Mr. May put his hand to his bewildered head.
“No — no — of course not! — I — I must tell Mrs. May our daughter is alive — it will be a shock — of surprise—”
“No doubt!” said Sophy, sharply. “But she’s dead to you! Remember that! If I didn’t fear to make trouble for her I’d wire to her employer at Geneva about this pretender to her name — only it wouldn’t do any good, and I’d rather not interfere. And I advise you not to go dangling after the ‘new beauty,’ as she’s called — you really are too old for that sort of thing!”
Mr. May winced. Then he drew himself up with an effort at dignity.
“I shall endeavour to trace my daughter,” he said. “And I regret I cannot rely on your assistance, Miss Lansing! You have deceived us very greatly—”
“Twaddle!” interrupted Miss Lansing, defiantly. “You made Diana wretched — and she’d have gone on housekeeping for you till she had lost all pleasure in living, — now she’s got a good salary and a situation which is satisfactory, and I’ll never help you to drag her back to the old jog-trot of attending to your food and comfort. So there! As for this ‘bogus’ Diana, the best thing you can do is to go and tell her you know all about it, and that she can’t take you in any more.”
“She’s the most beautiful thing ever seen!” he said, suddenly and with determination.
Sophy Lansing gave him an “all over” glance of utter contempt.
“What’s that to you if she is?” she demanded. “Will you never recognize your age? She might be your daughter — almost your granddaughter! And you want to make love to her? Bah!”
With a scornful sweep of her garments she left him, and he found his way out of the house more like a man in a dream than in a reality. He could hardly believe that what she had told him was true — that Diana — his daughter Diana, was alive after all! He wondered what effect the news would have on his wife? After so much “mourning” and expressions of “terrible shock,” — the whole drowning business was turned into something of a comedy!
“Miss Lansing ought to be ashamed of herself!” he thought, indignantly. “A regular hypocrite! Why, she wrote a letter of sympathy and ‘deep sorrow’ for the loss of her ‘darling Diana!’ Disgraceful! And if the story is true and. Diana has really run away from us, we should be perfectly justified in disowning her!”
Full of mingled anger and bewilderment he decided to go and see the “adventuress” known as Diana May and tell her all. She would not, he thought, pretend any longer to be his daughter if she knew that his daughter was living.
He found her in the loveliest of “rest gowns,” reclining on a sofa with a book in her hand, — she scarcely stirred from her attitude of perfect ease as he entered, except to turn her head round on her satin pillow and smile at him. Quite unnerved by that smile, he sat down beside her and taking her hand raised it to his lips.
“What a gallant little Pa it is!” she observed, lazily. “I wonder what ‘Ma’ would say if she saw you!”
He put on an air of mild severity.
“My dear girl,” he said, “I wish you would stop all this nonsense and be sensible! I have heard some news to-day which ought to put an end to your pretending to be what you are not. My daughter — my real daughter Diana — is alive.”
Diana laughed.
“Of course! Very much so! I should not be here if she were not. Do I seem dead?”
He made a gesture of impatience.
“Tut, tut! If you will persist—”
“Naturally I will persist!” she said, sitting up on the sofa, her delicate laces falling about her like a cloud and her fair head lifted like that of a pictured angel—” I am Diana! I suppose you’ve been seeing Sophy Lansing — she’s the only living being who knows my story and even she doesn’t recognize me now. But I can’t help her obstinacy, or yours! I am Diana!”
“My daughter,” said Mr. May, with emphasis—” is in Geneva—”
“Was,” interrupted Diana. “And is — here!”
Mr. May gave a groan of utter despair.
“No use —— no use!” he said. “One might as well argue with the wind as with one of these mentally obsessed persons! Perfectly hopeless! — hopeless — !”
Diana sprang off her sofa and stood erect, confronting him. —
“See here!” she said—” When I lived at home with you, sacrificing all my time to you and my mother, and only thinking of my duty to you both, you found me ‘in the way.’ Why? Merely because I was growing old. You never thought there was any cruelty in despising me for a fault which seems common to all nature. You never cared to consider that you yourself were growing old! — no, for you still seek to play the juvenile and the amorous! What you men consider legitimate in your own sex, you: judge ridiculous in ours. You look upon me as ‘young’ —— when in very truth I am of the age of the same Diana whom as your daughter you wearied of — but youth has been given to my ‘mature years’ in a way which you in your ignorance of all science would never dream of. You, like most men, judge by outward appearances only. The physical, which is perishable, attracts you — and you have no belief in the spiritual, which is imperishable. But the spiritual wins!”
