'... a pity when charming womenTalk of things that they don't understand.'""We should not have many subjects of conversation if we did not," said Di.And the old woman and the young one embraced each other with tears in their eyes.CHAPTER VII."Oh, well for him whose will is strong!"Tennyson.TTHERE come times in our lives when the mind lies broken on the revolving wheel of our thought. "I am illegitimate." That was the one thought which made John's bed for him at night, which followed him throughout the spectral day until it brought him back to the spectral night again.It was a quiver in which were many poisoned arrows. Because the first that struck him was well-nigh unbearable, the others did not fail to reach their mark.If he were nameless and penniless, hecould not marry Di. That was the first arrow. Such marriages are possible only in books and in that sacred profession which, in spite of numerous instances to the contrary, believes that "the Lord will provide." Di would not be allowed to marry him, even if she were willing to do so. And after a time—a long time, perhaps—she would marry some one else, possibly Lord Hemsworth.John writhed. He had set his heart on this woman. He had bent her strong will to love him as a proud woman only can. She had been hard to win, but she was his as much as if they were already married; his by right, as the living Galatea was by right the sculptor's, who gave her marble heart the throbbing life and love of his own."She is mine—I cannot give her up," he said aloud.There was no voice, nor any that answered.Strange how the ploughshare turns up little tags and ends of forgotten rubbish buried by the mould of a few years' dust.One utterance of Archie's, absolutely forgotten till now, was continually recurring to John's mind. Its barbed point rankled."There must be a mint of money in an old barrack stuffed full of gimcracks like this. If ever I wanted a hundred or two, I would trot out one of those little silver Johnnies in no time if they were mine."And he would. If the thought of what Colonel Tempest and Archie would achieve after his own death had stung John as Archie said that, how should he bear to stand by andseethem do it? The books, the pictures, the family manuscripts which he was even then arranging, the jewels, the renowned diamond necklace that the Spanish government had offered to buy from his grandfather, which he had hoped one dayto clasp on Di's neck—all the possessions of the past but almost regal state of a great name, which he had kept with such a reverent hand—he should live to see them cast right and left, lost, sold, squandered, stolen. Archie would give the diamonds to the first actress who asked for them. Colonel Tempest would be equally "open-handed."As the days went on, John shut his eyes to the pictures in the gallery as he passed through it. A mute suspense and reproach seemed to hang about the whole place. The Velasquez and the Titian peered at him. Tempest of the Red Hand clutched his sword-hilt uneasily. Mieris' old Dutch-woman seemed to have lost her interest in selling her marvellous string of onions to the little boy. Ribalta's Spanish Jesuit fingered the red cross of Santiago embroidered on his breast, and looked askance at John.John turned back many times from thelibrary door. The new books which he had had bound in exact reproduction of a beautiful old missal of the Tempest collection, and for the arrival of which he had been eagerly waiting, remained untouched in their packing-cases. He could not look at them.Once he went into the dining-hall, unused when he was alone, and opened one of the ponderous shutters. The rich light pierced the solemn gloom, catching the silver sconces on the wall and the silver figures standing in the carved niches above the fireplace."You will not give us up," they seemed to say; and the little cavalier turned to his lady with a shake of his head.As John closed the shutter his eyes fell on the Tempest motto on the pane, "Je le feray durant ma vie;" and it stabbed him like a knife.He went out into the open air like one pursued, and paced in the dead forest waitingfor the spring. All he had held so sacred meant nothing then—nothing, nothing, nothing. The Tempest motto, round which he had bound his life, round which his most solemn convictions and aspirations had grown up, had nothing to do with him. He had been mocked. He, a nameless bastard, the offspring of a mere common intrigue, had been fooled into believing that he was John Tempest, the head of one of the greatest families in England; that Overleigh belonged to him and he to it as entirely as—nay, more than—his own hands and feet and eyes.It was as if he had been acting a serious part to the best of his ability on a stage with many others, and suddenly they had all dropped their masks and were grinning at him with satyr faces in grotesque attitudes, and he found that he alone had mistaken a screaming farce, of which he was the butt,for a drama of which he had imagined himself one of the principal figures.John laughed a harsh wild laugh under the solemn overarching trees. Everything, himself included, had undergone a hideous distortion. His whole life was dislocated. His faith in God and man wavered. The key-stone of his existence was gone from the arch, and the stones struck him as they fell round him. The confusion was so great that for the first few days he was incapable of action, incapable of reflection, incapable of anything.Mitty!That thought came next. That stung. He had nothing in the wide world which he could call his own; no roof for Mitty, no fire to warm her by. He was absolutely without means. His mother's small fortune he had sunk in an annuity for Mr. Goodwin. What would become of Mitty? How would she survive being uprootedfrom her little nest in the garret gallery? How would she bear to see her lamb turned adrift upon the world? Mitty was growing old, and her faithful love for him would make the last years sorrowful which were so happy now. Oh, if he could only wait till Mitty died!John had not wept a tear for himself, but he hid his face against the trunk of one of the trees that were not his, and sobbed aloud at the thought of Mitty.And next day came a letter from Archie, saying that Colonel Tempest was at death's door in one of the London hospitals, owing to having accidentally shot himself with a revolver. John sent money, much more than was actually necessary, and drew breath. Nothing could be done until Colonel Tempest was either convalescent or dead. He was reprieved from telling Mitty anything for the moment.And as the spring was just beginning to whisper to the sleeping earth, and the buds of the horse-chestnut to grow white and woolly beneath the nursery windows, as John had seen them many and many a time—how or why I know not, but with the waking of the year Mitty began to fail.She had never been ill in John's recollection. She had had "a bone in her leg" occasionally, but excepting that mysterious ailment and a touch of rheumatism in later years, Mitty had always been quite well. She was not actually ill now, but——It was useless to tell her not to "do" her nurseries herself, and to positively forbid her to wash his socks and handkerchiefs. Mitty worked exactly the same; and John with an ache at his heart came indoors every day in time for nursery tea, and Mitty made him buttered toast, and was happy beyond words; but I think her eyesight must have begunto fail her, or she would have seen how grey and haggard the face of her "lamb" became as the days went by.Who shall say when a thought begins? Long before we see it, it was there, but our eyes were holden. "L'amour commence par l'ombre." So do many things besides love.The letters were destroyed.When did John think of that first, or rather, when did he first hear it whispered? Why was his mind always going back to that?He would not have burned them if he had taken time to consider, but the first impulse to do with them as their writer had herself intended, had been acted upon before he had even thought of their bearing upon himself and others.At any rate they were gone—quite gone—sprinkled to the four winds of heaven.There was no other proof.And his—no, not his father—Mr. Tempest, who knew all about him, had intended him to be his heir. He had left him his name and his place, with a solemn charge to do his duty by them."I have done it," said John to himself, "as those two would never have done. Shall I let all go to rack and ruin now? If I was not born a Tempest I have become one. Iamone, and if I marry one my children will be Tempests, and those two fools will not be suffered to pull Overleigh stone from stone, and drag a great name into the dust; as they would, as they assuredly would."Had not Mr. Tempest foreseen this when he exacted that solemn promise from John on his death-bed to uphold the honour of the family? Could he break that promise? And through the vain sophistries, upsettingthem all, a mad cry rang, "Di loves me! She loves me at last! I cannot give her up!"The challenge was thrown out into the darkness. No one took it up.A fierce restlessness laid hold on John. He rushed up to London several times to hear how Colonel Tempest was going on. Each time he told himself that he was going to see Di. But although the first time he went to Colonel Tempest's lodgings the servant informed him that Di was with her father, he did not ask to see her. Each time he came back without having dared to go to the little house in Kensington. He could not meet those grave clear eyes with the new gentleness in them that went to his head like wine. He knew they would make him forget everything, everything except that he loved her, and would sell his very soul for her.Time stopped. In all this enormous intervalthe buds of the horse-chestnut had not yet burst to green. It was ages since he had seen the first primrose, and yet to-day, as he walked in the woods on the day after his return from another futile journey to London, they were all out in the