The risen moon was full, and its cold, brilliant light filled the
garden with strong black shadows. She watched some that seemed even to
move, as if the garden were alive with creeping, hurrying figures, and
amused herself tracking them until she traced them to the palm tree or
cactus bush that caused them. One in particular gave her a long hunt
till she finally ran it to its lair, and it proved to be the shadow of
a grotesque lead statue half hidden by a flowering shrub. Forgetting
the hour and the open windows all around her, she burst into a rippling
peal of laughter, which was interrupted by the appearance of a figure,
imperfectly seen through the lattice-work which divided her balcony
from the next one, and the sound of an irritable voice.
"For Heaven's sake, Diana, let other people sleep if you can't."
"Which, being interpreted, is let Sir Aubrey Mayo sleep," she retorted,
with a chuckle. "My dear boy, sleep if you want to, but I don't know
how you can on a night like this. Did you ever see such a gorgeous
moon?"
"Oh, damn the moon!"
"Oh, very well. Don't get cross about it. Go back to bed and put your
head under the clothes, and then you won't see it. But I'm going to sit
here."
"Diana, don't be an idiot! You'll go to sleep and fall into the garden
and break your neck."
"Tant pis pour moi. Tant mieux pour toi," she said flippantly.
"I have left you all that I have in the world, dear brother. Could
devotion go further?"
She paid no heed to his exclamation of annoyance, and looked back into
the garden. It was a wonderful night, silent except for the cicadas'
monotonous chirping, mysterious with the inexplicable mystery that
hangs always in the Oriental night. The smells of the East rose up all
around her; here, as at home, they seemed more perceptible by night
than by day. Often at home she had stood on the little stone balcony
outside her room, drinking in the smells of the night--the pungent,
earthy smell after rain, the aromatic smell of pine trees near the
house. It was the intoxicating smells of the night that had first
driven her, as a very small child, to clamber down from her balcony,
clinging to the thick ivy roots, to wander with the delightful sense of
wrong-doing through the moonlit park and even into the adjoining gloomy
woods. She had always been utterly fearless.
Her childhood had been a strange one. There had been no near relatives
to interest themselves in the motherless girl left to the tender
mercies of a brother nearly twenty years her senior, who was frankly
and undisguisedly horrified at the charge that had been thrust upon
him. Wrapped up in himself, and free to indulge in the wander hunger
that gripped him, the baby sister was an intolerable burden, and he had
shifted responsibility in the easiest way possible. For the first few
years of her life she was left undisturbed to nurses and servants who
spoiled her indiscriminately. Then, when she was still quite a tiny
child, Sir Aubrey Mayo came home from a long tour, and, settling down
for a couple of years, fixed on his sister's future training, modelled
rigidly on his own upbringing. Dressed as a boy, treated as a boy, she
learned to ride and to shoot and to fish--not as amusements, but
seriously, to enable her to take her place later on as a companion to
the man whose only interests they were. His air of weariness was a
mannerism. In reality he was as hard as nails, and it was his intention
that Diana should grow up as hard. With that end in view her upbringing
had been Spartan, no allowances were made for sex or temperament and
nothing was spared to gain the desired result. And from the first Diana
had responded gallantly, throwing herself heart and soul into the
arduous, strenuous life mapped out for her. The only drawback to a
perfect enjoyment of life were the necessary lessons that had to be
gone through, though even these might have been worse. Every morning
she rode across the park to the rectory for a couple of hours' tuition
with the rector, whose heart was more in his stable than in his parish,
and whose reputation was greater across country than it was in the
pulpit. His methods were rough and ready, but she had brains, and
acquired an astonishing amount of diverse knowledge. But her education
was stopped with abrupt suddenness when she was fifteen by the arrival
at the rectory of an overgrown young cub who had been sent by a
despairing parent, as a last resource, to the muscular rector, and who
quickly discovered what those amongst whom she had grown up had hardly
realised, that Diana Mayo, with the clothes and manners of a boy, was
really an uncommonly beautiful young woman. With the assurance
belonging to his type, he had taken the earliest opportunity of telling
her so, following it with an attempt to secure the kiss that up to now
his own good looks had always secured for him. But in this case he had
to deal with a girl who was a girl by accident of birth only, who was
quicker with her hands and far finer trained than he was, and whose
natural strength was increased by furious rage. She had blacked his
eyes before he properly understood what was happening, and was dancing
around him like an infuriated young gamecock when the rector had burst
in upon them, attracted by the noise.