CHAPTER XIV."The earth buildeth on the earth castles and towers;The earth sayeth to the earth, 'All shall be ours;'The earth walketh on the earth, glistering like gold;The earth goeth to the earth sooner than it wold."JJOHN was late next morning. He had not slept for many nights, and the heavy slumber of entire exhaustion fell on him towards dawn. It was nearly midday when he re-entered the sitting-room where he had sat up so late the night before.He went to Archie's room to see whether he had come in; but it was empty.He was impatient to be gone, to get away from that marble-topped side-table, and the horsehair chairs, and the gilt clock on themantelpiece. At least, he thought he wished to get away from these things; but it was from himself that he really wanted to get away—from this miserable tortured self that was all that was left of him in this his hour of weakness and prostration; the hour which inevitably succeeds all great exertions of strength. How could he drag this wretched creature about with him? He abhorred himself; the thought of being with himself was intolerable. It seems hard that the nobler side of human nature, which can cheer and urge its weaker brother up such steep paths of duty and self-sacrifice, should desert us when the summit is achieved, leaving the weaker to wail unreproved over its bleeding feet and rent garments till we madden at the sound.An overwhelming sense of loneliness fell on John as he sat waiting for Archie to come in. He had no strong, earnest, steadfastself to bear him company. He felt deserted, lost.Who has not experienced it, that fierce depression and loathing of all life, which, though at the time we know it not, is only the writhing and fainting of the starved human affections! The very ordinary sources from which the sharpest suffering springs, shows us later on how narrow are the limits within which our common human nature works, and from which yet irradiate such diversities of pain.Alphonse disturbed him at last to ask whether he and "Monsieur" would dine attable d'hôte. "Monsieur," with a glance at Archie's door, had not yet come in.John said they would both dine; and then, roused somewhat by the interruption, an idea struck him. Had Archie, in the excitement of the moment, gone back to England without telling him?He went to the room, but there were no evidences of departure. On the bed the clothes were thrown which Archie had worn on the previous day. The gold watch John had given him was on the dressing-table. He had evidently left it there on purpose, not caring, perhaps, to risk taking it with him. All the paraphernalia of a man who studies his appearance were strewed on the table. There was his little moustache-brush, and phial ofbrilliantineto burnish it. John knew that he would never have leftthatbehind. Archie had evidently intended to return.In the mean while hour succeeded hour, but he did not come. That Archie should have been out all night was not surprising, but that he should be still out now in his evening clothes in the daytime, began to be incomprehensible. After a few premonitory tremors of misgiving, which, man-like, helaughed at himself for entertaining, John took alarm.Evening fell, and still no Archie. And then a hideous night followed, in which John forgot everything in heaven above or earth beneath except Archie. The police were informed. The actress at whose house he had supped after the play was interviewed, but could only vociferate between her sobs that he had left her house with the remainder of her party in the early hours of the morning, and she had not seen him since.Directly the office opened, John telegraphed to his colonel to know if he had returned to London. The answer came, "Absent without leave."John remembered that he had only three days' leave, and that the third day was up yesterday. Archie would not have forgotten that.A nightmare of a day passed. John hadbeen out during the greater part of it, rushing back at intervals in the hope, that was no longer anything but a masked despair, of finding Archie in his rooms on his return.In the dusk of the afternoon he came back once more, and peered for the twentieth time into the littered bedroom, which the frightened servants had left exactly as Archie had left it. He was standing in the doorway looking into the empty room, where a certain horror was beginning to gather round the familiar objects with which it was strewed, when a voice spoke to him.It was the superintendent of police to whom he had gone long ago—the night before—when first the horror began. Alphonse, who had shown him up, was watching through the doorway.The man said something in French. John did not hear him, but it did not matter much.He knew. They went downstairs together. Alphonse brought him his hat and stick. The other waiters were gathered in a little knot at thetable d'hôtedoor. A fiacre was waiting under the archway. John and the superintendent got into it, and it drove off at once without waiting for directions. They were lighting the lamps in the streets. The dusk was falling, falling like the shadow of death. They drove deeper and ever deeper into it.Time ceased to be."Nous voiçi, Monsieur," said the man, gravely, as they pulled up before a building, the long low outline of which was dimly visible.John knew it was the Morgue.He followed his guide down a white-washed passage into a long room. There was a cluster of people at the further end, towards which the man was leading him,and in the dusk there was a subdued whispering, and a sound of trickling water.As they reached the further end, some one turned on the electric light, and it fell full on a man's figure on one of the slabs. A little crowd of people were peering through the glass screen at the toy which the Seine had tired of and cast aside."Ah! qu'il est beau," said a high woman's voice.John shaded his eyes and looked.The face was turned away, but John knew the hair, fair to whiteness in that brilliant light, as he had often seen it in London ball-rooms.They let him through the glass screen which kept off the crowd, and, oblivious of the many eyes watching him, John bent over the slab and touched the clenched marble hand with the signet-ring on it which he had given him when they were at Oxford together.Yes, it was Archie.The dead face was set in the nervous grin with which he had been wont in life to meet the inevitable and the distasteful.The blue pencillings of dissolution had touched to inexorable distinctness the thin lines of dissipation in the cheek and at the corners of the mouth. The death of the body had overtaken the creeping death of the soul. Their landmarks met.The poor beautiful effeminate face, devoid of all that makes death bearable, stared up at the electric light.An impotent overwhelming compassion, as for some ephemeral irresponsible being of another creation, who knows not how to guide itself in this grim world of law, and has wandered blindfold within the sweep of a vast machinery of which it knew nothing, wrung John's heart. He hid his face in his hands.CHAPTER XV."For human bliss and woe in the frail threadOf human life are all so closely twined,That till the shears of fate the texture shred,The close succession cannot be disjoined,Nor dare we, from our hour, judge that which comes behind."Sir Walter Scott.DDI had seen her father and Archie off on their journey to Brighton, and, having arranged to replace her brother in three days' time, was surprised when a hasty note, the morning after their departure, informed her that Archie had been recalled to Londonon business, and that she must go to her father at once.Mrs. Courtenay was incensed. Archie had shirked before, and now he had shirked again. But Colonel Tempest remained in far too precarious a condition for her to refuse to allow her granddaughter to go, as she would certainly otherwise have done. So Di went off the morning after the Speaker's party.She had told Mrs. Courtenay that she had met John there."In one way I am glad to have met him," she said firmly, her proud lip quivering. "Any uncertainty I may have been weak enough to feel is at an end, and it was time the end should come. For, in spite of all you said, I had had a lingering idea that if we met——. And now wehavemet—and he had evidently no wish to see me again."Mrs. Courtenay looked fixedly at the beautiful pallid face, and wondered that she had ever wished Di had a heart."This pain will pass," she said gently. "You have always believed me, Di; believe me now. Take courage and wait. You have had an untroubled life till now. That has passed. Trouble has come. It is part of life. It will pass too; not the feeling, perhaps, but the suffering.""Good-bye, my child," she said a little later, kissing the girl's cold cheek with a tenderness which Di was powerless to return. "Take care of yourself. Go out every day; the sea air will do you good. And tell your father I cannot spare you more than a fortnight."Di would have given anything to show her grandmother that she was thankful—oh, how thankful in this grey world!