forest still.And something stirred within him that had not deigned to take notice of all his feverish asseverations and wanderings, that had not rebuked him, that had not even listened when he had said repeatedly that he could not give up Di.By an invisible hand the challenge was taken up, and John knew the time of conflict was at hand.He walked on and on, not knowing where he went, past the forest and the meadowland, and away over the rolling moors, with only Lindo for his companion.At last his newly returned strength failinghim, he threw himself down in the dry windswept heather. He had not outstripped his thoughts. This was the appointed place. He knew it even as he flung himself down. His hour was come.It was an April afternoon, pale and bleak. The late frost had come back, and had silenced the birds. One only deeply in love, somewhere near at hand, but invisible, repeated plaintively over and over again a small bird-name in the silence of the shrinking spring.And John's heart said over and over again one little word—"Di, Di, Di!"There are some sacrifices which partake of the nature of self-mutilation. That is why principle often falls before the onslaught of a deep human passion, which is nothing but the rebellion of human nature brought to bay, against the execution upon itself of thatdread command of the spiritual nature, "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off."To give up certain affections is with some natures to give up all possibility of the quickening into life of that latent maturer self that craves for existence in each one of us. It is to take, for better for worse, a more meagre form of life, destitute, not of happiness perhaps, but of those common joys and sorrows which most of all bind us in sympathy with our fellow-men. What marriage in itself is to the majority, the love of one fellow-creature, and one only, is to the few. To a few, happily a very few, there is only one hand that can minister among the pressure of the crowd. There was none other woman in the world for John, save only Di. Sayings common to vulgarity, profaned by every breach of promise case, can yet be true sometimes."Di, Di, Di!" said John.He tried to recall her face, but he could not. When they were together he had not seen her; he had only felt her presence, only trembled at each slight movement of her hands. He always watched them when he was talking to her. He knew every movement of those strong, slender hands by heart. She had a little way of opening and shutting her left hand as she talked. He smiled even now as he thought of it. And she had a certain wave in her hair just above the ear, that was not the same over the other ear. But her face—no, he could not see her face.He tried again. They were sitting once again, he and she, not very near, nor very far apart, in the low entresol room at Overleigh. He could see her now. She was arranging the lilies of the valley, and he was saying to himself, as he watched her with his chin in his hands, "This is only thebeginning. There will be many times like this, only dearer and sweeter than this."Many times! That deep conviction had proved as false as all the rest—as false as everything else which he had trusted.And all in a moment as he looked, as he remembered, was it endurance, was it principle, that seemed to snap?He set his teeth and ground his heel into the earth. Agony had come upon him. Passion, writhing in torment, rose gigantic without warning and seized him in a Titan grip. It was a duel to the death.John sat motionless in the solitude of the heather. The bird was silent. On either hand the level moors met the level sky. Lindo walked in and out in semi and total eclipse near at hand, now emerging life-size upon a hillock, now visible only as an erect travelling tail amid the heather. The suncame faintly out. There was a little speech of bees, a little quivering among the poised spears of the tall bleached grasses against the sky.Time passed.John's was not the easy faith which believes that in another world what has been given up in this will be restored a thousandfold. The hope of future reward had no more power to move him than the fear of future punishment. The heaven of rewards of which those speak who have authority, would be no heaven at all to many; a place from which the noblest would turn away. Love worthy of the name, even down here, gives all, asking nothing back.John did not try to define even to himself the faith by which he had lived so far; but as the veiled sun stooped near and nearer to the west, he began to see, as clearly as he saw the sword-grass shaking against the sky,that he was about to remain true to it, or be false to it for ever.Perhaps that faith was more than anything else a stern allegiance to the Giver of that law within the heart which independent natures ever recognize as the only true authority; which John had early elected to obey, which he had obeyed with ease, till now. He had been condemned by many as a freethinker; for to be obedient to the divine prompting has ever been stigmatized as lawlessness by those who are obedient to a written code. John had no code.Yet God, who made (if the tourists who cheaply move in flocks on beaten highways could only believe it) those solitary, isolated natures, knew what He was about. And to those to whom little human guidance is vouchsafed He adds courage, and that self-reliance which comes only of a deep-rooted faith in a God who will not keepsilence, who will not leave the traveller journeying towards Him unpiloted upon a lonely shore, or ultimately suffer His least holy one to see corruption.John looked wildly round him. Even nature seemed to have turned against him. It spoke of peace when there was no peace. For nature has no power to mitigate the bitterness of that cup of self-surrender which even Christ Himself, beneath the kindred stars of still Gethsemane, prayed might pass from Him.John hid his convulsed face in his hands.The crises of life have their hour of loneliness and prostration, their agony and bloody sweat. That cup which may not pass, how ennobling it is to read of in the lives of others, how interesting to theorize upon in our own; how appalling in actual experience, when it is in our hands to drink or to refuse;refusing for ever with it, if we accept it not, the hand of Him who offers it!The solemn world of grey earth and sky waited. The light in the west waited. How much longer were they to wait? How much longer would this bowed figure sway itself to and fro?"I will do it!" said John suddenly, and with a harsh inarticulate cry he flung himself down on his face among the heather, clutching the soft earth; for the Hand of the God whom he would not deny was heavy on him.CHAPTER VIII."The dead abide with us! Though stark and coldEarth seems to grip them, they are with us still.They have forged our chains of being for good or ill."Mathilde Blind.JJOHN was late. Mitty looked out several times to see if he were coming, and then put down the tea-cake to the fire.At last his step came slowly along the garret gallery, and Lindo, who approved of nursery tea, walked in first, his dignity somewhat impaired by a brier hanging from his back flounce.John saw the firelight through the open door, and the figure in the low chair waitingfor him. She had heard him coming, and was getting stiffly up to make the tea."Mitty, you should not wait for me," he said, sitting down in his own place by the fire.Would they let her keep the brass kettle and her silver teapot? Yes, no doubt they would; but somebody would have to ask. He supposed he should be that somebody. Everything she possessed had been bought by himself with other people's money.He let the tea last as long as possible. If Lindo had more than his share of tea-cake, no one was the wiser. At last Mitty cleared away, and sat down in the rocking-chair."Don't light the candles, Mitty.""Why not, my dear? I can't be settin' with my hands before me, and holes in your socks a shame to be seen."John came and sat down on the floor beside her, and leaned his head against her."Never mind the socks just now. There is something I want to talk to you about."He looked at the fire through the bars of the high nursery fender, and something in its glimmer, seen from so near the floor through the remembered pattern of the wires which he had lost sight of for twenty years, suddenly recalled the times when he had sat on the hearthrug, as he was sitting now, with his head against Mitty's knee, confiding to her what he would do when he was a man."Do you remember, Mitty," he said, "how I used to tell you that when I grew up you should ride in a carriage, and have a gold brooch, and a clock that played a tune?""I remember, my darling; and how, next time Charles went into York, you give him all you had, and half a crown it was, to buy me a brooch, and the silly staring fool went and spent it, and brought back that great thing with the mock stones in. And youwas as pleased as pleased. Eh! I was angry with Charles for taking your bits of money, and all he said was, 'Well, Mrs. Emson, I went to a many shops, and I give five shillin's for it so as to get a big un.'""I remember it," said John. "It was about the size of a small poultice. And so Charles paid half. Good old Charles! I seem to have been much deceived in my youth."His deep-set eyes watched the fire, watched the semblance of a little castle in the heart of the glow. Mitty was quite happy with her darling's head against her knee."When the castle falls in I will tell her," said John to himself.But the fire had settled itself. The castle held. At last Mitty put out her hand, and gave it a poke; not with the brass poker, of course, but with a little black slave which did that polished aristocrat's work for it."Mitty," said John, "I am not so rich now as when I was in pinafores; and even then, you see, the brooch was not bought with my own money. Charles gave half. I have never given you anything that was paid for with my own money. I have been spending