,—also for no fault—except perhaps—” and she laughed lightly—“that of too much general weightiness! But she has given you children—are you not proud and happy to be ‘the father of a family’? Your daughters are certainly very plain,—but you must not go by outward appearances!”

Her lovely face dimpled with smiles—her brilliant eyes, full of a compelling magnetism, filled him with a kind of inward rage—he gave a gesture of mingled wrath and pain.

“You are quite unlike the old Diana,” he said, bitterly. “She was the gentlest of creatures,—she would never have mocked me!”

A rippling peal of laughter broke from her—laughter that was so cold and cutting that its very vibration on the air was like the tinkling of ice-drops on glass.

“True!” she said. “She was too gentle by half! She was meek and patient—devoted, submissive and loving—she believed in a man’s truth, honour and chivalry! Yes—the poor ‘old’ Diana had feeling and emotions—but the ‘young’ Diana has none!”

The afternoon sunshine pouring through the window bathed her figure in a luminance so dazzling and made of her such a radiant vision of exquisite perfection that he was fairly dazzled, while the same uneasy sense of the “supernatural” troubled him as it had troubled Mr. James Polydore May.

“Well, if youwilltalk like this,” he said, almost reproachfully—“I had better not trouble you with my company—you said you wanted me——”

“So I do!” she rejoined—“I want you very much!—but not just now! You can go—but come again soon! However I need not ask you—you are sure to come! And you need not tell your wife to call upon me—I will dispense with that formality! I prefer to ignore your ‘family!’Au revoir!”

She stretched out her hand—a little, lovely hand like that of the marble Psyche—and hardly knowing what he did, he covered it with kisses. She smiled.

“There, that will do!” she said—“Another time——”

She gave him a look that shot like lightning from her eyes into his brain, and set it in a whirl.

“Diana!” He uttered the name as if it were a prayer.

“Another time!” she said, in a low, sweet tone—“And—quite soon! But—go now!”

He left her reluctantly, his mind disquieted and terrorised. Some potent force appeared to have laid hold of his entire being, drawing every nerve and muscle as if by a strong current of electricity. In a dim sort of way he was afraid,—but of what? This he could not formulate to himself, but when he had gone out of her presence he was aware of a strange and paralysing weakness and tiredness,—sensations new to him, and—as he was a great coward where any sort of illness was concerned—alarming. And yet—such was the hold her beauty had on him, that he had made up his mind to possess it or die in the attempt. All the men he knew about town were infatuated with the mere glimpse of the loveliness which flashed upon them like the embodiment of light from another and fairer world, and there was not one among them who did not secretly indulge in the same hope as himself. But the craze or “obsession,” or whatever it was that dominated her, as he thought, gave him a certain advantage over her other admirers. For if she really believed he had formerly been her lover, then surely there was something in her which would draw her to him through the mere fancy of such a possibility. Like all men who are largely endowed with complacent self-satisfaction, he was encased in a hide of conceit too thick to imagine that with the “obsession” (as he considered it) which she entertained, might also go the memory of his callous treatment of her in the past, entailing upon him a possible though indefinable danger.

She, meanwhile, after he had gone, sat down to think. A long mirror facing her gave her the reflection of her own exquisite face and figure—but her expression for the moment was cold and stern, as that of some avenging goddess. She looked at her hands—the hands her traitor lover had kissed—and opening a quaint jar of perfume on the table beside her, she dashed some of its contents over their delicate whiteness.

“For he has soiled them!” she said—“They are outraged by his touch!”

A deep scorn gathered in her eyes like growing darkness.

“Why should I trouble myself with any vengeance upon him?” she asked herself inwardly. “A mere lump of sensuality!—a man who considers no principle save that of his own pleasure, and has no tenderness or memory for me as the ‘old’ spinster whom he thought (and still thinks) was drowned in Devon!—what is he to me but an utterly contemptible atom!—and yet—the only sentiment I seem to be capable of now is hate!—undying hate, the antithesis of the once undying love I bore him! The revolt of my soul against him is like a revolt of light against darkness! Is he not punished enough by the gross and commonplace domestic life he has made for himself! No!—not enough!—not enough to hurt him!”