—for her sympathy and love, but she had no words. She kissed Mrs. Courtenay, and went down to the cab.Mrs. Courtenay remained motionless untilshe heard it drive away. Then she let two tears run down from below her spectacles, and wiped them away. No more followed them. The old cannot give way like the young. Mrs. Courtenay had once said that nothing had power to touch her very nearly; but she was still vulnerable on one point. Her old heart, worn with so many troubles, ached for her granddaughter."Thank God," she said to herself, "that in the next world there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Perhaps God Almighty sees it's a mistake."Di found Colonel Tempest wrapped up in aduvetin an armchair by the window of his sitting-room, in a state of equal indignation against his children for deserting him, and against the rain for blurring the seaview from the window. With his nurse, it is hardly necessary to add, he was not on speaking terms—a fact which seemed tocause that patient, apathetic person very little annoyance, she being, as she told Di, "accustomed to gentlemen."Di soothed him as best she could, took his tray from the nurse at the door, so that he might be spared as much as possible the sight of the most hideous woman in the world, rang for lights, and drew a curtain before the untactful rain, while he declaimed alternately on the enormity of Archie's behaviour, and on the callousness of Mrs. Courtenay in endeavouring to keep his daughter, his only daughter, away from him. Colonel Tempest and Archie detested Mrs. Courtenay. However much the father and son might disagree and bicker on most subjects, they could always sing a little duet together in perfect harmony about her.Colonel Tempest began a feeble solo on that theme to Di when he had finished withArchie; but Di visibly froze, and somehow the subject, often as it was started, always dropped. Di, as Colonel Tempest frequently informed her, did not care to hear the truth about her grandmother. If she knew all thathedid about her, and what her behaviour had been tohim, she would not be so fond of her as she evidently was.Earlier in his illness Di had been obliged to exercise patience with her father, but she needed none now. That is the one small compensation for deep trouble. It numbs the power of feeling small irritations. It is when it begins to lift somewhat that the small irritations fit themselves out with new stings. Di had not reached that stage yet. The doctor who came daily to see her father looked narrowly at her, and ordered her to go out-of-doors as much as possible, in wet weather or fine."I sometimes take a little nap afterluncheon," said Colonel Tempest with dignity. "You might go out then, Di.""Miss Tempest will in any case go out morning and afternoon," said the doctor with decision.Colonel Tempest had before had his doubts whether the doctor understood his case, but now they were confirmed. He wished to change doctors, and a painful scene ensued between him and Di, in the course of which a hole was kicked in theduvet, and a cup of broth was upset. But it is an ascertained fact that women are not amenable to reason. Di sewed up the hole in theduvet, rubbed the carpet, and remained, as Colonel Tempest hysterically informed her, "as obstinate as her mother before her."On the second morning after her arrival at Brighton she was sitting with Colonel Tempest, reading the papers to him, when the waiter brought in the letters. Therewere none for her, two for her father. One was a foreign letter with a blue French stamp. She took them to him where he lay on the sofa.Colonel Tempest looked at them."Nothing from Archie again," he said. "He does not care even to write and ask whether I am alive or dead.""Archie is not a good hand at writing," said Di, echoing, for the sake of saying something, the time-honoured masculine plea for exemption from the tedium of domestic correspondence."This is John's hand," said Colonel Tempest. "A Paris postmark. How these rich men do rush about!"Di had actually not known it was John's writing. She had never seen it, to her knowledge, but nevertheless it appeared to her extraordinary that she had not at once divined that it was his. She was notanxious to hear her father's comments on John's letter, or the threadbare remark, sacred to the poor relation, that when the rich onewassitting down to draw a cheque he might just as well have written it for double the amount. He would never have known the difference. The poor relation always knows exactly how much the rich one can afford to give. So Di told her father she was going out, and left the room.It stung her, as she laced her boots, to think that John had probably sent another cheque to cover their expenses at the hotel, and that the fried soles and semolina-pudding which she had ordered for luncheon would be paid for by him. It exasperated her still more to know that whatever John sent, Colonel Tempest would pronounce to be mean.Before she had finished lacing her boots, however, the sitting-room door was opened,and Di heard her father calling wildly to her.Colonel Tempest was not allowed to move, except with great precaution, owing to the slow healing of the obstinate internal injury caused by that unlucky pistol-shot.She rushed headlong downstairs."Father!" she cried, horrified to find him standing on the landing. "Father, come back at once!" And she put her arms round him, and supported him back to the sofa.He was trembling from head to foot. She saw that something had happened, but he was not in a state to be questioned. She administered what restoratives she had at hand, and presently the constantly moving lips got out the words, "Read it;" and Colonel Tempest pointed to a letter on the floor."Read it," repeated Colonel Tempest,lying back on his cushions, and recovering from his momentary collapse. "Read it."Di picked up the letter and sat down by the window. She was suddenly too tired to stand. Her father was talking wildly, but she did not hear him; was calling to her to read it aloud, but she did not hear him. She saw only John's strong, small handwriting.It was a business letter, couched in the most matter-of-fact terms. John stated his case—expressed a formal regret that the facts he mentioned had not come to light at Mr. Tempest's death, mentioned that the accumulation of income during his minority had fortunately remained untouched, that he had desired his lawyer to communicate with Colonel Tempest, and signed himself "John Fane." He had written the word "Tempest," and had then struck it through.Di pressed her forehead against the glass on which the rain was beating.Was the emotion which was shattering her joy or sorrow, or both?She knew it was joy. In a lightning-flash of comprehension she realized that it was this awful calamity which had kept John silent, which had held him back from coming to her, from asking her to marry him. He loved her still! Love, dead and buried, had risen out of his grave. The impossible had happened. John loved her still."I cannot bear it," she said; and for a moment the long yellow waves, and her father's impatient voice, and even John's letter, were alike blotted out, unheard.Colonel Tempest considered Di's apathy, after she had read the letter, unfeeling and unsympathetic in the extreme, and he did not hesitate to tell her so. But when she presently turned her averted face towardshim he was already off on another tack, his excitement, which seemed to increase rather than diminish, tossing him as a wave tosses a spar."Twenty years," he said tremulously. "Think of it, Di—not that you seem to care! Twenty years have I toiled and moiled in poverty, twenty years have I and my children been ground down while that nameless interloper has spent our money right and left. Oh, my God! I've got it at last. I've got my own at last. But who will give me back those twenty years?" and Colonel Tempest's voice broke into a sob.Other consequences of that letter began to dawn on Di's awakening consciousness."Then John," she said, bewildered. "Oh, father, what will become of John?""John," said Colonel Tempest, bitterly, "is now just where I was twenty years ago—disinherited, penniless. He has kept me outall these years, and now at last Providence gives me my own."It is to be hoped that Providence is not really responsible for all the shady transactions for which we offer up our best thanks."I dare say he has put by," continued Colonel Tempest. "He has had time enough.""You have not read the letter carefully," said Di. "He only discovered all this less than three months ago, and you have been ill for more than two."Colonel Tempest did not hear her. He had ceased for the last twenty years to hear anything he did not want to."Fifty thousand a year," he went on; "not a penny less. And the New River shares have gone up since Jack's day. And there was a large sum which rolled up during the minority. John is right there. There mustbe over a hundred thousand. You shall have that, Di. Archie will kick, but you shall have it. Eight thousand pounds John settled on you a year ago. That was the amount ofhisgenerosity to my poor girl. You shall not have a penny less than a hundred thousand. Not during my lifetime, of course; but when I die——" he added hastily.Di could articulate nothing."I shall pay my own debts and Archie's in a