Diana Tempest Volume Ii Part 10

CHAPTER VIII.

"Vous me quittez, n'ayant pu voir Mon ame a travers mon silence."

VICTOR HUGO.

It was Sat.u.r.day morning. The few guests had departed by an early train.

The painter cast a backward glance at Overleigh and the two figures standing together in the sunshine on the grey green steps which, with their wide hospitable bal.u.s.trade, he had sketched so carefully. He was returning to the chastened joys of domestic life in London lodgings; to his pretty young jaded, fluffy wife, and fluffy, delicate child; to the Irish stew, and the warm drinking-water, and the blistered gravy of his home-life. Sordid surroundings have the sad power of making some lives sordid too. It requires a rare n.o.bility of character to rise permanently above the dirty table-cloth, and ill-trimmed paraffin-lamp of poor circ.u.mstances. Poverty demoralizes. A smell of cooking, and, why I know not, but especially an aroma of boiled cabbage, can undermine the dignity of existence. A reminiscence of yesterday on the morning fork dims the ideals of youth.

As he drove away between the double row of beeches, with a hand on his boarded picture, the poor painter reflected that John was a fortunate kind of person. The dogcart was full of grapes and peaches and game.

Perhaps the power to be generous is one of the most enviable attributes of riches.

"Poor fellow!" said John, as he and Di turned back into the cool gloom of the white stone hall.

"He has given granny the sketch of me," said Di. "He is a nice man, but after the first few days he hardly spoke to me, which I consider a bad sign in any one. It shows a want of discernment; don't you think so?

Alas! we are going away this afternoon. I wish, John, you would try and look a little more moved at the prospect of losing us. It would be gratifying to think of you creeping on all-fours under a sofa after our departure, dissolved in tears."

John winced, but the reflections of the night before had led to certain conclusions, and he answered lightly--that is, lightly for him, for he had not an airy manner at the best of times--

"I am afraid I could not rise to tears. Would a shriek from the battlements do?"

"I should prefer tears," said Di, who was in a foolish mood this morning, in which high spirits take the form of nonsense, looking at her cousin, whose sedate and rather impenetrable face stirred the latent mischief in her. "Not idle tears, John, that 'I know not what they mean,' you know, but large solemn drops, full man's size, sixty to a teaspoonful. That's the measure by granny's medicine-gla.s.s."

She looked very provoking as she stood poising herself on her slender feet on the low edge of the hearthstone, with one hand holding the stone paw of the ragged old Tempest lion carved on the chimney-piece. John looked at her with amused irritation, and wished--there is a practical form of repartee eminently satisfactory to the masculine mind which an absurd conventionality forbids--wished, but what is the good of wishing?

"I must go and pack," said Di, with a sigh; "and see how granny is getting on. She is generally down before this. You won't go and get lost, will you, and only turn up at luncheon?"

"I will be about," said John. "If I am not in the library, look for me under the drawing-room sofa."

Di laughed, and went lightly away across the grey and white stone flags.

There was a lamentable discrepancy between his feelings and hers which outraged John's sense of proportion. He went into the study and sat down there, staring at the shelves of embodied thought and speculation and aspiration with which at one time he had been content to live, which, now that he had begun to live, seemed entirely beside the mark.

Mrs. Courtenay was a person of courage and endurance, but even her powers had been sorely tried during the past week. She had been bored to the verge of distraction by the people of whom she had taken such a cordial leave the night before. There are persons who never, when out visiting, wish to retire to their rooms to rest, who never have letters to write, who never take up a book downstairs, who work for deep-sea fishermen, and are always ready for conversation. Such had been the departed. Miss Fane herself, for whom Mrs. Courtenay professed a certain friendship, was a person with whom she would have had nothing in common, whom she would hardly have tolerated, if it had not been for her nephew.

But for him she was willing to sacrifice herself even further. She had seen undemonstrative men in love before now. Their actions had the same bald significance for her as a string of molehills for a mole-catcher.