She drew a long breath, conscious of the power which filled her body and spirit,—a power which now for the first time seemed to herself terrific. She knew there was pent up within her a lightning force which was swift to attract and equally swift to destroy.

“Those old Greek stories of gods and goddesses whose unveiled glory slew the mortals who dared to doubt them were quite true prophecies,” she thought—“only they did not penetrate far enough into the myth to discover the real scientific truth of how the mortal could put on immortality. Not even now, though the fusion and transmutation of elements every day discloses more and more marvels of Nature, they have not tested the possibilities of change which science may bring about in the composition of human bodies—that is for the future to discover and determine.”

At that moment Mrs. Beresford entered the room with a telegram.

“For you, Diana,” she said. “It has just come.”

Opening it, Diana read the message it brought.

“Professor Chauvet has died suddenly. Has left you his sole heiress. Please meet me in Paris as soon as possible to settle business. Your presence necessary. Reply Hôtel Windsor.—Dimitrius.”

The paper dropped from her hands. She had forgotten Professor Chauvet altogether! The crusty yet kindly old Professor who had asked her to marry him—she had actually forgotten him! And now—he was dead! She sat amazed and stricken, till the gentle voice of Mrs. Beresford roused her.

“Anything wrong, my dear?”

“Oh, no!—yet—yes!—perhaps a little! A friend has died suddenly—very suddenly—and he has made me his heiress.”

Mrs. Beresford smiled a little.

“Well, isn’t that good news?”

For the first time since her “awakening” under the fiery ordeal of Dimitrius’s experiment, she experienced a painful thrill of real “feeling.”

“No—I am sorry,” she said. “I thought I should never feel sorry for anything—but I forgot and neglected this friend—and perhaps—if I had remembered, he might not have died.”

A beautiful softness and tenderness filled her eyes, and Mrs. Beresford thought she had never seen or imagined any creature half so lovely as she looked.

“We must go to Paris,” she said. “We can easily start to-morrow. I will answer this wire—and then write.”

She pencilled a brief reply:

“Deeply grieved. Will come as soon as possible.—Diana.”

—and ringing the bell, bade the servant who answered the summons take it to the telegraph office and send it off without delay.

“Yes—I am very sorry!” she said again to Mrs. Beresford—“I reproach myself for needless cruelty.”

Mrs. Beresford, mild-eyed and grey-haired, looked at her half timidly, half affectionately.

“I’m afraid, my dear, youarecruel!—just a little!” she said. “You make havoc in so many hearts!—and you do not seem to care!”

Diana shrugged her shoulders.

“Why should I care?” she retorted. “The havoc you speak of, is merely the selfish desire of men to possess what seems to them attractive—it goes no deeper!”

Then, noting Mrs. Beresford’s rather pained expression, she smiled. “I seem hard, don’t I? But I have had experience——”

“You? My dear, you are so young!” and her kindly chaperone took her hand and patted it soothingly. “When you are older you will think very differently! When you love someone——”

“When I love!”—and the beautiful eyes shone glorious as light-beams—“Ah, then! Why then—‘the sun will grow cold, and the leaves of the Judgment Book will most certainly be unrolled!’”

That night she came to a sudden resolve to put away all her formerly cherished ideas of revenging herself on Reginald Cleeve. Standing before her mirror she saw her own beauty transfigured into a yet finer delicacy when this determination became crystallized, as it were, in her consciousness.

“What is my positive mind?” she asked herself. “It is a pole of attraction, which has through the forces of air, fire and water learned to polarise atoms into beautiful forms. It organises itself; but it is also a centre which radiates power over a world of visible effects. So that if I choose I can vitalise ordevitalise other forms. In this way I could inflict punishment on the traitor who spoiled my former life—but I live another life, now, in which he has no part. This being so, why should I descend to pulverise base clay with pure fire? He will meet his punishment now without any further effort of mine, beyond that which I demand of justice!”