other people's all my life.""Why, bless your dear heart!" said Mitty; "and who gave me my silver teapot, I should like to know, and the ivory workbox, and that very kettle a-staring you in the face, and the Wedgwood tea-things, and—and everything, if it was not you?"John did not answer. His face twitched.The bars of the fender were blurred. The brass kettle, instead of staring him in the face, melted quite away.Mitty stroked his head and face."Cryin'!" she said—"my lamby cryin'!""Not for myself, Mitty.""Who for, then? For that Miss Dinah?""No, Mitty, for you. This is no home for you and me." He took her hard hand and rubbed his cheek against it. "It belongs to Colonel Tempest. I am not my father's son, Mitty.""Well, my precious," said Mitty, soothingly, in no wise discomposed by what John feared would have quite overwhelmed her, "and if your poor mammy did say as much to me when she was light-headed, when her pains was on her, there's no call to fret about that, seeing it's a long time ago, and her dead and all. Poor thing! I can see her now, with her pretty eyes and her little hands, and she'd put her head against me and say, 'Nursey' (Nursey I was to her), 'I'm not fit neither to live nor to die.' Many and many's the night I've roared to think of her after she was gone, when you was asleep in your crib. But there's no need for you to fret, my deary."John's heart contracted. Mitty knew also. Oh, if he might but have started life knowing what even Mitty knew!"They'd no business to marry her to Mr. Tempest," continued Mitty, shaking her head, "and she, poor thing, idolizing that black Lord Fane, as was her first cousin. It wasn't likely, after that, she'd settle to Mr. Tempest, who was as light as tow. It was against nature. She never took a bit of interest in him, nor him in her neither, that I could see. A hard man he was, too—a hard man. She sent for him when she was dying. She would not see him while there was any chance. 'Forgive me,' she says; she says it over and over, me holding her up. 'I wouldn't ask it if I was staying, but I'm doing the best I can by dying. It's not much to make up, but it's the best I can. And,' she says, 'don't think, Jack, as all women are bad like me. There's a manygood ones as 'ull make you happy yet when I'm gone.' I can see him now, standing by her, looking past her out of the window with his face like a flint. 'I've known two false ones,' he says; and he went away without another word. And she says after a bit to me, 'I've always been frightened at the very thought of dying, but it's living I'm frightened of now.' Eh! Master John, your poor mammy! She did repent. And Mr. Tempest sent for me to the library after the funeral, and he says, 'Promise me, nurse, that you'll never repeat what your mistress said to me when she was not herself.' And he looked hard at me, and I promised. And I've never breathed it to any living soul, not to one I haven't, from that day to this.""I found it out three weeks ago," said John. "And as I am not Mr. Tempest's son, everything I have belongs by right to Colonel Tempest, the next heir, not tome. Overleigh is not mine. It never was mine."But Mitty could not be made to understand what his mother's frailty had to do with John. When at last she grasped the idea that John would make known the fact that he was not his father's son, she was simply incredulous that her lamb could do such a thing—could bring shame upon his own mother. No, whatever else he might do, he would never do that. Why, Mrs. Alcock would know; and friends as she was with Mrs. Alcock, and had been for years, such a word had never passed her lips. And the people in the village, and the trades-people, and Jones and Evans from York, who were putting up the new curtains,—everybody would know. Mitty became quite agitated. Surely, surely, he'd never tell against his poor mother in her grave."Mitty," said John, forcing himself torepeat what it had been difficult enough to say once, "don't you see that I can't stay here and keep what is not mine? Nothing is mine if I am not Mr. Tempest's son. I ought never to have been called so. We must go away."But Mitty was perplexed."Not to that great weary house in London," she said anxiously, "with every spot of water to carry up from the bottom?""That is not mine either," said John in despair, rising to his feet and standing before her. "Oh, Mitty, try and understand. Nothing is mine—nothing, nothing, nothing; not even the clothes I have on. I am a beggar."Mitty looked at him in a dazed way. She could not understand, but she could believe. Her chin began to tremble.It was almost a relief to see at last the tears which he had dreaded from the first."My lamb a beggar," she said over and over again; and she cried a little, but not much. Mitty was getting old, and she was not able to realize a change—a change so incomprehensible as this."But we need not be unhappy," said John, kneeling down by her, and putting his arms round her. "We shall be together still. Wherever I go you will go with me. I don't know yet where it will be, but we shall have a little home together somewhere, just you and I; and you'll do my socks and handkerchiefs, won't you, Mitty? and"—John controlled his voice, but he hid his face in her lap that she might not see it—"we'll be so happy together." At the moment I think John would have given up heaven itself to make that hour smooth to Mitty. "And your cakes, Mitty," he went on hoarsely. "They are better than any one else's. You shall have a little kitchen, and you will makethe cakes yourself, won't you? and the"—his voice stumbled heavily—"the rock buns.""My precious," said Mitty, sobbing, "don't you fret yourself! I can make a many things besides them; Albert puddings and moulds, and them little cheese straws, and a sight of things. There's a deal of work in my old hands yet. It's only the spring as has took the starch out of me. I always feel a sinking in the spring. Lord, my darling, the times and times again I've been settin' here just dithering with a mossel of crotchet, or idling over a bit of reading, and wishing you was having a set of nightshirts to make!"Love had found out the way. John had appealed to the right instinct. Mitty was already busying herself with a future in which she should minister to her child's comfort, and John saw, with a relief that washalf a pang, that the calamity of his life held hardly any place in the heart that loved him so much."I've a sight of things," continued Mitty, wiping her eyes. "Books and pictures and cushions put away. My precious shall not go short. And there's two pair of linen sheets as I bought with my own money, and piller-slips to match, and six silver teaspoons and one dessert. My lamb shall have things comfortable about him."She fell to communing with herself. John did not speak."I'll leave my places tidy," said Mitty. "Tidy I didn't find 'em, but tidy I'll leave 'em. I can't go till after the spring cleaning, Master John. I'll never trust that Fanny to do the scrubbing unless I'm behind her. I caught her washing round the mats instead of under only last week."John felt unable to enter into the questionof the spring cleaning. There was another silence.At last Mitty said defiantly, "And I shall take your morroccy shoes, and your little chair as I give you myself. I don't care what anybody says, I shall take 'em. And the old horse and the Noey's ark.""It will be all right," said John, getting slowly to his feet. "Nobody will want to have them, or anything of mine;" and he kissed her, and went out.He went to the library and sat down by the fire.The resolution and aspiration of a few hours ago—where were they now? He felt broken in body and soul.Lindo came in, nibbled John's elbow, and scrutinized the fire. John scratched him absently on the top of his back between the tufts."Lindo," he said, "the world is a hard place to live in."But Lindo, bulging with an unusual allowance of tea-cake, and winnowing the air with an appreciative hind leg, did not think so.CHAPTER IX."Et souvent au moment où l'on croyait tenirUne espérance, on voit que c'est un souvenir."Victor Hugo.WWHEN Colonel Tempest lay in a precarious condition owing to the unexpected explosion of a revolver which he was taking to his gun-maker, and which he believed to be unloaded—when this fatality occurred, Mrs. Courtenay somewhat relaxed the stringency of her usual demeanour to him, and allowed his daughter to be with him constantly in the hospital to which he was first conveyed, and afterwards in his rooms in Brook Street when he wassufficiently convalescent to be conveyed thither.Colonel Tempest was a trying patient; in one sense he was not a patient at all; melting into querulous tears when denied a sardine on toast for which his soul thirsted, the application of which would infallibly have separated his soul from his body; and bemoaning continually, when consciousness was vouchsafed to him, the neglect of his children and the callousness of his friends. Di bore it with equanimity. It is only true accusations which one feels obliged to contradict. She did not love her father, and his continual appeals to her pity and filial devotion touched her but little. Colonel Tempest confided to his nurse in the night-watches that he was the parent of heartless children, and when Di took her place in the daytime, reviled the nurse's greed, who, whether he was sufferingor not, could eat a large meal in the middle of the night."I hate nurses," he would say. "Your poor mother had such a horrid nurse when Archie was born. I could not bear her, always making difficulties and restrictions, and locking the door, and then complaining to the doctor because I rattled the lock. I urged your mother to part with her whenever she was not in the room. But she only cried, and said she could not do without her, and that she was kind to her. That was your mother all over. She always sided against me. I must say she knew the value of tears, did your poor mother. She cried herself into hysterics when I