moment," he continued, not noticing whether she answered or not. "If you want a new gown, Di, you may send the bill to me. I don't believe I owe a thousand, and Archie not so much, poor lad, though John was always pulling a long face over his debts. How deuced mean John was from first to last! Well, do as you would be done by. I'll do for him alone what he thought enough for the two of you. I'll never givehim cause to say I'm close-fisted. He shall have your eight thousand, and he shall have three hundred a year, the same that he allowed Archie, as well.""He won't take it.""Won't take it!" said Colonel Tempest, contemptuously. "That's all you know about the world, Di. I tell you he'll have to take it. I tell you he has not a sixpence in the world at this moment, to say nothing of owing me twenty years' income."Colonel Tempest rambled on of how Archie should leave the army and live at Overleigh, of how Di should live there too, and Mrs. Courtenay might go to the devil. Presently he fell to wondering what state the shooting was in, and how many pheasants John was breeding at that moment. Every instant it became more unbearable, till at last Di sent for the nurse, made an excuseof posting her letters, and slipped out of the room.She went out to her old friends, the yellow waves, and, too exhausted to walk, sat down under the lee of one of the high wooden rivets between which the sea licks the pebbly shore into grooves.Gradually the tension of her mind relaxed. Di sat and watched the waves until they washed away the high invalid voice vibrating in some acute recess of her brain; washed away the hideous thought that they were rich because John was penniless and dishonoured; washed away everything except the one fact that his silence was accounted for, and that he loved her after all.Di looked out across the rain-trodden sea. If it was raining, she did not know it. What did anything in this wide world matter so long as John loved her? Poverty was nothing. Marriage was nothing either.What did it matter if they could not marry so long as they loved each other?Once in a lifetime it is vouchsafed alike to the worldly and to the pure, to the earnest and to the frivolous, to discern that vision—which has been ever life's greatest reality or life's greatest illusion according to the character of the beholder—that to love and to be loved is enough.A wet glint came across the sea, exquisite and evanescent as the gleam across Di's heart."It is enough!" said Di; and her soul was flooded with a solemn joy a thousand times deeper than when she had first discovered her love for John, and his for her, and a brilliant future was before her.Sorrow with his pick mines the heart. But he is a cunning workman. He deepens the channels whereby happiness may enter, and hollows out new chambers for joy to abide in, when he is gone.CHAPTER XVI."Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small."Longfellow.TTHE doctor was sitting with Colonel Tempest on Di's return to the hotel, and Di perceived that her father, who was still in a very excited state, had been telling him about his sudden change of fortune.The doctor courteously offered his congratulations, and on leaving made a pretext of inquiring after Di's health in order to see her alone."Colonel Tempest has been telling me of his unexpected access of wealth," he said. "In his present condition of nervous prostration,and tendency to cerebral excitement, the information should most certainly have been withheld from him. His brain is not in a state to bear the strain which such an event might have put upon it, has put upon it. Were such a thing to occur again in his enfeebled condition, I cannot answer for the consequences.""It was absolutely unforeseen," said Di. "None of us had the remotest suspicion. He has been in the habit of reading his letters for the past month.""They must be kept from him for the present," replied the doctor. "Let them be brought to you in future, and use your own discretion about showing them to him after you have read them yourself. Your father must be guarded from all agitation."This was more easily said than done. Nothing could turn Colonel Tempest's shattered, restless mind from hopping like agrasshopper on that one subject for the remainder of the day. The bit of cork in his medicine, which at another time would have elicited a torrent of indignation, excited only a momentary attention. He talked without ceasing—hinted darkly at danger to John which that young man's creditable though tardy action had averted, alluded to passages in his own life which nothing would induce him to divulge, and then lighting on a sentimental vein, discoursed of a happy old age (the old age of fiction), in which he should see Archie's and Di's children playing in the gallery at Overleigh. And the old name——Di had not realized, until her parent descanted upon the subject in a way that set her teeth on edge, how hideous, how vulgar, is the seamy side of pride of birth. When Colonel Tempest began to dwell on "the goodness and the grace that on his birthhad smiled," shall we blame Di if she put on the clock half an hour, and rang for the nurse?Things were not much better next morning. Di gave strict orders that all letters and telegrams should be brought to her room. Colonel Tempest fidgeted because he had not heard from the lawyer in whose hands John had placed the transfer of the property. The letter was in Di's pocket, but she dared not give it to him, for though it contained nothing to agitate him, she knew that the fact that she had opened it would raise a whirlwind."And Archie," said Colonel Tempest, querulously—"I ought to have heard from him too. If John told him the same day that he wrote to me, we ought to have heard from Archie this morning. I should have imagined that though Archie did not give his father a thought when he was poor, hemight have thought him worthy of a little considerationnow.""If that is the motive you would have given him if he had written, it is just as well he has not," said Di; but she wondered at his silence nevertheless.But she did not wonder long.She left her father busily writing to an imaginary lawyer, for he had neither the name nor address of John's, and on the landing met a servant bringing a telegram to her room. She took it upstairs, and though it was addressed to her father, opened it. She had no apprehension of evil. The old are afraid of telegrams, but the young have made them common, and have worn out their prestige.The telegram was from John, merely stating that Archie had been taken seriously ill.Di's heart gave a leap of thankfulnessthat her father had been spared this further shock. But Archie. Seriously ill. She was indignant at John's vague statement. What did seriously ill mean? Why could not he say what was the matter? And how could she keep the fact of his illness from her father? Ought she to go at once to Archie? Seriously ill. How like a man to send a telegram of that kind! She would telegraph at once to John for particulars, and go or stay according as the doctor thought she could or could not safely leave her father. Di put on her walking things, and ran out to the post-office round the corner, where she despatched a peremptory telegram to John; and then, seeing there was no one else to advise her, hurried to the doctor's house close at hand. For a wonder he was in. For a greater still, his last patient walked out as she walked in. The doctor, with the quickness of his kind, saw thedifficulty, and caught up his hat to come with her."You shall go to your brother if you can," was the only statement to which he would commit himself during the two minutes' walk in the rain; the two minutes which sealed Colonel Tempest's fate.No one knew exactly how it happened. Perhaps the hall porter had gone to his dinner, and the little boy who took his place for half an hour brought up the telegram to the person to whom it was addressed. No one knew afterwards how it had happened. It did happen, that was all.Colonel Tempest had the pink paper in his hand as the doctor and Di entered the room. He was laughing softly to himself."Archie is dead," he said, chuckling. "That is what John would like me to believe. But I know better. It is Johnthat is dead. It is John who had to be snuffed out. Swayne said so, and he knew. And John says it's Archie, and he will write. Ha, ha! We know better, eh, doctor? eh, Di? John's dead. Eight and twenty years old he was; but he's dead at last. He won't write any more. He won't spend my money any more. He won't keep me out any more."Colonel Tempest dropped on his knees. The only prayer he knew rose to his lips. "For what we are going to receive, the Lord make us truly thankful."For an awful day and night the fierce flame of delirium leaped and fell, and ever leaped again. With set face Di stood hour after hour in the blast of the furnace, till doctor and nurse marvelled at her courage and endurance.On the evening of the second day John came. He had written to tell Colonel Tempestof his coming, but the letter had not been opened.The doctor, thinking he was Di's brother, brought him into the sick-room, too crowded with fearful images for his presence to be