She raised her hand appealingly, as though she were a priestess invoking a deity,—then, turning to her writing-table, she penned the following lines:

“To Reginald Cleeve.“I am summoned unexpectedly to Paris on business,—and the chances are that I shall not see you again. All that I have told you is absolutely true, no matter how much you may disbelieve the story. I am the woman you once pretended to love, and whose life you spoiled,—and I am the woman whom you love now, or (to put it roughly) whom you desire, but whose life you can never spoil again. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’—and when you read this, it is probable I shall have gone away, which is a good thing for your peace, and—safety. You have a wife,—you are the ‘father of a family’—be content with the domestic happiness you have chosen, and fulfil the responsibilities you have accepted. Good-bye!—and think of me no more except as the ‘old’“Diana.”

“To Reginald Cleeve.

“I am summoned unexpectedly to Paris on business,—and the chances are that I shall not see you again. All that I have told you is absolutely true, no matter how much you may disbelieve the story. I am the woman you once pretended to love, and whose life you spoiled,—and I am the woman whom you love now, or (to put it roughly) whom you desire, but whose life you can never spoil again. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’—and when you read this, it is probable I shall have gone away, which is a good thing for your peace, and—safety. You have a wife,—you are the ‘father of a family’—be content with the domestic happiness you have chosen, and fulfil the responsibilities you have accepted. Good-bye!—and think of me no more except as the ‘old’

“Diana.”

Now when this letter reached Captain the Honourable Reginald Cleeve at his club, to which it was addressed, and where he had dined on the evening of the day it was posted, which was the next but one to the day of his interview with Diana, it was brought to him in the smoking-room, and as his eyes ran over it he uttered an involuntary oath of such force that even men inured to violent language looked up, amused and inquisitive.

“What’s up?” asked an acquaintance seated near him.

“Oh, nothing! A dun!” he answered,—then, calming down, he lit a cigar. After a few puffs at it he took up a newspaper—read a paragraph or two—then laid it down.

“By the way,” he said, to the man who had spoken—“the famous beauty—Diana May—is off to Paris.”

These words created a certain stir in the smoking-room. Several men looked up.

“Oh, well! All lovely women go to Paris for their clothes!”

“Pardon!” said a dark-visaged young man, coming forward from a corner where he had been writing a letter, and speaking with a foreign accent—“Did I hear you mention a lady’s name—Diana May?”

Cleeve glanced him over with military frigidity.

“I did mention that name—yes.”

“Excuse me!—I am a stranger in London, and a friend has made me an honorary member of this club for a short time—I knew a Miss Diana May in Geneva—permit me——” And he proffered his visiting-card, on which was inscribed:

“Marchese Luigi Farnese.”

“I met Miss May,” he continued, “at the house of a very distinguished Russian scientist, Dr. Féodor Dimitrius. She had come from England on a visit to his mother, so I was informed. But I had an idea at the time that she had arrived in answer to an advertisement he had put in the Paris newspapers for a lady assistant,—of course I may have been wrong. She was a very bright, rather clever middle-aged person——”

“The Miss May I spoke of just now,” interpolated Cleeve, “is quite a young girl—not more than eighteen or nineteen.”

“Oh, then!”—and Farnese made a profoundly apologetic bow—“it cannot be the same. The lady I met was—ah!—thirty-five or so—perhaps forty. She left Geneva very suddenly, and I have been trying to trace her ever since.”

“May I ask why?” inquired Cleeve.