rang the front door bell at four in the morning because I had gone out without a latch-key. I suppose she expected me to sit all night on the step. And first the nurse and then the doctor spoke to me about agitating her, andsaid it was doing her harm; so I just walked straight out of the house, and never set foot in it again for a month till they had both cleared out. They overreached themselves that time."Archie, who looked in once a day for the space of ten seconds, came in for the largest share of Colonel Tempest's reproaches."I don't like sick people," that young gentleman was wont to remark. "Don't understand 'em. No use. Nursing not in my line. Better out of the way."So, with the consideration of his kind, he was so good as to keep out of it, while Colonel Tempest wept salt tears into his already too salt beef-tea (it was always too salt or not salt enough), and remarked with bitterness that he could have fancied a sardine, and that other people's sons nursed their parents when they were at death's door. Young Grandcourt had never lefthisfather'sbedside for three weeks when he had pneumonia; but Archie, it seemed, was different."My children are not much comfort to me," he told the doctor as regularly as he put out his tongue."John might have come," he said one day to Di. "He got out of it by sending a cheque, but I think he might have taken the trouble just to come and see whether I was alive or dead.""John is ill himself," said Di."John is always ill," said Colonel Tempest, fretfully, with the half-memory of convalescence—"always ailing and coddling himself; and yet he has twice my physique. John grows coarse-looking—very coarse. I fancy he is a large eater. I remember he was ill in the summer. I went to see him. I was always sitting with him; and there did not seem to be much the matter with him. I think he gives way.""Perhaps it is a family failing," said Di, who was beginning to discover what a continual bottling up and corking down of effervescent irritation is comprised under the name of patience.How many weeks was it after Di's return to London when a cloud no larger than a man's hand arose on the clear horizon of that secret happiness which no amount of querulousness on Colonel Tempest's part could effectually dim? It was a very small cloud. It took the shape of a card with John's name on it, who had come to Brook Street to inquire after his uncle."He is in London. He will call this afternoon," said Di to herself; and as Colonel Tempest happened to be too sleepy to wish to be read to, she left him early in the afternoon, and hurried home. And she and Mrs. Courtenay sat indoors all that afternoon, though they had been lent acarriage, and they waited to make tea till after the time; and whenever the door bell rang, Mrs. Courtenay's hands shook quite as much as Di's. And aimless, foolish persons called, but John did not call."He is ill," said Mrs. Courtenay in the dusk, "or he has been prevented coming. There is some reason. He will write.""Yes," said Di, "he will come when he can." But nevertheless a little shiver of doubt crept into her heart for the first time. "If I had been in his place," she said to herself, "I should have come ill or well, and I shouldnothave been prevented."She put the thought aside instantly as unreasonable, but the shy dread she had previously felt of meeting him changed to a restless longing just to see him, just to be reassured.To be loved by one we love is, after all, so incredible a revelation that it is not wonderfulthat human nature seeks after a sign. Only a great self-esteem finds love easy to believe in.The days passed, and linked themselves to weeks. Was it fancy, or did Mrs. Courtenay become graver day by day? and Di remembered with misgiving a certain note which she had written to John the morning she left Overleigh. The little cloud grew.One afternoon Di came in rather later than usual, and after a glance round the room, which had become habitual to her, sat down by her grandmother, and poured out tea."Any callers, granny?""One—Archie."Di sighed. Coming home had always the possibility in it of finding some one sitting in the drawing-room, or a note on the hall table. Yet neither possibility happened."Archie came to say that the doctor thinks your father does not gain ground, and that he might be moved to the seaside with advantage. He wanted to know whether you could go with him. He can't get leave himself for more than a couple of days. I said I would allow you to do so, if he took your father down himself, and got him settled. He can do that in two days, and he ought to take his share. He has left everything to you so far. He mentioned," continued Mrs. Courtenay with an effort, "that he had met John at the Carlton yesterday, and that he was all right, and able to go about again as usual. He went back to Overleigh to-day."There was a long silence."What do you think, granny?" said Di at last."How long is it since you were at Overleigh?""Two months.""When you were there did you allow John to see that you had changed your mind, or were you friendly with him, as you used to be? Nothing discourages men so much as that.""No; I tried to be, but I could not. I don't know what I was, except very uncomfortable.""Had he any real opportunity of speaking to you without interruption?"Di remembered the half-hour in the entresol sitting-room. It had never occurred to her till that moment that certainly, if he had wished to do so, he could have spoken to her then."Yes," she said, "he had; and," she added, "I am sure he knew I liked him. If he did not know it then, I am quite sure he knows it now. I wrote a note.""What kind of note?""Oh, granny, that is just it. I don't know what kind it was. It seemed natural at the time. I can't remember exactly what I said. I've tried to, often. It was written in such a hurry, for you telegraphed for me, and I had been up all night waiting to hear whether he was to live or die, and it was so dreadful to have to go away without a word."Mrs. Courtenay leaned back in her chair. She seemed tired."Tell me what you think," said Di again."I think," said Mrs. Courtenay, "that if John had been seriously attached to you, he would either have come, or have answered your letter by this time. I am afraid we have made a mistake."Di did not answer. The world was crumbling down around her."I may be making one now," said Mrs. Courtenay; "but it appears to me he hashad every opportunity given him, and he has made no use of them. Men worth their saltmaketheir opportunities, but if they don't even take them when they are ready-made to their hand, they cannot be in earnest. Women don't realize what a hateful position a man is in who is deeply in love, and who has no knowledge of whether it is returned or not. He won't remain in it any longer than he can help.""John is not in that position," said Di, colouring painfully. "Granny, why don't you reproach me for writing that letter?""Because, my dear, though I regret it more than I can say, I should have done the same in your place.""And—and what would you donowin my place?""This," said Mrs. Courtenay. "You cannot dismiss the subject from your mind, but whenever it comes into your thoughts, holdsteadily before you the one fact that he is certainly aware you are attached to him, and he has not acted on that knowledge.""They say men don't care for anything when once they know they can have it," said Di hoarsely, pride wringing the words out of her. "Perhaps John is like that. He knows I—am only waiting to be asked.""Fools say many things," returned Mrs. Courtenay. "That is about as true as that women don't care for their children when they get them. A few unnatural ones don't; the others do. I have seen much trouble caused by love affairs. After middle life most people decry them, especially those who have had superficial ones themselves; for there is seldom any love at all in the mutual attraction of two young people, and the elders know very well that if it is judiciously checked it can also be judiciously replaced by something else. But a real lovewhich comes to nothing is more like the death of an only child than anything else. Itisa death. The great thing is to regard it so. I have known women go on year after year waiting, as we have been doing during the last two months, refusing to believe in its death; believing, instead, in some misunderstanding; building up theories to account for alienation; clinging to the idea that things might have turned out differently if only So-and-so had been more tactful, if they had not refused a certain invitation, if something they had said which might yet be explained had not been misconstrued. And all the time there is no misunderstanding, no need of explanation. The position is simple enough. No man is daunted by such things except in women's imaginations. What men want they will try to obtain, unless there is some positive bar, such as poverty. And if they don'ttry, remember the inference issure, that they don't really want it."Di did not answer. Her face had taken a set look, which for the first time reminded Mrs. Courtenay of her mother. She had often seen the other Diana look like that."My child," she said, stretching out her soft old hand, and laying it on the cold clenched one, "a death even of what is dearest to us, and a funeral and a headstone to mark the place, hard as it is, is as nothing compared to the death in life of an existence which is always dragging about a corpse. I have seen that not once nor twice. I want to save you from that."Di laid her face for a moment on the kind hand."I will bury my dead," she said.
'... a pity when charming womenTalk of things that they don't understand.'"
'... a pity when charming womenTalk of things that they don't understand.'"
"We should not have many subjects of conversation if we did not," said Di.
And the old woman and the young one embraced each other with tears in their eyes.
"Oh, well for him whose will is strong!"Tennyson.
"Oh, well for him whose will is strong!"Tennyson.