noticed by the sick man."John is dead," the high-pitched terrible voice was saying. "Blundering fools. First there was the railway, but Goodwin saved him; damn his officiousness. And then there was the fire. They nearly had him that time. How grey he looked! Burnt to ashes. Bandaged up to the eyes. But he got better. And then the carnival. They muffed it again. Oh, Lord, how slow they were! But"—the voice sank to a frightful whisper—"they got him in Paris. I don't know how they did it—it's a secret; but they trapped him at last."Suddenly the glassy eyes looked with horrified momentary recognition at John."Risen from the dead," continued the voice. "I knew he would get up again. I always said he would; and he has. You can't kill John. There's no grave deep enough to hold him. Look at him with his head out now, and the earth upon his hair. We ought to have put a monument over him to keep him down. He's getting up. I tell you I did not do it. The grave's not big enough. Swayne dug it for him when he was a little boy—a little boy at school."Di turned her colourless face to John, and smiled at him, as one on the rack might smile at a friend to show that the anguish is not unbearable. She felt no surprise at seeing him. She was past surprise. She had forgotten that she had ever doubted his love.In silence he took the hand she held out towards him, and kept it in a strong gentle clasp that was more comfort than any words.Hour after hour they watched and ministered together, and hour by hour the lamp of life flared grimly low and lower. And after he had told everything—everything, everything that he had concealed in life—after John and Di had heard, in awed compassion and forgiveness, every word of the guilty secret which he had kept under lock and key so many years, at last the tide of remembrance ebbed away and life with it.Did he know them in the quiet hours that followed? Did he recognize them? They bent over him. They spoke to him gently, tenderly. Did he understand? They never knew.And so, in the grey of an April morning, poor Colonel Tempest, unconscious of death, which had had so many terrors for him in life, drifted tranquilly upon its tide from the human compassion that watched by him here, to the Infinite Pity beyond.CONCLUSION."Where there are twa seeking there will be a finding."AAFTER John had taken Di back to London he returned to Brighton, and from thence to Overleigh, to arrange for the double funeral. He had not remembered to mention that he was coming, and in the dusk of a wet afternoon he walked up by the way of the wood, and let himself in at the little postern in the wall. He had not thought he should return to Overleigh again, yet here he was once more in the dim gallery, with its faint scent ofpot-pourri, his hand as he passed stirring it from longhabit. The pictures craned through the twilight to look at him. He stole quietly upstairs and along the garret gallery. The nursery door was open. A glow of light fell on Mitty's figure. What was she doing?John stopped short and looked at her, and, with a sudden recollection as of some previous existence, understood.Mitty was packing. Two large white grocery boxes were already closed and corded in one corner. John saw "Best Cubes" printed on them, and it dawned upon his slow masculine consciousness that those boxes were part of Mitty's luggage.Mitty was standing in the middle of the room, holding at arm's length a little red flannel dressing-gown, which knocked twenty years off John's age as he looked."I shall take it," she said, half aloud. "It's wore as thin as thin behind; that and the open socks as I've mended and better-be-mended;"and she thrust them both hastily, as if for fear she should repent, into a tin box, out of which the battered head of John's old horse protruded.If there was one thing certain in this world, it was that the Noah's ark would not go in unless the horse came out. Mitty tried many ways, and was contemplating them with arms akimbo when John came in.She showed no surprise at seeing him, and with astonishment John realized that it was only six days since he had left Overleigh. It was actually not yet a week since that far-distant afternoon, separated from the present by such a chasm, when he had lain on his face in the heather, and the deep passions of youth had rent him and let him go. Here at Overleigh time stopped. He came back twenty years older, and the almanac on his writing-table marked six days.John made the necessary arrangementsfor the funeral to take place at midnight, according to the Tempest custom, which he knew Colonel Tempest would have been the last to waive. He wrote to tell Di what he had settled, together with the hour and the date. He dared not advise her not to be present, but he remembered the vast concourse of people who had assembled at his father's funeral to see the torchlight procession, and he hoped she would not come.But Mrs. Courtenay wrote back that her granddaughter was fixed in her determination to be present, that she had reluctantly consented to it, and would accompany her herself. She added in a postscript that no doubt John would arrange for them to stay the night at Overleigh, and they should return to London the next day.The night of the funeral was exceedingdark and still; so still that many, watching from a distance on Moat-hill, heard the voice saying, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."And again—"We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out."The night was so calm that the torches burned upright and unwavering, casting a steadfast light on church and graveyard and tilted tombstones, on the crowded darkness outside, and on the worn faces of a man and woman who stood together between two open graves.John and Di exchanged no word as they drove home. There were lights and a fire in the music-room, and she went in there,and began absently to take off her hat and long crêpe veil. Mrs. Courtenay had gone to bed.John followed Di with a candle in his hand. He offered it to her, but she did not take it."It is good-bye as well as good night," he said, holding out his hand. "I must leave here very early to-morrow."Di took no notice of his outstretched hand. She was looking into the fire."You must rest," he said gently, trying to recall her to herself.A swift tremor passed over her face."You are right," she said, in a low voice. "I will rest—when I have had five minutes' talk with you."John shut the door, and came back to the fireside. He believed he knew what was coming, and his face hardened. It was bitter to him that Di thought it worth while tospeak to him on the subject. She ought to have known him better.She faced him with difficulty, but without hesitation. They looked each other in the eyes."You are going to London early to see your lawyer," she said, "on the subject that you wrote to father about.""I am.""That is why I must speak to you to-night. I dare not wait." Her eyes fell before the stern intentness of his. Her voice faltered a moment, and then went on. "John, don't go. It is not necessary. Don't grieve me by leaving Overleigh, or—changing your name."A great bitterness welled up in John's heart against the woman he loved—the bitterness which sooner or later few men escape, of realizing how feeble is a woman's perception of what is honourable or dishonourable in a man."Ah, Di," he said, "you are very generous. But do not let us speak of it again. Such a thing could not be."He took her hand, but she withdrew it instantly."John," she said with dignity, "you misunderstand me. It would be a poor kind of generosity in me to offer what it is impossible for you to accept. You wound me by thinking I could do such a thing. I only meant to ask you to keep your present name and home for a little while, until—they both will become yours again by right—the day when—you marry me."A beautiful colour had mounted to Di's face. John's became white as death."Do you love me?" he said hoarsely, shaking from head to foot."Yes," she replied, trembling as much as he.He held her in his arms. The steadfast heart that understood and loved him beat against his own."Di!" he stammered—"Di!"And they wept and clung together like two children.POSTSCRIPT.MMITTY'S packing was never finished—why, she did not understand. But John, who helped her to rearrange her things, understood, and that was enough for her. For many springs and spring cleanings the horse-chestnut buds peered in at the nursery windows and found her still within. I think the wishes of Mitty's heart all came to pass, and that she loved "Miss Dinah;" but nevertheless I believe that, to the end of life, she never quite ceased to regret the little kitchen that John had spoken of, where she would have made "rock buns" for her lamb, and waited on him "hand and foot."
"The earth buildeth on the earth castles and towers;The earth sayeth to the earth, 'All shall be ours;'The earth walketh on the earth, glistering like gold;The earth goeth to the earth sooner than it wold."
"The earth buildeth on the earth castles and towers;The earth sayeth to the earth, 'All shall be ours;'The earth walketh on the earth, glistering like gold;The earth goeth to the earth sooner than it wold."