“Certainly! I have for long been interested in the scientific investigations of Dr. Dimitrius—he is a very mysterious person, and I fancied he might be trying some experiment on this lady, Miss May. She gave me no idea of such a thing—she was quite a normal, cheerful person,—still I had my suspicions and I was curious about it. She went with him and his mother to winter at Davos Platz—I was unable to follow them there, as I had a pressure of business—but I heard from a friend that Miss May was the ‘belle’ of the season. This rather surprised me, as she was not young enough to be a ‘belle’ unless”—here he paused, and uttered the next words with singular emphasis—“Dimitrius had made her so.”

Cleeve uttered a sharp exclamation and then checked himself.

“This is not an age of fairy tales,” he said curtly.

“No—it is not, but it is an age of science, in which fairy tales are realised,” rejoined Farnese. “But pray excuse me!—I am detaining you—you could not by chance give me the address of this young lady you speak of?—the Miss Diana May you know?”

“I do not consider myself entitled to do so,” answered Cleeve, coldly, “without her consent.”

Farnese bowed.

“I entirely understand! If you should see her, you will, perhaps, do me the kindness to mention my name and ask if she has ever heard it before?”

“I will certainly do that,” agreed Cleeve,—whereupon they parted, Captain the Honourable with his mind in a giddy whirl, and his passions at fever heat. Come what would he must see Diana before she went to Paris! He must ask her about this Dimitrius,—for the story he had just heard seemed to hang together with her own fantastic “obsession!” But no!—ten thousand times no!—it was not, it could not be possible that the “old” Diana could thus have been miraculously transformed! Even Science must have its limits! He glanced at his watch. It was past nine o’clock,—very late for a call—yet he would risk it. Taking a cab, he was driven with all speed to Diana’s flat,—the servant who opened the door to him looked at him in surprise.

“Miss May and Mrs. Beresford have gone to Paris,” she said. “They left this evening by the night boat train.”

He retreated, baffled and inwardly furious. For one moment he was recklessly moved to follow them across Channel next morning—then he remembered, with rather an angry shock, that he was “the father of a family.” Convention stepped in and held up a warning finger.

“No—it wouldn’t do,” he ruminated, vexedly. “She”—here he alluded to his fat wife—“she would make the devil’s own row, and I have enough of her sulks as it is. I’d better do nothing,—and just wait my chance. But—that exquisite Diana!Whatis she? Imustknow! I must be off with the ‘old’ love, before I’m on with the new! Butisshe the ‘old’? That’s the puzzle. Is she the ‘old,’ or a young Diana?” This was a question which was destined never to be answered, so far as he was concerned. Diana had gone from him,—gone in that swift, irrecoverable way which happens when one soul, advancing onward to higher planes of power, is compelled to leave another of grosser make (even though that other were lover or friend) to wallow in the styes of sensual and material life. She, clothed in her vesture of fire and light, as radiant as any spirit of legendary lore, was as far removed from the clay man of low desires as the highest star from the deepest earth. And though he did not know this, and never would have been able, had he known, to realise the forceful vitality of her existence, the same strange sense of physical weakness, tiredness and general incapacity which had before alarmed him came upon him now with such overwhelming weight that he could hardly drag his limbs across the fashionable square in which his own house was situated. A great helplessness possessed him,—and a thought, bitter as wormwood and sharp as flame, flashed through his brain: “I am getting old!” It was a thought he always put away from him—but just now it bore down upon him with a kind of thunderous gloom. Yes—he was “getting old,”—he, who had more or less contemptuously considered the “age” of the woman he had callously thrown over sufficient cause for the rupture,—he, too, was likely to be left out in the cold by the hurrying tide of warmer, quicker, youthful life. The vision of the radiant eyes, the exquisite features, the rose-leaf skin, and the supple, graceful form of the marvellous Diana who so persistently declared herself to be his former betrothed, floated before him in tempting, tantalising beauty,—and as he opened his own house-door with his latch-key to enter that abode of domestic bliss where his unwieldy wife talked commonplaces all day long and bored him to death, he uttered something like a groan.

“Whatever her fancy or craze may be,” he said, “she is young! Young and perfectly beautiful! It is I who am old!”

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