TTHERE come times in our lives when the mind lies broken on the revolving wheel of our thought. "I am illegitimate." That was the one thought which made John's bed for him at night, which followed him throughout the spectral day until it brought him back to the spectral night again.
It was a quiver in which were many poisoned arrows. Because the first that struck him was well-nigh unbearable, the others did not fail to reach their mark.
If he were nameless and penniless, hecould not marry Di. That was the first arrow. Such marriages are possible only in books and in that sacred profession which, in spite of numerous instances to the contrary, believes that "the Lord will provide." Di would not be allowed to marry him, even if she were willing to do so. And after a time—a long time, perhaps—she would marry some one else, possibly Lord Hemsworth.
John writhed. He had set his heart on this woman. He had bent her strong will to love him as a proud woman only can. She had been hard to win, but she was his as much as if they were already married; his by right, as the living Galatea was by right the sculptor's, who gave her marble heart the throbbing life and love of his own.
"She is mine—I cannot give her up," he said aloud.
There was no voice, nor any that answered.
Strange how the ploughshare turns up little tags and ends of forgotten rubbish buried by the mould of a few years' dust.
One utterance of Archie's, absolutely forgotten till now, was continually recurring to John's mind. Its barbed point rankled.
"There must be a mint of money in an old barrack stuffed full of gimcracks like this. If ever I wanted a hundred or two, I would trot out one of those little silver Johnnies in no time if they were mine."
And he would. If the thought of what Colonel Tempest and Archie would achieve after his own death had stung John as Archie said that, how should he bear to stand by andseethem do it? The books, the pictures, the family manuscripts which he was even then arranging, the jewels, the renowned diamond necklace that the Spanish government had offered to buy from his grandfather, which he had hoped one dayto clasp on Di's neck—all the possessions of the past but almost regal state of a great name, which he had kept with such a reverent hand—he should live to see them cast right and left, lost, sold, squandered, stolen. Archie would give the diamonds to the first actress who asked for them. Colonel Tempest would be equally "open-handed."
As the days went on, John shut his eyes to the pictures in the gallery as he passed through it. A mute suspense and reproach seemed to hang about the whole place. The Velasquez and the Titian peered at him. Tempest of the Red Hand clutched his sword-hilt uneasily. Mieris' old Dutch-woman seemed to have lost her interest in selling her marvellous string of onions to the little boy. Ribalta's Spanish Jesuit fingered the red cross of Santiago embroidered on his breast, and looked askance at John.
John turned back many times from thelibrary door. The new books which he had had bound in exact reproduction of a beautiful old missal of the Tempest collection, and for the arrival of which he had been eagerly waiting, remained untouched in their packing-cases. He could not look at them.
Once he went into the dining-hall, unused when he was alone, and opened one of the ponderous shutters. The rich light pierced the solemn gloom, catching the silver sconces on the wall and the silver figures standing in the carved niches above the fireplace.
"You will not give us up," they seemed to say; and the little cavalier turned to his lady with a shake of his head.
As John closed the shutter his eyes fell on the Tempest motto on the pane, "Je le feray durant ma vie;" and it stabbed him like a knife.
He went out into the open air like one pursued, and paced in the dead forest waitingfor the spring. All he had held so sacred meant nothing then—nothing, nothing, nothing. The Tempest motto, round which he had bound his life, round which his most solemn convictions and aspirations had grown up, had nothing to do with him. He had been mocked. He, a nameless bastard, the offspring of a mere common intrigue, had been fooled into believing that he was John Tempest, the head of one of the greatest families in England; that Overleigh belonged to him and he to it as entirely as—nay, more than—his own hands and feet and eyes.
It was as if he had been acting a serious part to the best of his ability on a stage with many others, and suddenly they had all dropped their masks and were grinning at him with satyr faces in grotesque attitudes, and he found that he alone had mistaken a screaming farce, of which he was the butt,for a drama of which he had imagined himself one of the principal figures.
John laughed a harsh wild laugh under the solemn overarching trees. Everything, himself included, had undergone a hideous distortion. His whole life was dislocated. His faith in God and man wavered. The key-stone of his existence was gone from the arch, and the stones struck him as they fell round him. The confusion was so great that for the first few days he was incapable of action, incapable of reflection, incapable of anything.
Mitty!That thought came next. That stung. He had nothing in the wide world which he could call his own; no roof for Mitty, no fire to warm her by. He was absolutely without means. His mother's small fortune he had sunk in an annuity for Mr. Goodwin. What would become of Mitty? How would she survive being uprootedfrom her little nest in the garret gallery? How would she bear to see her lamb turned adrift upon the world? Mitty was growing old, and her faithful love for him would make the last years sorrowful which were so happy now. Oh, if he could only wait till Mitty died!
John had not wept a tear for himself, but he hid his face against the trunk of one of the trees that were not his, and sobbed aloud at the thought of Mitty.
And next day came a letter from Archie, saying that Colonel Tempest was at death's door in one of the London hospitals, owing to having accidentally shot himself with a revolver. John sent money, much more than was actually necessary, and drew breath. Nothing could be done until Colonel Tempest was either convalescent or dead. He was reprieved from telling Mitty anything for the moment.
And as the spring was just beginning to whisper to the sleeping earth, and the buds of the horse-chestnut to grow white and woolly beneath the nursery windows, as John had seen them many and many a time—how or why I know not, but with the waking of the year Mitty began to fail.
She had never been ill in John's recollection. She had had "a bone in her leg" occasionally, but excepting that mysterious ailment and a touch of rheumatism in later years, Mitty had always been quite well. She was not actually ill now, but——
It was useless to tell her not to "do" her nurseries herself, and to positively forbid her to wash his socks and handkerchiefs. Mitty worked exactly the same; and John with an ache at his heart came indoors every day in time for nursery tea, and Mitty made him buttered toast, and was happy beyond words; but I think her eyesight must have begunto fail her, or she would have seen how grey and haggard the face of her "lamb" became as the days went by.
Who shall say when a thought begins? Long before we see it, it was there, but our eyes were holden. "L'amour commence par l'ombre." So do many things besides love.
The letters were destroyed.When did John think of that first, or rather, when did he first hear it whispered? Why was his mind always going back to that?
He would not have burned them if he had taken time to consider, but the first impulse to do with them as their writer had herself intended, had been acted upon before he had even thought of their bearing upon himself and others.
At any rate they were gone—quite gone—sprinkled to the four winds of heaven.
There was no other proof.
And his—no, not his father—Mr. Tempest, who knew all about him, had intended him to be his heir. He had left him his name and his place, with a solemn charge to do his duty by them.
"I have done it," said John to himself, "as those two would never have done. Shall I let all go to rack and ruin now? If I was not born a Tempest I have become one. Iamone, and if I marry one my children will be Tempests, and those two fools will not be suffered to pull Overleigh stone from stone, and drag a great name into the dust; as they would, as they assuredly would."
Had not Mr. Tempest foreseen this when he exacted that solemn promise from John on his death-bed to uphold the honour of the family? Could he break that promise? And through the vain sophistries, upsettingthem all, a mad cry rang, "Di loves me! She loves me at last! I cannot give her up!"
The challenge was thrown out into the darkness. No one took it up.
A fierce restlessness laid hold on John. He rushed up to London several times to hear how Colonel Tempest was going on. Each time he told himself that he was going to see Di. But although the first time he went to Colonel Tempest's lodgings the servant informed him that Di was with her father, he did not ask to see her. Each time he came back without having dared to go to the little house in Kensington. He could not meet those grave clear eyes with the new gentleness in them that went to his head like wine. He knew they would make him forget everything, everything except that he loved her, and would sell his very soul for her.
Time stopped. In all this enormous intervalthe buds of the horse-chestnut had not yet burst to green. It was ages since he had seen the first primrose, and yet to-day, as he walked in the woods on the day after his return from another futile journey to London, they were all out in the forest still.
And something stirred within him that had not deigned to take notice of all his feverish asseverations and wanderings, that had not rebuked him, that had not even listened when he had said repeatedly that he could not give up Di.
By an invisible hand the challenge was taken up, and John knew the time of conflict was at hand.
