The Testing of Diana Mallory | Page 2

and pillars decorated with ivy and
holly, yet austere and cold through all its adornings, with its bare walls
and pale windows. She shivered a little, for her youth had been
accustomed to churches all color and lights and furnishings--churches
of another type and faith. But instantly some warm leaping instinct met
the shrinking, and overpowered it. She smote her hands together.
"England!--England!--my own, own country!"
She dropped upon the window-seat half laughing, yet the tears in her
eyes. And there, with her face pressed against the glass, she waited
while the dawn stole upon the night, while in the park the trees
emerged upon the grass white with rime, while on the face of the down
thickets and paths became slowly visible, while the first wreaths of
smoke began to curl and hover in the frosty air.
Suddenly, on a path which climbed the hill-side till it was lost in the
beech wood which crowned the summit, she saw a flock of sheep, and
behind them a shepherd boy running from side to side. At the sight, her
eyes kindled again. "Nothing changes," she thought, "in this country
life!" On the morning of Charles I.'s execution--in the winters and
springs when Elizabeth was Queen--while Becket lay dead on
Canterbury steps--when Harold was on his way to Senlac--that hill, that
path were there--sheep were climbing it, and shepherds were herding
them. "It has been so since England began--it will be so when I am
dead. We are only shadows that pass. But England lives

always--always--and shall live!"
And still, in a trance of feeling, she feasted her eyes on the quiet
country scene.
The old house which Diana Mallory had just begun to inhabit stood
upon an upland, but it was an upland so surrounded by hills to north
and east and south that it seemed rather a close-girt valley, leaned over
and sheltered by the downs. Pastures studded with trees sloped away
from the house on all sides; the village was hidden from it by boundary
woods; only the church tower emerged. From the deep oriel window
where she sat Diana could see a projecting wing of the house itself, its
mellowed red brick, its Jacobean windows and roof. She could see also
a corner of the moat with its running stream, a moat much older than
the building it encircled, and beneath her eyes lay a small formal
garden planned in the days of John Evelyn--with its fountain and its
sundial, and its beds in arabesque. The cold light of December lay upon
it all; there was no special beauty in the landscape, and no
magnificence in the house or its surroundings. But every detail of what
she saw pleased the girl's taste, and satisfied her heart. All the while she
was comparing it with other scenes and another landscape, amid which
she had lived till now--a monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and
crumbled by the sun, dry palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust
and tormented with a plague of motor-cars, white villas crowded
among high walls, a wilderness of hotels, and everywhere a chattering
unlovely crowd.
"Thank goodness!--that's done with," she thought--only to fall into a
sudden remorse. "Papa--papa!--if you were only here too!"
She pressed her hands to her eyes, which were moist with sudden tears.
But the happiness in her heart overcame the pang, sharp and real as it
was. Oh! how blessed to have done with the Riviera, and its hybrid
empty life, for good and all!--how blessed even, to have done with the
Alps and Italy!--how blessed, above all, to have come home!--home
into the heart of this English land--warm mother-heart, into which she,
stranger and orphan, might creep and be at rest.

The eloquence of her own thoughts possessed her. They flowed on in a
warm, mute rhetoric, till suddenly the Comic Spirit was there, and
patriotic rapture began to see itself. She, the wanderer, the exile, what
did she know of England--or England of her? What did she know of
this village even, this valley in which she had pitched her tent? She had
taken an old house, because it had pleased her fancy, because it had
Tudor gables, pretty panelling, and a sundial. But what natural link had
she with it, or with these peasants and countrymen? She had no true
roots here. What she had done was mere whim and caprice. She was an
alien, like anybody else--like the new men and prowling millionaires,
who bought old English properties, moved thereto by a feeling which
was none the less snobbish because it was also sentimental.
She drew herself up--rebelling hotly--yet not seeing how to disentangle
herself from these associates. And she was still struggling to put herself
back in the romantic mood, and to see herself and her experiment