Chapter XXIII: Not Told by Diana

A struggle takes place in Captain Montagu's mind: it is short-lived. He has never accustomed himself to conquer self, it has always been so pleasant to act on the impulse of the moment, and very rarely in his life has it been followed by unpleasant consequences for him. It is unfair after his promise to be sitting here now, it is as unfair to Diana as to Hector, and yet on this fair warm night, with the sweet spring scents filling his senses, with the amorous song of the nightingale thrilling through the soft night air, with the proximity of a fair and loving woman, he is morally incapable of jumping up, as he knows he ought to do, and walking off briskly in the opposite direction. The knowledge of its being wrong makes the temptation stronger still. But how could he, he told himself afterwards, when it was too late, see her in distress and not attempt to soothe her! In distress for him, too! It would have been simply brutal.

"Darling," he whispers, stealing one arm round her, and drawing her head on to his shoulder, "don't let me see tears in those dear eyes!" As he sees two more impending, he bends down and kisses them away. She leaves her head where he has laid it; she is very young, very innocent, she has not been brought up with strict cautions about the proprieties; the heroes of her books have always kissed the heroines (at parting from them, or on some supreme occasion like this), and for the most part the heroines have taken it as she is doing now, happily, unresistingly. She is not overtaken by a paroxysm of indignant virtue, as perhaps a well-tutored young lady would have been, because her mind is too pure to think any harm. It would have seemed horrible, loathsome, to her to have been kissed by a man whom she did not love; but here, where all her heart is given, it does not seem wrong,--not even unnatural.

Captain Montagu, having made no resistance to temptation, is, as happens to most of us, swept away by it altogether.

"My darling," he cries, the warm blood stirring in his veins, finding her doubly dear because he knows she cannot be his, "do you think I can give you up without a struggle! Only this time last night I had no more thought of _loving_ you than I had of flying, and now to-night I feel as if parting with you was like parting with my heart's blood." Her lips are so near to his, how can they help but meet? Then she draws herself away from him, and, sitting upright, pushes back her hair with a confused motion. She is silent, but her heart is saying, wildly, "He will not, he cannot leave me now."

But he too has pulled himself together; he has been through scenes something of the kind before, and he feels that he must make an effort, or the witchery of the night and this fair girl may plunge him into an act of folly that will bring a life-long repentance. It is bitterly hard to be practical under present circumstances. If Diana had been town-bred, if she had mixed in society, it would have been unnecessary to attempt any explanation as to the impossibility of their thinking of marriage; but she is a simple unsophisticated girl (however sweet and dear), who knows nothing of the world's ways, and who, worst of all, is accustomed to comparative poverty. Feeling and expediency are equally mixed as he says (hating himself the while for saying it),--"I never in my life cared for a girl before as I do for you. I never dreamed of marrying except as a means of paying my debts and launching me afresh in the world; but I swear to you it gives me the most horrible pain that I cannot ask you to be my wife."

"I know," she answers, hurriedly, though a pang shoots through her breast, but wanting to gave him the pain of a confession,--"I know it is quite impossible. I never thought of anything of _that sort_. If" (drooping her sweet face in shame), "if I might think you--you liked me a little."

"Liked you!" cries the young man, passionately: "what a poor little miserable cold word! Think and be quite sure that I love you, and that I would give my right hand to make you mine."

Diana looks up into his face with radiant eyes.

"I shall not mind anything now I have heard you say that," she says, innocently: "it will be enough to live on all the rest of my life."

"Oh, darling!" he utters, remorsefully, taking her hand in his, "why do you make me feel such a brute? How can you care for such a miserable, selfish fellow as I am? Why, even now this moment, loving you as I do" (moved to the confession by a worthy sense of shame), "do you not see that I am sacrificing you to my selfishness in the most hateful, cold-blooded way?"

"Hush!" she says, laying her slim fingers on his lips; "do not breathe a word against yourself; it would be the only thing" (with loving emphasis) "you could say that I should not believe."

Her sweetness, her fairness, her love, rise up before him, and overcome all which prudence, worldliness, and selfishness had whispered to him before.

"My sweet!" he cries, catching her in his arms, "I can, I will give up everything in the world for your sake, if you can put up with me as I am."

She yields for one moment to his passionate embrace; then, with a sigh, she withdraws herself gently from his binding arms.

"Do you think," she says, laying one slim white hand on his arm, and fixing her shining eyes upon his passion-wrought face,--"do you think I love you so little as that? No, no, no! it is very generous of you, but it is impossible. I know it even better than you do."

Her words stab him. He generous! he feels intensely, more intensely than he has ever felt anything in his life, how selfish and ignoble his conduct has been. He feels in truth

"There is no after-pang
Can deal that vengeance on the self-condemned
He deals on his own soul."

Yet, even now, as he dwells upon her fairness and thinks it will be Hector's, not his, he grudges her bitterly to him.

"What unlucky chance brought us out here together to-night?" he says, miserably. "I had resolved not to put myself in the way of temptation again, and" (half to himself) "I had given him my word."

"What?" cries Diana, with kindling eyes, catching the words and understanding them all too well.

"What is the use of mincing matters?" he says, moodily, leaning against the stalwart oak trunk through whose as yet sparsely-filled branches the moonbeams glint on the workings of his face. "You know that Hector loves you, you know he wants to marry you, and" (bitterly) "in time of course you will marry him. He is young enough, he is not bad-looking, he is devoted to you, and all this" (with a little wave of his hand) "will be his."

Speaking, Captain Montagu takes some little credit to himself that, however reluctantly, with however ill a grace, he is still pleading his brother's cause. If it were possible for scorn to creep into so great a love as Diana's, it glances for one moment upon him from her flashing eyes. But as she looks upon that dear face it dies out.