JJOHN was late next morning. He had not slept for many nights, and the heavy slumber of entire exhaustion fell on him towards dawn. It was nearly midday when he re-entered the sitting-room where he had sat up so late the night before.
He went to Archie's room to see whether he had come in; but it was empty.
He was impatient to be gone, to get away from that marble-topped side-table, and the horsehair chairs, and the gilt clock on themantelpiece. At least, he thought he wished to get away from these things; but it was from himself that he really wanted to get away—from this miserable tortured self that was all that was left of him in this his hour of weakness and prostration; the hour which inevitably succeeds all great exertions of strength. How could he drag this wretched creature about with him? He abhorred himself; the thought of being with himself was intolerable. It seems hard that the nobler side of human nature, which can cheer and urge its weaker brother up such steep paths of duty and self-sacrifice, should desert us when the summit is achieved, leaving the weaker to wail unreproved over its bleeding feet and rent garments till we madden at the sound.
An overwhelming sense of loneliness fell on John as he sat waiting for Archie to come in. He had no strong, earnest, steadfastself to bear him company. He felt deserted, lost.
Who has not experienced it, that fierce depression and loathing of all life, which, though at the time we know it not, is only the writhing and fainting of the starved human affections! The very ordinary sources from which the sharpest suffering springs, shows us later on how narrow are the limits within which our common human nature works, and from which yet irradiate such diversities of pain.
Alphonse disturbed him at last to ask whether he and "Monsieur" would dine attable d'hôte. "Monsieur," with a glance at Archie's door, had not yet come in.
John said they would both dine; and then, roused somewhat by the interruption, an idea struck him. Had Archie, in the excitement of the moment, gone back to England without telling him?
He went to the room, but there were no evidences of departure. On the bed the clothes were thrown which Archie had worn on the previous day. The gold watch John had given him was on the dressing-table. He had evidently left it there on purpose, not caring, perhaps, to risk taking it with him. All the paraphernalia of a man who studies his appearance were strewed on the table. There was his little moustache-brush, and phial ofbrilliantineto burnish it. John knew that he would never have leftthatbehind. Archie had evidently intended to return.
In the mean while hour succeeded hour, but he did not come. That Archie should have been out all night was not surprising, but that he should be still out now in his evening clothes in the daytime, began to be incomprehensible. After a few premonitory tremors of misgiving, which, man-like, helaughed at himself for entertaining, John took alarm.
Evening fell, and still no Archie. And then a hideous night followed, in which John forgot everything in heaven above or earth beneath except Archie. The police were informed. The actress at whose house he had supped after the play was interviewed, but could only vociferate between her sobs that he had left her house with the remainder of her party in the early hours of the morning, and she had not seen him since.
Directly the office opened, John telegraphed to his colonel to know if he had returned to London. The answer came, "Absent without leave."
John remembered that he had only three days' leave, and that the third day was up yesterday. Archie would not have forgotten that.
A nightmare of a day passed. John hadbeen out during the greater part of it, rushing back at intervals in the hope, that was no longer anything but a masked despair, of finding Archie in his rooms on his return.
In the dusk of the afternoon he came back once more, and peered for the twentieth time into the littered bedroom, which the frightened servants had left exactly as Archie had left it. He was standing in the doorway looking into the empty room, where a certain horror was beginning to gather round the familiar objects with which it was strewed, when a voice spoke to him.
It was the superintendent of police to whom he had gone long ago—the night before—when first the horror began. Alphonse, who had shown him up, was watching through the doorway.
The man said something in French. John did not hear him, but it did not matter much.He knew. They went downstairs together. Alphonse brought him his hat and stick. The other waiters were gathered in a little knot at thetable d'hôtedoor. A fiacre was waiting under the archway. John and the superintendent got into it, and it drove off at once without waiting for directions. They were lighting the lamps in the streets. The dusk was falling, falling like the shadow of death. They drove deeper and ever deeper into it.
Time ceased to be.
"Nous voiçi, Monsieur," said the man, gravely, as they pulled up before a building, the long low outline of which was dimly visible.
John knew it was the Morgue.
He followed his guide down a white-washed passage into a long room. There was a cluster of people at the further end, towards which the man was leading him,and in the dusk there was a subdued whispering, and a sound of trickling water.
As they reached the further end, some one turned on the electric light, and it fell full on a man's figure on one of the slabs. A little crowd of people were peering through the glass screen at the toy which the Seine had tired of and cast aside.
"Ah! qu'il est beau," said a high woman's voice.
John shaded his eyes and looked.
The face was turned away, but John knew the hair, fair to whiteness in that brilliant light, as he had often seen it in London ball-rooms.
They let him through the glass screen which kept off the crowd, and, oblivious of the many eyes watching him, John bent over the slab and touched the clenched marble hand with the signet-ring on it which he had given him when they were at Oxford together.
Yes, it was Archie.
The dead face was set in the nervous grin with which he had been wont in life to meet the inevitable and the distasteful.
The blue pencillings of dissolution had touched to inexorable distinctness the thin lines of dissipation in the cheek and at the corners of the mouth. The death of the body had overtaken the creeping death of the soul. Their landmarks met.
The poor beautiful effeminate face, devoid of all that makes death bearable, stared up at the electric light.
An impotent overwhelming compassion, as for some ephemeral irresponsible being of another creation, who knows not how to guide itself in this grim world of law, and has wandered blindfold within the sweep of a vast machinery of which it knew nothing, wrung John's heart. He hid his face in his hands.
"For human bliss and woe in the frail threadOf human life are all so closely twined,That till the shears of fate the texture shred,The close succession cannot be disjoined,Nor dare we, from our hour, judge that which comes behind."Sir Walter Scott.
"For human bliss and woe in the frail threadOf human life are all so closely twined,That till the shears of fate the texture shred,The close succession cannot be disjoined,Nor dare we, from our hour, judge that which comes behind."Sir Walter Scott.
DDI had seen her father and Archie off on their journey to Brighton, and, having arranged to replace her brother in three days' time, was surprised when a hasty note, the morning after their departure, informed her that Archie had been recalled to Londonon business, and that she must go to her father at once.
Mrs. Courtenay was incensed. Archie had shirked before, and now he had shirked again. But Colonel Tempest remained in far too precarious a condition for her to refuse to allow her granddaughter to go, as she would certainly otherwise have done. So Di went off the morning after the Speaker's party.
She had told Mrs. Courtenay that she had met John there.
"In one way I am glad to have met him," she said firmly, her proud lip quivering. "Any uncertainty I may have been weak enough to feel is at an end, and it was time the end should come. For, in spite of all you said, I had had a lingering idea that if we met——. And now wehavemet—and he had evidently no wish to see me again."
Mrs. Courtenay looked fixedly at the beautiful pallid face, and wondered that she had ever wished Di had a heart.
"This pain will pass," she said gently. "You have always believed me, Di; believe me now. Take courage and wait. You have had an untroubled life till now. That has passed. Trouble has come. It is part of life. It will pass too; not the feeling, perhaps, but the suffering."
"Good-bye, my child," she said a little later, kissing the girl's cold cheek with a tenderness which Di was powerless to return. "Take care of yourself. Go out every day; the sea air will do you good. And tell your father I cannot spare you more than a fortnight."
Di would have given anything to show her grandmother that she was thankful—oh, how thankful in this grey world!—for her sympathy and love, but she had no words. She kissed Mrs. Courtenay, and went down to the cab.