He walked on and on, not knowing where he went, past the forest and the meadowland, and away over the rolling moors, with only Lindo for his companion.
At last his newly returned strength failinghim, he threw himself down in the dry windswept heather. He had not outstripped his thoughts. This was the appointed place. He knew it even as he flung himself down. His hour was come.
It was an April afternoon, pale and bleak. The late frost had come back, and had silenced the birds. One only deeply in love, somewhere near at hand, but invisible, repeated plaintively over and over again a small bird-name in the silence of the shrinking spring.
And John's heart said over and over again one little word—
"Di, Di, Di!"
There are some sacrifices which partake of the nature of self-mutilation. That is why principle often falls before the onslaught of a deep human passion, which is nothing but the rebellion of human nature brought to bay, against the execution upon itself of thatdread command of the spiritual nature, "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off."
To give up certain affections is with some natures to give up all possibility of the quickening into life of that latent maturer self that craves for existence in each one of us. It is to take, for better for worse, a more meagre form of life, destitute, not of happiness perhaps, but of those common joys and sorrows which most of all bind us in sympathy with our fellow-men. What marriage in itself is to the majority, the love of one fellow-creature, and one only, is to the few. To a few, happily a very few, there is only one hand that can minister among the pressure of the crowd. There was none other woman in the world for John, save only Di. Sayings common to vulgarity, profaned by every breach of promise case, can yet be true sometimes.
"Di, Di, Di!" said John.
He tried to recall her face, but he could not. When they were together he had not seen her; he had only felt her presence, only trembled at each slight movement of her hands. He always watched them when he was talking to her. He knew every movement of those strong, slender hands by heart. She had a little way of opening and shutting her left hand as she talked. He smiled even now as he thought of it. And she had a certain wave in her hair just above the ear, that was not the same over the other ear. But her face—no, he could not see her face.
He tried again. They were sitting once again, he and she, not very near, nor very far apart, in the low entresol room at Overleigh. He could see her now. She was arranging the lilies of the valley, and he was saying to himself, as he watched her with his chin in his hands, "This is only thebeginning. There will be many times like this, only dearer and sweeter than this."
Many times! That deep conviction had proved as false as all the rest—as false as everything else which he had trusted.
And all in a moment as he looked, as he remembered, was it endurance, was it principle, that seemed to snap?
He set his teeth and ground his heel into the earth. Agony had come upon him. Passion, writhing in torment, rose gigantic without warning and seized him in a Titan grip. It was a duel to the death.
John sat motionless in the solitude of the heather. The bird was silent. On either hand the level moors met the level sky. Lindo walked in and out in semi and total eclipse near at hand, now emerging life-size upon a hillock, now visible only as an erect travelling tail amid the heather. The suncame faintly out. There was a little speech of bees, a little quivering among the poised spears of the tall bleached grasses against the sky.
Time passed.
John's was not the easy faith which believes that in another world what has been given up in this will be restored a thousandfold. The hope of future reward had no more power to move him than the fear of future punishment. The heaven of rewards of which those speak who have authority, would be no heaven at all to many; a place from which the noblest would turn away. Love worthy of the name, even down here, gives all, asking nothing back.
John did not try to define even to himself the faith by which he had lived so far; but as the veiled sun stooped near and nearer to the west, he began to see, as clearly as he saw the sword-grass shaking against the sky,that he was about to remain true to it, or be false to it for ever.
Perhaps that faith was more than anything else a stern allegiance to the Giver of that law within the heart which independent natures ever recognize as the only true authority; which John had early elected to obey, which he had obeyed with ease, till now. He had been condemned by many as a freethinker; for to be obedient to the divine prompting has ever been stigmatized as lawlessness by those who are obedient to a written code. John had no code.
Yet God, who made (if the tourists who cheaply move in flocks on beaten highways could only believe it) those solitary, isolated natures, knew what He was about. And to those to whom little human guidance is vouchsafed He adds courage, and that self-reliance which comes only of a deep-rooted faith in a God who will not keepsilence, who will not leave the traveller journeying towards Him unpiloted upon a lonely shore, or ultimately suffer His least holy one to see corruption.
John looked wildly round him. Even nature seemed to have turned against him. It spoke of peace when there was no peace. For nature has no power to mitigate the bitterness of that cup of self-surrender which even Christ Himself, beneath the kindred stars of still Gethsemane, prayed might pass from Him.
John hid his convulsed face in his hands.
The crises of life have their hour of loneliness and prostration, their agony and bloody sweat. That cup which may not pass, how ennobling it is to read of in the lives of others, how interesting to theorize upon in our own; how appalling in actual experience, when it is in our hands to drink or to refuse;refusing for ever with it, if we accept it not, the hand of Him who offers it!
The solemn world of grey earth and sky waited. The light in the west waited. How much longer were they to wait? How much longer would this bowed figure sway itself to and fro?
"I will do it!" said John suddenly, and with a harsh inarticulate cry he flung himself down on his face among the heather, clutching the soft earth; for the Hand of the God whom he would not deny was heavy on him.
"The dead abide with us! Though stark and coldEarth seems to grip them, they are with us still.They have forged our chains of being for good or ill."Mathilde Blind.
"The dead abide with us! Though stark and coldEarth seems to grip them, they are with us still.They have forged our chains of being for good or ill."Mathilde Blind.
JJOHN was late. Mitty looked out several times to see if he were coming, and then put down the tea-cake to the fire.
At last his step came slowly along the garret gallery, and Lindo, who approved of nursery tea, walked in first, his dignity somewhat impaired by a brier hanging from his back flounce.
John saw the firelight through the open door, and the figure in the low chair waitingfor him. She had heard him coming, and was getting stiffly up to make the tea.
"Mitty, you should not wait for me," he said, sitting down in his own place by the fire.
Would they let her keep the brass kettle and her silver teapot? Yes, no doubt they would; but somebody would have to ask. He supposed he should be that somebody. Everything she possessed had been bought by himself with other people's money.
He let the tea last as long as possible. If Lindo had more than his share of tea-cake, no one was the wiser. At last Mitty cleared away, and sat down in the rocking-chair.
"Don't light the candles, Mitty."
"Why not, my dear? I can't be settin' with my hands before me, and holes in your socks a shame to be seen."
John came and sat down on the floor beside her, and leaned his head against her.
"Never mind the socks just now. There is something I want to talk to you about."
He looked at the fire through the bars of the high nursery fender, and something in its glimmer, seen from so near the floor through the remembered pattern of the wires which he had lost sight of for twenty years, suddenly recalled the times when he had sat on the hearthrug, as he was sitting now, with his head against Mitty's knee, confiding to her what he would do when he was a man.
"Do you remember, Mitty," he said, "how I used to tell you that when I grew up you should ride in a carriage, and have a gold brooch, and a clock that played a tune?"
"I remember, my darling; and how, next time Charles went into York, you give him all you had, and half a crown it was, to buy me a brooch, and the silly staring fool went and spent it, and brought back that great thing with the mock stones in. And youwas as pleased as pleased. Eh! I was angry with Charles for taking your bits of money, and all he said was, 'Well, Mrs. Emson, I went to a many shops, and I give five shillin's for it so as to get a big un.'"
"I remember it," said John. "It was about the size of a small poultice. And so Charles paid half. Good old Charles! I seem to have been much deceived in my youth."
His deep-set eyes watched the fire, watched the semblance of a little castle in the heart of the glow. Mitty was quite happy with her darling's head against her knee.
"When the castle falls in I will tell her," said John to himself.
But the fire had settled itself. The castle held. At last Mitty put out her hand, and gave it a poke; not with the brass poker, of course, but with a little black slave which did that polished aristocrat's work for it.
"Mitty," said John, "I am not so rich now as when I was in pinafores; and even then, you see, the brooch was not bought with my own money. Charles gave half. I have never given you anything that was paid for with my own money. I have been spending other people's all my life."
"Why, bless your dear heart!" said Mitty; "and who gave me my silver teapot, I should like to know, and the ivory workbox, and that very kettle a-staring you in the face, and the Wedgwood tea-things, and—and everything, if it was not you?"