"Do not," she whispers, softly; "you hurt me. If you cared ever so little for me you could not bear to think of my belonging to him. I know nothing of love" (looking at him with clear steadfast eyes), "but, oh, I know, I feel that by a sort of instinct."

"You are right," he says, catching at her hand. "I hate the thought like death. Well" (eagerly), "say the word, take me for worse and for poorer, and then I shall not have to think of giving you up to any one."

She is only a child, a child without experience, but she knows, even if he thinks it for the moment, that he is not in earnest about it, that if she yielded he would regret it even to-night. If the sacrifice, the self-abnegation, had been for her in the future, would she not have consented joyfully, without a fear, without a pang? But it would be on his part; and she knows, without its detracting from her love for him one whit, that he would grudge the sacrifice later, if not now. She laughs to scorn the bare idea that she can be worthy of him: what has she to give him but her love, her poor little worthless love, that is, after all, only an involuntary tribute to his perfection?

The church-clock strikes ten with a slow sonorous sound.

"Your father is awake, and waiting for his game," she says, looking up with an awed face and returning to sudden consciousness of the present.

Captain Montagu cannot help laughing.

"Poor little darling!" he whispers: "how they have cowed you already!"

"He will wake up," says Diana, in a low, prophetic voice; "he will look about for me, and then he will ring and ask for me; they will go to my room and not find me there; then," her voice rising, "they will come out and look for me. Oh," (grasping his arm and looking in his face with a blanched, frightened gaze)--"if they find me here with you _I shall die_."

"They shall not find you here with me," he says, in a soothing voice, seeing that she is really terrified and that her nerves are over-strung. "Come; we will go towards the house, and then, when we are in the garden, if we hear any one coming we can separate."

"Come!" she cries, making her way swiftly towards the gate, he following her.

At the gate they pause, as they did in the morning.

"Is it to be 'good-by,' then?" he whispers, looking regret fully at her.

"Why need you go to-morrow?" she asks, evasively.

"Because I have promised."

"But," she urges, in an earnest voice, "if he--if Mr. Montagu _knows_ that I can never be anything more to him than" (falteringly) "to you, why should we not all be happy together?"

"Did you ever hear of Cain and Abel? One brother murdered the other because he was jealous; though I never heard that a woman had anything to do with it in that case. But it strikes me that if we were in the same house with you for another week with our present feelings, we should both feel pretty much towards each other as Cain and Abel did; or rather, I should say, as Cain did to Abel."

"Good-by, then," she sighs, with bitter reluctance, stretching out her hand.

"Not yet," he cries. "Oh, little darling, I don't feel as if I _could_ part from you!"

"I must go," she whispers. "They would know it was unnatural for me to be out so late alone. I think your mother would not be pleased. She is the only one I should be really grieved to vex."

"Good-by," she whispers, again, and lifts her sweet face to take one last look at him. He sees the tremulous red mouth, the bright eyes shining through unshed tears, the white, fair face, in which the warm color ebbs and flows; he hears the quiver in the soft voice, and again he thinks remorsefully of all he will lose in parting from her. He draws her back a few paces out of the moonlight into the deep shadow of the tree. Once more his arms are round her, once more he kisses her sweet lips. For a moment she clings to him, as though to part from him were to part with her whole soul; and then she leaves him standing there alone, fighting with a passionate love and regret for her, and goes swiftly towards the house. In front of the door, in the full white light, Hector is standing.

"Miss Carew!" he exclaims, in a voice wherein surprise and anger fight for mastery, and then, with a swift change of voice, speaking very eagerly, "How pale you are! Have you been frightened?"

"I! no," she answers, staring at him, and trembling in every limb. Her nerves are overwrought: a deadly fear and sickness comes across her.

"You look quite ill," he says, anxiously. "Let me get you a glass of wine." And, without waiting for her answer, he draws her unresisting hand through his arm, and leads her away into the house. There is a light in the smoking-room, and he pushes the door open and takes her in and places her in a low chair by the open window. Then he hurries off for wine. Whilst he is gone, she collects herself, and is able to smile upon him when he returns, and to make a pretense even of sipping what he brings her.

"And answered with such craft as women use,
Guilty or guiltless, to stave off a chance
That breaks upon them perilously."

"Were you frightened?" Hector asks her again, pertinatiously.

"No--yes," she stammers. "The moon throws such strange ghostly shadows these bright nights."

"Did you go out alone?" he asks, eying her with stern curiosity.

Diana pauses: she has never told a lie in her life. But a quick thought comes to her rescue; he has asked her if she went alone, and to that she can answer "Yes," truthfully.

"Why did you not wait for me?" he says, with gentle reproach, coming a little nearer to her. "Did you not know how glad I should have been to go with you?"

She shrinks from him imperceptibly, and utters a little forced laugh.

"Thank you," she says. "I felt oppressed by the heat, and thought the fresh air would do me good. What did Sir Hector say?"

"He took it for granted you had gone to bed," answers Mr. Montagu, stiffly. He is still haunted by a vague, horrible suspicion, although he believes firmly in her truthfulness. Certainly she is not the same gay laughing Diana he drove along the hawthorn-bound lanes, and wished good-by to, only yesterday morning, before that hateful journey.

She has relapsed into weary silence, and, glancing at her,

"Right through his manful breast darted the pang
That makes a man, in the sweet face of her
Whom he loves most, lonely and miserable."

"I shall steal off to bed," she says, rising, and forcing rather a wan smile. "Do not betray me to your father. Good-night!"

Somehow he has no heart to ask her to linger. He bids her a cold good-night.

"To-morrow!" he whispers to himself, as he looks after her retreating figure; "to-morrow!" But still he sighs, and his heart is heavy within him. Even his cigar affords him but poor consolation to-night.