Mrs. Courtenay remained motionless untilshe heard it drive away. Then she let two tears run down from below her spectacles, and wiped them away. No more followed them. The old cannot give way like the young. Mrs. Courtenay had once said that nothing had power to touch her very nearly; but she was still vulnerable on one point. Her old heart, worn with so many troubles, ached for her granddaughter.
"Thank God," she said to herself, "that in the next world there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Perhaps God Almighty sees it's a mistake."
Di found Colonel Tempest wrapped up in aduvetin an armchair by the window of his sitting-room, in a state of equal indignation against his children for deserting him, and against the rain for blurring the seaview from the window. With his nurse, it is hardly necessary to add, he was not on speaking terms—a fact which seemed tocause that patient, apathetic person very little annoyance, she being, as she told Di, "accustomed to gentlemen."
Di soothed him as best she could, took his tray from the nurse at the door, so that he might be spared as much as possible the sight of the most hideous woman in the world, rang for lights, and drew a curtain before the untactful rain, while he declaimed alternately on the enormity of Archie's behaviour, and on the callousness of Mrs. Courtenay in endeavouring to keep his daughter, his only daughter, away from him. Colonel Tempest and Archie detested Mrs. Courtenay. However much the father and son might disagree and bicker on most subjects, they could always sing a little duet together in perfect harmony about her.
Colonel Tempest began a feeble solo on that theme to Di when he had finished withArchie; but Di visibly froze, and somehow the subject, often as it was started, always dropped. Di, as Colonel Tempest frequently informed her, did not care to hear the truth about her grandmother. If she knew all thathedid about her, and what her behaviour had been tohim, she would not be so fond of her as she evidently was.
Earlier in his illness Di had been obliged to exercise patience with her father, but she needed none now. That is the one small compensation for deep trouble. It numbs the power of feeling small irritations. It is when it begins to lift somewhat that the small irritations fit themselves out with new stings. Di had not reached that stage yet. The doctor who came daily to see her father looked narrowly at her, and ordered her to go out-of-doors as much as possible, in wet weather or fine.
"I sometimes take a little nap afterluncheon," said Colonel Tempest with dignity. "You might go out then, Di."
"Miss Tempest will in any case go out morning and afternoon," said the doctor with decision.
Colonel Tempest had before had his doubts whether the doctor understood his case, but now they were confirmed. He wished to change doctors, and a painful scene ensued between him and Di, in the course of which a hole was kicked in theduvet, and a cup of broth was upset. But it is an ascertained fact that women are not amenable to reason. Di sewed up the hole in theduvet, rubbed the carpet, and remained, as Colonel Tempest hysterically informed her, "as obstinate as her mother before her."
On the second morning after her arrival at Brighton she was sitting with Colonel Tempest, reading the papers to him, when the waiter brought in the letters. Therewere none for her, two for her father. One was a foreign letter with a blue French stamp. She took them to him where he lay on the sofa.
Colonel Tempest looked at them.
"Nothing from Archie again," he said. "He does not care even to write and ask whether I am alive or dead."
"Archie is not a good hand at writing," said Di, echoing, for the sake of saying something, the time-honoured masculine plea for exemption from the tedium of domestic correspondence.
"This is John's hand," said Colonel Tempest. "A Paris postmark. How these rich men do rush about!"
Di had actually not known it was John's writing. She had never seen it, to her knowledge, but nevertheless it appeared to her extraordinary that she had not at once divined that it was his. She was notanxious to hear her father's comments on John's letter, or the threadbare remark, sacred to the poor relation, that when the rich onewassitting down to draw a cheque he might just as well have written it for double the amount. He would never have known the difference. The poor relation always knows exactly how much the rich one can afford to give. So Di told her father she was going out, and left the room.
It stung her, as she laced her boots, to think that John had probably sent another cheque to cover their expenses at the hotel, and that the fried soles and semolina-pudding which she had ordered for luncheon would be paid for by him. It exasperated her still more to know that whatever John sent, Colonel Tempest would pronounce to be mean.
Before she had finished lacing her boots, however, the sitting-room door was opened,and Di heard her father calling wildly to her.
Colonel Tempest was not allowed to move, except with great precaution, owing to the slow healing of the obstinate internal injury caused by that unlucky pistol-shot.
She rushed headlong downstairs.
"Father!" she cried, horrified to find him standing on the landing. "Father, come back at once!" And she put her arms round him, and supported him back to the sofa.
He was trembling from head to foot. She saw that something had happened, but he was not in a state to be questioned. She administered what restoratives she had at hand, and presently the constantly moving lips got out the words, "Read it;" and Colonel Tempest pointed to a letter on the floor.
"Read it," repeated Colonel Tempest,lying back on his cushions, and recovering from his momentary collapse. "Read it."
Di picked up the letter and sat down by the window. She was suddenly too tired to stand. Her father was talking wildly, but she did not hear him; was calling to her to read it aloud, but she did not hear him. She saw only John's strong, small handwriting.
It was a business letter, couched in the most matter-of-fact terms. John stated his case—expressed a formal regret that the facts he mentioned had not come to light at Mr. Tempest's death, mentioned that the accumulation of income during his minority had fortunately remained untouched, that he had desired his lawyer to communicate with Colonel Tempest, and signed himself "John Fane." He had written the word "Tempest," and had then struck it through.
Di pressed her forehead against the glass on which the rain was beating.
Was the emotion which was shattering her joy or sorrow, or both?
She knew it was joy. In a lightning-flash of comprehension she realized that it was this awful calamity which had kept John silent, which had held him back from coming to her, from asking her to marry him. He loved her still! Love, dead and buried, had risen out of his grave. The impossible had happened. John loved her still.
"I cannot bear it," she said; and for a moment the long yellow waves, and her father's impatient voice, and even John's letter, were alike blotted out, unheard.
Colonel Tempest considered Di's apathy, after she had read the letter, unfeeling and unsympathetic in the extreme, and he did not hesitate to tell her so. But when she presently turned her averted face towardshim he was already off on another tack, his excitement, which seemed to increase rather than diminish, tossing him as a wave tosses a spar.
"Twenty years," he said tremulously. "Think of it, Di—not that you seem to care! Twenty years have I toiled and moiled in poverty, twenty years have I and my children been ground down while that nameless interloper has spent our money right and left. Oh, my God! I've got it at last. I've got my own at last. But who will give me back those twenty years?" and Colonel Tempest's voice broke into a sob.
Other consequences of that letter began to dawn on Di's awakening consciousness.
"Then John," she said, bewildered. "Oh, father, what will become of John?"
"John," said Colonel Tempest, bitterly, "is now just where I was twenty years ago—disinherited, penniless. He has kept me outall these years, and now at last Providence gives me my own."
It is to be hoped that Providence is not really responsible for all the shady transactions for which we offer up our best thanks.
"I dare say he has put by," continued Colonel Tempest. "He has had time enough."
"You have not read the letter carefully," said Di. "He only discovered all this less than three months ago, and you have been ill for more than two."
Colonel Tempest did not hear her. He had ceased for the last twenty years to hear anything he did not want to.
"Fifty thousand a year," he went on; "not a penny less. And the New River shares have gone up since Jack's day. And there was a large sum which rolled up during the minority. John is right there. There mustbe over a hundred thousand. You shall have that, Di. Archie will kick, but you shall have it. Eight thousand pounds John settled on you a year ago. That was the amount ofhisgenerosity to my poor girl. You shall not have a penny less than a hundred thousand. Not during my lifetime, of course; but when I die——" he added hastily.