John did not answer. His face twitched.
The bars of the fender were blurred. The brass kettle, instead of staring him in the face, melted quite away.
Mitty stroked his head and face.
"Cryin'!" she said—"my lamby cryin'!"
"Not for myself, Mitty."
"Who for, then? For that Miss Dinah?"
"No, Mitty, for you. This is no home for you and me." He took her hard hand and rubbed his cheek against it. "It belongs to Colonel Tempest. I am not my father's son, Mitty."
"Well, my precious," said Mitty, soothingly, in no wise discomposed by what John feared would have quite overwhelmed her, "and if your poor mammy did say as much to me when she was light-headed, when her pains was on her, there's no call to fret about that, seeing it's a long time ago, and her dead and all. Poor thing! I can see her now, with her pretty eyes and her little hands, and she'd put her head against me and say, 'Nursey' (Nursey I was to her), 'I'm not fit neither to live nor to die.' Many and many's the night I've roared to think of her after she was gone, when you was asleep in your crib. But there's no need for you to fret, my deary."
John's heart contracted. Mitty knew also. Oh, if he might but have started life knowing what even Mitty knew!
"They'd no business to marry her to Mr. Tempest," continued Mitty, shaking her head, "and she, poor thing, idolizing that black Lord Fane, as was her first cousin. It wasn't likely, after that, she'd settle to Mr. Tempest, who was as light as tow. It was against nature. She never took a bit of interest in him, nor him in her neither, that I could see. A hard man he was, too—a hard man. She sent for him when she was dying. She would not see him while there was any chance. 'Forgive me,' she says; she says it over and over, me holding her up. 'I wouldn't ask it if I was staying, but I'm doing the best I can by dying. It's not much to make up, but it's the best I can. And,' she says, 'don't think, Jack, as all women are bad like me. There's a manygood ones as 'ull make you happy yet when I'm gone.' I can see him now, standing by her, looking past her out of the window with his face like a flint. 'I've known two false ones,' he says; and he went away without another word. And she says after a bit to me, 'I've always been frightened at the very thought of dying, but it's living I'm frightened of now.' Eh! Master John, your poor mammy! She did repent. And Mr. Tempest sent for me to the library after the funeral, and he says, 'Promise me, nurse, that you'll never repeat what your mistress said to me when she was not herself.' And he looked hard at me, and I promised. And I've never breathed it to any living soul, not to one I haven't, from that day to this."
"I found it out three weeks ago," said John. "And as I am not Mr. Tempest's son, everything I have belongs by right to Colonel Tempest, the next heir, not tome. Overleigh is not mine. It never was mine."
But Mitty could not be made to understand what his mother's frailty had to do with John. When at last she grasped the idea that John would make known the fact that he was not his father's son, she was simply incredulous that her lamb could do such a thing—could bring shame upon his own mother. No, whatever else he might do, he would never do that. Why, Mrs. Alcock would know; and friends as she was with Mrs. Alcock, and had been for years, such a word had never passed her lips. And the people in the village, and the trades-people, and Jones and Evans from York, who were putting up the new curtains,—everybody would know. Mitty became quite agitated. Surely, surely, he'd never tell against his poor mother in her grave.
"Mitty," said John, forcing himself torepeat what it had been difficult enough to say once, "don't you see that I can't stay here and keep what is not mine? Nothing is mine if I am not Mr. Tempest's son. I ought never to have been called so. We must go away."
But Mitty was perplexed.
"Not to that great weary house in London," she said anxiously, "with every spot of water to carry up from the bottom?"
"That is not mine either," said John in despair, rising to his feet and standing before her. "Oh, Mitty, try and understand. Nothing is mine—nothing, nothing, nothing; not even the clothes I have on. I am a beggar."
Mitty looked at him in a dazed way. She could not understand, but she could believe. Her chin began to tremble.
It was almost a relief to see at last the tears which he had dreaded from the first."My lamb a beggar," she said over and over again; and she cried a little, but not much. Mitty was getting old, and she was not able to realize a change—a change so incomprehensible as this.
"But we need not be unhappy," said John, kneeling down by her, and putting his arms round her. "We shall be together still. Wherever I go you will go with me. I don't know yet where it will be, but we shall have a little home together somewhere, just you and I; and you'll do my socks and handkerchiefs, won't you, Mitty? and"—John controlled his voice, but he hid his face in her lap that she might not see it—"we'll be so happy together." At the moment I think John would have given up heaven itself to make that hour smooth to Mitty. "And your cakes, Mitty," he went on hoarsely. "They are better than any one else's. You shall have a little kitchen, and you will makethe cakes yourself, won't you? and the"—his voice stumbled heavily—"the rock buns."
"My precious," said Mitty, sobbing, "don't you fret yourself! I can make a many things besides them; Albert puddings and moulds, and them little cheese straws, and a sight of things. There's a deal of work in my old hands yet. It's only the spring as has took the starch out of me. I always feel a sinking in the spring. Lord, my darling, the times and times again I've been settin' here just dithering with a mossel of crotchet, or idling over a bit of reading, and wishing you was having a set of nightshirts to make!"
Love had found out the way. John had appealed to the right instinct. Mitty was already busying herself with a future in which she should minister to her child's comfort, and John saw, with a relief that washalf a pang, that the calamity of his life held hardly any place in the heart that loved him so much.
"I've a sight of things," continued Mitty, wiping her eyes. "Books and pictures and cushions put away. My precious shall not go short. And there's two pair of linen sheets as I bought with my own money, and piller-slips to match, and six silver teaspoons and one dessert. My lamb shall have things comfortable about him."
She fell to communing with herself. John did not speak.
"I'll leave my places tidy," said Mitty. "Tidy I didn't find 'em, but tidy I'll leave 'em. I can't go till after the spring cleaning, Master John. I'll never trust that Fanny to do the scrubbing unless I'm behind her. I caught her washing round the mats instead of under only last week."
John felt unable to enter into the questionof the spring cleaning. There was another silence.
At last Mitty said defiantly, "And I shall take your morroccy shoes, and your little chair as I give you myself. I don't care what anybody says, I shall take 'em. And the old horse and the Noey's ark."
"It will be all right," said John, getting slowly to his feet. "Nobody will want to have them, or anything of mine;" and he kissed her, and went out.
He went to the library and sat down by the fire.
The resolution and aspiration of a few hours ago—where were they now? He felt broken in body and soul.
Lindo came in, nibbled John's elbow, and scrutinized the fire. John scratched him absently on the top of his back between the tufts.
"Lindo," he said, "the world is a hard place to live in."
But Lindo, bulging with an unusual allowance of tea-cake, and winnowing the air with an appreciative hind leg, did not think so.
"Et souvent au moment où l'on croyait tenirUne espérance, on voit que c'est un souvenir."Victor Hugo.
"Et souvent au moment où l'on croyait tenirUne espérance, on voit que c'est un souvenir."Victor Hugo.
WWHEN Colonel Tempest lay in a precarious condition owing to the unexpected explosion of a revolver which he was taking to his gun-maker, and which he believed to be unloaded—when this fatality occurred, Mrs. Courtenay somewhat relaxed the stringency of her usual demeanour to him, and allowed his daughter to be with him constantly in the hospital to which he was first conveyed, and afterwards in his rooms in Brook Street when he wassufficiently convalescent to be conveyed thither.
Colonel Tempest was a trying patient; in one sense he was not a patient at all; melting into querulous tears when denied a sardine on toast for which his soul thirsted, the application of which would infallibly have separated his soul from his body; and bemoaning continually, when consciousness was vouchsafed to him, the neglect of his children and the callousness of his friends. Di bore it with equanimity. It is only true accusations which one feels obliged to contradict. She did not love her father, and his continual appeals to her pity and filial devotion touched her but little. Colonel Tempest confided to his nurse in the night-watches that he was the parent of heartless children, and when Di took her place in the daytime, reviled the nurse's greed, who, whether he was sufferingor not, could eat a large meal in the middle of the night.