Mr. May sat winking and blinking under this outburst, which was to him entirely incomprehensible, though he was uncomfortably conscious of the radiance of eyes that played their glances upon him like beams from fiery stars.
“There, there!” he said at last, nervously, — resorting to his usual soothing formula—” You are overwrought — a little hysterical — a sudden access of this — this unfortunate mistaken identity trouble. I will come back and talk to you another day—”
“Why should you come back?” she demanded. “What do you want of me?”
James Polydore was somewhat confused by this straight question. What indeed did he want of her? He was too much of a moral coward to formulate the answer, even to himself. She was beautiful, and he wanted to caress her beauty, — old as he was, he would have liked to kiss that exquisite month, curved like a rose-petal, and run his wrinkled fingers through the warm and lavish gold of the hair that waved over the white brow and small ears like rippling sunshine. He was afflicted by the disease of senile amorousness for all women — but for this one in particular he was ready and eager to go to all lengths of fatuous foolishness possible to an old man in love, if he could only have been sure she was not insane! While he stood hesitating, and twitching his eyelids in the peculiar “manner” he affected when he had thoughts to conceal, she answered her own question for him.
“You want to make love to me,” she said. “As I have told you before, that can’t be done. I am your daughter, — deny it as you may to the end, nothing can alter the fact. Do you remember the man I was engaged to? — Captain Cleeve? — the ‘Honourable’ Reginald Cleeve?”
At this he was fairly startled and he gave a gasp of astonishment.
“I remember the man my daughter was engaged to,” he said. “His name was Cleeve. But he is married—”
“Very much so!” and Diana smiled. “But that doesn’t prevent his making love to me — and I let him do it! You see, he’s no relation! —— — and I don’t consider his fat wife any more than he considered me when he married her and threw me over! But he’s like you — he doesn’t believe I’m the old Diana!”
“Of course not!” and Mr. May expanded his chest with a long, breath of superior wisdom. “I should like to see him and talk to him about you and your sad condition of mind—”
“No doubt you would, but you won’t,” said Diana calmly. “I have forbidden him to go near you for the present. He dare not ask any questions about me — till — till I have done with him!”
What a look there was in her eyes! James Polydore, meeting it, shrank under it as though it blinded him.
“Dare not? Done with him?” he echoed, stupidly. She laughed, quite sweetly.
“There, poor Pa, do go home! Pay your attentions to my mother’s companion, Miss Pr
eston — if she really likes your endearments, why, then, ‘crabbed age and youth’ may live together! Poor mother! She never found out all your little Ways! — some of them she discovered by chance — but I knew them all! What would you give to be as young as I am at your age! ‘Too late, too late! — ye cannot enter now!’” Her laughter rang out again, — then approaching him, she laid her hands lightly on his shoulders and kissed him. “There, that’s a true daughter’s kiss! — make the best of it, dear Pa! Go home and be a good, nice, moral old man! — sit on one side of the fireplace with Ma on the other, and settle down into Darby and Joan! — such a nice couple! — with a dash of Miss Preston between to keep up your spirits! And don’t come back here ever! — unless you accept the true position we occupy of father and daughter — father growing old, and daughter growing young!”
Standing in the centre of the room, with the soft ivory chiffon and lace of her “rest gown” trailing about her like the delicate cirri floating across a summer sky, she appeared like a vision of something altogether beyond mere woman, and as the little, gross, sensual man who had been her father looked at her, a sudden unnameable terror overcame him. His limbs shook — his brain reeled, — within himself a frightened sense of something supernatural paralysed his will — and he made for the door like a man groping in the dark. She threw it open for him with a queenly gesture of dismissal.
“Tell my mother,” she said, “that her daughter is truly alive, and that she has kissed you! — not as the ‘old’ but as the ‘young’ Diana! Don’t forget!”
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 mental 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 hypnotized 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 recognized 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 calls passée! 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 — I was engaged 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. You have 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 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 realize that we axe 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!”
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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 are old lovers! And you — 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! I am the ‘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 left ms! — 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!”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 864