Di could articulate nothing.
"I shall pay my own debts and Archie's in a moment," he continued, not noticing whether she answered or not. "If you want a new gown, Di, you may send the bill to me. I don't believe I owe a thousand, and Archie not so much, poor lad, though John was always pulling a long face over his debts. How deuced mean John was from first to last! Well, do as you would be done by. I'll do for him alone what he thought enough for the two of you. I'll never givehim cause to say I'm close-fisted. He shall have your eight thousand, and he shall have three hundred a year, the same that he allowed Archie, as well."
"He won't take it."
"Won't take it!" said Colonel Tempest, contemptuously. "That's all you know about the world, Di. I tell you he'll have to take it. I tell you he has not a sixpence in the world at this moment, to say nothing of owing me twenty years' income."
Colonel Tempest rambled on of how Archie should leave the army and live at Overleigh, of how Di should live there too, and Mrs. Courtenay might go to the devil. Presently he fell to wondering what state the shooting was in, and how many pheasants John was breeding at that moment. Every instant it became more unbearable, till at last Di sent for the nurse, made an excuseof posting her letters, and slipped out of the room.
She went out to her old friends, the yellow waves, and, too exhausted to walk, sat down under the lee of one of the high wooden rivets between which the sea licks the pebbly shore into grooves.
Gradually the tension of her mind relaxed. Di sat and watched the waves until they washed away the high invalid voice vibrating in some acute recess of her brain; washed away the hideous thought that they were rich because John was penniless and dishonoured; washed away everything except the one fact that his silence was accounted for, and that he loved her after all.
Di looked out across the rain-trodden sea. If it was raining, she did not know it. What did anything in this wide world matter so long as John loved her? Poverty was nothing. Marriage was nothing either.What did it matter if they could not marry so long as they loved each other?
Once in a lifetime it is vouchsafed alike to the worldly and to the pure, to the earnest and to the frivolous, to discern that vision—which has been ever life's greatest reality or life's greatest illusion according to the character of the beholder—that to love and to be loved is enough.
A wet glint came across the sea, exquisite and evanescent as the gleam across Di's heart.
"It is enough!" said Di; and her soul was flooded with a solemn joy a thousand times deeper than when she had first discovered her love for John, and his for her, and a brilliant future was before her.
Sorrow with his pick mines the heart. But he is a cunning workman. He deepens the channels whereby happiness may enter, and hollows out new chambers for joy to abide in, when he is gone.
"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small."Longfellow.
"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small."Longfellow.
TTHE doctor was sitting with Colonel Tempest on Di's return to the hotel, and Di perceived that her father, who was still in a very excited state, had been telling him about his sudden change of fortune.
The doctor courteously offered his congratulations, and on leaving made a pretext of inquiring after Di's health in order to see her alone.
"Colonel Tempest has been telling me of his unexpected access of wealth," he said. "In his present condition of nervous prostration,and tendency to cerebral excitement, the information should most certainly have been withheld from him. His brain is not in a state to bear the strain which such an event might have put upon it, has put upon it. Were such a thing to occur again in his enfeebled condition, I cannot answer for the consequences."
"It was absolutely unforeseen," said Di. "None of us had the remotest suspicion. He has been in the habit of reading his letters for the past month."
"They must be kept from him for the present," replied the doctor. "Let them be brought to you in future, and use your own discretion about showing them to him after you have read them yourself. Your father must be guarded from all agitation."
This was more easily said than done. Nothing could turn Colonel Tempest's shattered, restless mind from hopping like agrasshopper on that one subject for the remainder of the day. The bit of cork in his medicine, which at another time would have elicited a torrent of indignation, excited only a momentary attention. He talked without ceasing—hinted darkly at danger to John which that young man's creditable though tardy action had averted, alluded to passages in his own life which nothing would induce him to divulge, and then lighting on a sentimental vein, discoursed of a happy old age (the old age of fiction), in which he should see Archie's and Di's children playing in the gallery at Overleigh. And the old name——
Di had not realized, until her parent descanted upon the subject in a way that set her teeth on edge, how hideous, how vulgar, is the seamy side of pride of birth. When Colonel Tempest began to dwell on "the goodness and the grace that on his birthhad smiled," shall we blame Di if she put on the clock half an hour, and rang for the nurse?
Things were not much better next morning. Di gave strict orders that all letters and telegrams should be brought to her room. Colonel Tempest fidgeted because he had not heard from the lawyer in whose hands John had placed the transfer of the property. The letter was in Di's pocket, but she dared not give it to him, for though it contained nothing to agitate him, she knew that the fact that she had opened it would raise a whirlwind.
"And Archie," said Colonel Tempest, querulously—"I ought to have heard from him too. If John told him the same day that he wrote to me, we ought to have heard from Archie this morning. I should have imagined that though Archie did not give his father a thought when he was poor, hemight have thought him worthy of a little considerationnow."
"If that is the motive you would have given him if he had written, it is just as well he has not," said Di; but she wondered at his silence nevertheless.
But she did not wonder long.
She left her father busily writing to an imaginary lawyer, for he had neither the name nor address of John's, and on the landing met a servant bringing a telegram to her room. She took it upstairs, and though it was addressed to her father, opened it. She had no apprehension of evil. The old are afraid of telegrams, but the young have made them common, and have worn out their prestige.
The telegram was from John, merely stating that Archie had been taken seriously ill.
Di's heart gave a leap of thankfulnessthat her father had been spared this further shock. But Archie. Seriously ill. She was indignant at John's vague statement. What did seriously ill mean? Why could not he say what was the matter? And how could she keep the fact of his illness from her father? Ought she to go at once to Archie? Seriously ill. How like a man to send a telegram of that kind! She would telegraph at once to John for particulars, and go or stay according as the doctor thought she could or could not safely leave her father. Di put on her walking things, and ran out to the post-office round the corner, where she despatched a peremptory telegram to John; and then, seeing there was no one else to advise her, hurried to the doctor's house close at hand. For a wonder he was in. For a greater still, his last patient walked out as she walked in. The doctor, with the quickness of his kind, saw thedifficulty, and caught up his hat to come with her.
"You shall go to your brother if you can," was the only statement to which he would commit himself during the two minutes' walk in the rain; the two minutes which sealed Colonel Tempest's fate.
No one knew exactly how it happened. Perhaps the hall porter had gone to his dinner, and the little boy who took his place for half an hour brought up the telegram to the person to whom it was addressed. No one knew afterwards how it had happened. It did happen, that was all.
Colonel Tempest had the pink paper in his hand as the doctor and Di entered the room. He was laughing softly to himself.
"Archie is dead," he said, chuckling. "That is what John would like me to believe. But I know better. It is Johnthat is dead. It is John who had to be snuffed out. Swayne said so, and he knew. And John says it's Archie, and he will write. Ha, ha! We know better, eh, doctor? eh, Di? John's dead. Eight and twenty years old he was; but he's dead at last. He won't write any more. He won't spend my money any more. He won't keep me out any more."
Colonel Tempest dropped on his knees. The only prayer he knew rose to his lips. "For what we are going to receive, the Lord make us truly thankful."
For an awful day and night the fierce flame of delirium leaped and fell, and ever leaped again. With set face Di stood hour after hour in the blast of the furnace, till doctor and nurse marvelled at her courage and endurance.