"I hate nurses," he would say. "Your poor mother had such a horrid nurse when Archie was born. I could not bear her, always making difficulties and restrictions, and locking the door, and then complaining to the doctor because I rattled the lock. I urged your mother to part with her whenever she was not in the room. But she only cried, and said she could not do without her, and that she was kind to her. That was your mother all over. She always sided against me. I must say she knew the value of tears, did your poor mother. She cried herself into hysterics when I rang the front door bell at four in the morning because I had gone out without a latch-key. I suppose she expected me to sit all night on the step. And first the nurse and then the doctor spoke to me about agitating her, andsaid it was doing her harm; so I just walked straight out of the house, and never set foot in it again for a month till they had both cleared out. They overreached themselves that time."
Archie, who looked in once a day for the space of ten seconds, came in for the largest share of Colonel Tempest's reproaches.
"I don't like sick people," that young gentleman was wont to remark. "Don't understand 'em. No use. Nursing not in my line. Better out of the way."
So, with the consideration of his kind, he was so good as to keep out of it, while Colonel Tempest wept salt tears into his already too salt beef-tea (it was always too salt or not salt enough), and remarked with bitterness that he could have fancied a sardine, and that other people's sons nursed their parents when they were at death's door. Young Grandcourt had never lefthisfather'sbedside for three weeks when he had pneumonia; but Archie, it seemed, was different.
"My children are not much comfort to me," he told the doctor as regularly as he put out his tongue.
"John might have come," he said one day to Di. "He got out of it by sending a cheque, but I think he might have taken the trouble just to come and see whether I was alive or dead."
"John is ill himself," said Di.
"John is always ill," said Colonel Tempest, fretfully, with the half-memory of convalescence—"always ailing and coddling himself; and yet he has twice my physique. John grows coarse-looking—very coarse. I fancy he is a large eater. I remember he was ill in the summer. I went to see him. I was always sitting with him; and there did not seem to be much the matter with him. I think he gives way."
"Perhaps it is a family failing," said Di, who was beginning to discover what a continual bottling up and corking down of effervescent irritation is comprised under the name of patience.
How many weeks was it after Di's return to London when a cloud no larger than a man's hand arose on the clear horizon of that secret happiness which no amount of querulousness on Colonel Tempest's part could effectually dim? It was a very small cloud. It took the shape of a card with John's name on it, who had come to Brook Street to inquire after his uncle.
"He is in London. He will call this afternoon," said Di to herself; and as Colonel Tempest happened to be too sleepy to wish to be read to, she left him early in the afternoon, and hurried home. And she and Mrs. Courtenay sat indoors all that afternoon, though they had been lent acarriage, and they waited to make tea till after the time; and whenever the door bell rang, Mrs. Courtenay's hands shook quite as much as Di's. And aimless, foolish persons called, but John did not call.
"He is ill," said Mrs. Courtenay in the dusk, "or he has been prevented coming. There is some reason. He will write."
"Yes," said Di, "he will come when he can." But nevertheless a little shiver of doubt crept into her heart for the first time. "If I had been in his place," she said to herself, "I should have come ill or well, and I shouldnothave been prevented."
She put the thought aside instantly as unreasonable, but the shy dread she had previously felt of meeting him changed to a restless longing just to see him, just to be reassured.
To be loved by one we love is, after all, so incredible a revelation that it is not wonderfulthat human nature seeks after a sign. Only a great self-esteem finds love easy to believe in.
The days passed, and linked themselves to weeks. Was it fancy, or did Mrs. Courtenay become graver day by day? and Di remembered with misgiving a certain note which she had written to John the morning she left Overleigh. The little cloud grew.
One afternoon Di came in rather later than usual, and after a glance round the room, which had become habitual to her, sat down by her grandmother, and poured out tea.
"Any callers, granny?"
"One—Archie."
Di sighed. Coming home had always the possibility in it of finding some one sitting in the drawing-room, or a note on the hall table. Yet neither possibility happened.
"Archie came to say that the doctor thinks your father does not gain ground, and that he might be moved to the seaside with advantage. He wanted to know whether you could go with him. He can't get leave himself for more than a couple of days. I said I would allow you to do so, if he took your father down himself, and got him settled. He can do that in two days, and he ought to take his share. He has left everything to you so far. He mentioned," continued Mrs. Courtenay with an effort, "that he had met John at the Carlton yesterday, and that he was all right, and able to go about again as usual. He went back to Overleigh to-day."
There was a long silence.
"What do you think, granny?" said Di at last.
"How long is it since you were at Overleigh?"
"Two months."
"When you were there did you allow John to see that you had changed your mind, or were you friendly with him, as you used to be? Nothing discourages men so much as that."
"No; I tried to be, but I could not. I don't know what I was, except very uncomfortable."
"Had he any real opportunity of speaking to you without interruption?"
Di remembered the half-hour in the entresol sitting-room. It had never occurred to her till that moment that certainly, if he had wished to do so, he could have spoken to her then.
"Yes," she said, "he had; and," she added, "I am sure he knew I liked him. If he did not know it then, I am quite sure he knows it now. I wrote a note."
"What kind of note?"
"Oh, granny, that is just it. I don't know what kind it was. It seemed natural at the time. I can't remember exactly what I said. I've tried to, often. It was written in such a hurry, for you telegraphed for me, and I had been up all night waiting to hear whether he was to live or die, and it was so dreadful to have to go away without a word."
Mrs. Courtenay leaned back in her chair. She seemed tired.
"Tell me what you think," said Di again.
"I think," said Mrs. Courtenay, "that if John had been seriously attached to you, he would either have come, or have answered your letter by this time. I am afraid we have made a mistake."
Di did not answer. The world was crumbling down around her.
"I may be making one now," said Mrs. Courtenay; "but it appears to me he hashad every opportunity given him, and he has made no use of them. Men worth their saltmaketheir opportunities, but if they don't even take them when they are ready-made to their hand, they cannot be in earnest. Women don't realize what a hateful position a man is in who is deeply in love, and who has no knowledge of whether it is returned or not. He won't remain in it any longer than he can help."
"John is not in that position," said Di, colouring painfully. "Granny, why don't you reproach me for writing that letter?"
"Because, my dear, though I regret it more than I can say, I should have done the same in your place."
"And—and what would you donowin my place?"
"This," said Mrs. Courtenay. "You cannot dismiss the subject from your mind, but whenever it comes into your thoughts, holdsteadily before you the one fact that he is certainly aware you are attached to him, and he has not acted on that knowledge."
"They say men don't care for anything when once they know they can have it," said Di hoarsely, pride wringing the words out of her. "Perhaps John is like that. He knows I—am only waiting to be asked."
"Fools say many things," returned Mrs. Courtenay. "That is about as true as that women don't care for their children when they get them. A few unnatural ones don't; the others do. I have seen much trouble caused by love affairs. After middle life most people decry them, especially those who have had superficial ones themselves; for there is seldom any love at all in the mutual attraction of two young people, and the elders know very well that if it is judiciously checked it can also be judiciously replaced by something else. But a real lovewhich comes to nothing is more like the death of an only child than anything else. Itisa death. The great thing is to regard it so. I have known women go on year after year waiting, as we have been doing during the last two months, refusing to believe in its death; believing, instead, in some misunderstanding; building up theories to account for alienation; clinging to the idea that things might have turned out differently if only So-and-so had been more tactful, if they had not refused a certain invitation, if something they had said which might yet be explained had not been misconstrued. And all the time there is no misunderstanding, no need of explanation. The position is simple enough. No man is daunted by such things except in women's imaginations. What men want they will try to obtain, unless there is some positive bar, such as poverty. And if they don'ttry, remember the inference issure, that they don't really want it."
Di did not answer. Her face had taken a set look, which for the first time reminded Mrs. Courtenay of her mother. She had often seen the other Diana look like that.
"My child," she said, stretching out her soft old hand, and laying it on the cold clenched one, "a death even of what is dearest to us, and a funeral and a headstone to mark the place, hard as it is, is as nothing compared to the death in life of an existence which is always dragging about a corpse. I have seen that not once nor twice. I want to save you from that."
Di laid her face for a moment on the kind hand.
"I will bury my dead," she said.