On the evening of the second day John came. He had written to tell Colonel Tempestof his coming, but the letter had not been opened.
The doctor, thinking he was Di's brother, brought him into the sick-room, too crowded with fearful images for his presence to be noticed by the sick man.
"John is dead," the high-pitched terrible voice was saying. "Blundering fools. First there was the railway, but Goodwin saved him; damn his officiousness. And then there was the fire. They nearly had him that time. How grey he looked! Burnt to ashes. Bandaged up to the eyes. But he got better. And then the carnival. They muffed it again. Oh, Lord, how slow they were! But"—the voice sank to a frightful whisper—"they got him in Paris. I don't know how they did it—it's a secret; but they trapped him at last."
Suddenly the glassy eyes looked with horrified momentary recognition at John.
"Risen from the dead," continued the voice. "I knew he would get up again. I always said he would; and he has. You can't kill John. There's no grave deep enough to hold him. Look at him with his head out now, and the earth upon his hair. We ought to have put a monument over him to keep him down. He's getting up. I tell you I did not do it. The grave's not big enough. Swayne dug it for him when he was a little boy—a little boy at school."
Di turned her colourless face to John, and smiled at him, as one on the rack might smile at a friend to show that the anguish is not unbearable. She felt no surprise at seeing him. She was past surprise. She had forgotten that she had ever doubted his love.
In silence he took the hand she held out towards him, and kept it in a strong gentle clasp that was more comfort than any words.
Hour after hour they watched and ministered together, and hour by hour the lamp of life flared grimly low and lower. And after he had told everything—everything, everything that he had concealed in life—after John and Di had heard, in awed compassion and forgiveness, every word of the guilty secret which he had kept under lock and key so many years, at last the tide of remembrance ebbed away and life with it.
Did he know them in the quiet hours that followed? Did he recognize them? They bent over him. They spoke to him gently, tenderly. Did he understand? They never knew.
And so, in the grey of an April morning, poor Colonel Tempest, unconscious of death, which had had so many terrors for him in life, drifted tranquilly upon its tide from the human compassion that watched by him here, to the Infinite Pity beyond.
"Where there are twa seeking there will be a finding."
"Where there are twa seeking there will be a finding."
AAFTER John had taken Di back to London he returned to Brighton, and from thence to Overleigh, to arrange for the double funeral. He had not remembered to mention that he was coming, and in the dusk of a wet afternoon he walked up by the way of the wood, and let himself in at the little postern in the wall. He had not thought he should return to Overleigh again, yet here he was once more in the dim gallery, with its faint scent ofpot-pourri, his hand as he passed stirring it from longhabit. The pictures craned through the twilight to look at him. He stole quietly upstairs and along the garret gallery. The nursery door was open. A glow of light fell on Mitty's figure. What was she doing?
John stopped short and looked at her, and, with a sudden recollection as of some previous existence, understood.
Mitty was packing. Two large white grocery boxes were already closed and corded in one corner. John saw "Best Cubes" printed on them, and it dawned upon his slow masculine consciousness that those boxes were part of Mitty's luggage.
Mitty was standing in the middle of the room, holding at arm's length a little red flannel dressing-gown, which knocked twenty years off John's age as he looked.
"I shall take it," she said, half aloud. "It's wore as thin as thin behind; that and the open socks as I've mended and better-be-mended;"and she thrust them both hastily, as if for fear she should repent, into a tin box, out of which the battered head of John's old horse protruded.
If there was one thing certain in this world, it was that the Noah's ark would not go in unless the horse came out. Mitty tried many ways, and was contemplating them with arms akimbo when John came in.
She showed no surprise at seeing him, and with astonishment John realized that it was only six days since he had left Overleigh. It was actually not yet a week since that far-distant afternoon, separated from the present by such a chasm, when he had lain on his face in the heather, and the deep passions of youth had rent him and let him go. Here at Overleigh time stopped. He came back twenty years older, and the almanac on his writing-table marked six days.
John made the necessary arrangementsfor the funeral to take place at midnight, according to the Tempest custom, which he knew Colonel Tempest would have been the last to waive. He wrote to tell Di what he had settled, together with the hour and the date. He dared not advise her not to be present, but he remembered the vast concourse of people who had assembled at his father's funeral to see the torchlight procession, and he hoped she would not come.
But Mrs. Courtenay wrote back that her granddaughter was fixed in her determination to be present, that she had reluctantly consented to it, and would accompany her herself. She added in a postscript that no doubt John would arrange for them to stay the night at Overleigh, and they should return to London the next day.
The night of the funeral was exceedingdark and still; so still that many, watching from a distance on Moat-hill, heard the voice saying, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."
And again—
"We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out."
The night was so calm that the torches burned upright and unwavering, casting a steadfast light on church and graveyard and tilted tombstones, on the crowded darkness outside, and on the worn faces of a man and woman who stood together between two open graves.
John and Di exchanged no word as they drove home. There were lights and a fire in the music-room, and she went in there,and began absently to take off her hat and long crêpe veil. Mrs. Courtenay had gone to bed.
John followed Di with a candle in his hand. He offered it to her, but she did not take it.
"It is good-bye as well as good night," he said, holding out his hand. "I must leave here very early to-morrow."
Di took no notice of his outstretched hand. She was looking into the fire.
"You must rest," he said gently, trying to recall her to herself.
A swift tremor passed over her face.
"You are right," she said, in a low voice. "I will rest—when I have had five minutes' talk with you."
John shut the door, and came back to the fireside. He believed he knew what was coming, and his face hardened. It was bitter to him that Di thought it worth while tospeak to him on the subject. She ought to have known him better.
She faced him with difficulty, but without hesitation. They looked each other in the eyes.
"You are going to London early to see your lawyer," she said, "on the subject that you wrote to father about."
"I am."
"That is why I must speak to you to-night. I dare not wait." Her eyes fell before the stern intentness of his. Her voice faltered a moment, and then went on. "John, don't go. It is not necessary. Don't grieve me by leaving Overleigh, or—changing your name."
A great bitterness welled up in John's heart against the woman he loved—the bitterness which sooner or later few men escape, of realizing how feeble is a woman's perception of what is honourable or dishonourable in a man.
"Ah, Di," he said, "you are very generous. But do not let us speak of it again. Such a thing could not be."
He took her hand, but she withdrew it instantly.
"John," she said with dignity, "you misunderstand me. It would be a poor kind of generosity in me to offer what it is impossible for you to accept. You wound me by thinking I could do such a thing. I only meant to ask you to keep your present name and home for a little while, until—they both will become yours again by right—the day when—you marry me."
A beautiful colour had mounted to Di's face. John's became white as death.
"Do you love me?" he said hoarsely, shaking from head to foot.
"Yes," she replied, trembling as much as he.
He held her in his arms. The steadfast heart that understood and loved him beat against his own.
"Di!" he stammered—"Di!"
And they wept and clung together like two children.
MMITTY'S packing was never finished—why, she did not understand. But John, who helped her to rearrange her things, understood, and that was enough for her. For many springs and spring cleanings the horse-chestnut buds peered in at the nursery windows and found her still within. I think the wishes of Mitty's heart all came to pass, and that she loved "Miss Dinah;" but nevertheless I believe that, to the end of life, she never quite ceased to regret the little kitchen that John had spoken of, where she would have made "rock buns" for her lamb, and waited on him "hand and foot."