She was certain he was seriously attracted, and she was determined to give him a fair field, and as much favour as possible. That Di had not as yet the remotest suspicion of his intentions she regarded as little short of providential, considering the irritating and impracticable turn of that young lady's mind.

Di entered her grandmother's room, and found that conspirator sitting up in bed, looking with rueful interest at a boiled egg and untouched rack of toast on a tray before her. Mrs. Courtenay always breakfasted in bed, and could generally thank Providence for a very substantial meal.

"Take the tray away, Brown," said Mrs. Courtenay, with an effort.

"Why, you've not touched a single thing, ma'am," remarked Brown, reproachfully.

"I have drunk a little coffee," said Mrs. Courtenay, faintly.

"Granny, aren't you well?" asked Di.

Brown removed the tray, which Mrs. Courtenay's eyes followed regretfully from the room.

"I am not _very_ well, my love," she replied, adjusting her spectacles, "but not positively ill. I had a threatening of one of those tiresome spasms in the night. I dare say it will pa.s.s off in an hour or two."

Di scrutinized her grandmother remorsefully.

"I never noticed you were feeling ill when I came in before breakfast,"

she said.

"My dear, you are generally the first to observe how I am," returned Mrs. Courtenay, hurriedly. "I was feeling better just then, but--and we are due at Carmyan to-day. It is very provoking."

Di looked perturbed.

"The others are gone," she said; "even the painter has just driven off.

Do you think you will be able to travel by the afternoon, granny?"

"I am afraid _not_," said Mrs. Courtenay, closing her eyes; "but I think--I feel sure I could go to-morrow."

"To-morrow is Sunday."

"Dear me! so it is," said Mrs. Courtenay, with mild surprise. "To-day is Sat.u.r.day. It certainly is unfortunate. But after all," she continued, "it could not have happened at a better place. Miss Fane is a good-natured person and will quite understand, and John is a relation.

Perhaps you had better tell Miss Fane I am feeling unwell, and ask her to come here; and before you go pull down the blinds half-way, and put that sheaf of her 'lost tribes' and 'unicorns' and 'stone ages' on the bed."

What induced John to spend the whole of Sat.u.r.day afternoon and the greater part of a valuable evening at a small colliery town some twenty miles distant, it would be hard to say. The fact that some days ago he had arranged to go there after the departure of his guests did not account for it, for he had dismissed all thought of doing so directly he heard that Di and Mrs. Courtenay were staying on. It was not important. The following Sat.u.r.day would do equally well to inspect a reading-room he was building, and the new shaft of one of his mines, about the safety of which he was not satisfied. Yet somehow or other, when the afternoon came, John went. Up to the last moment after luncheon he had intended to remain. Nevertheless, he went. The actions of persons under a certain influence cannot be predicted or accounted for. They can only be chronicled.

John did not return to Overleigh till after ten o'clock. He told himself most of the way home that Miss Fane and Di would be sure not to sit up later than ten. He made up his mind that he should only arrive after they had gone to bed. As he drove up through the semi-darkness he looked eagerly for Di's window. There was a light in it. He perceived it with sudden resentment. She _had_ gone to bed, then. He should not see her till to-morrow. John had a vague impression that he was glad he had been away all day, that he had somehow done rather a clever thing. But apparently he was not much exhilarated by the achievement. It lost somewhat in its complete success.

And Mrs. Courtenay, who heard the wheels of his dogcart drive up just after Di had wished her "Good night," said aloud in the darkness the one word, "Idiot!"

CHAPTER IX.

"Love, how it sells poor bliss For proud despair!"

Sh.e.l.lEY.

It was Sunday morning, and it was something more. There was a subtle change in the air, a mystery in the sunshine. Autumn and summer were met in tremulous wedlock. But the hand of the bride trembled in the bridegroom's. In the rapture of bridal there was a prophesy of parting and death. The birds knew it. In the songless silence the robin was practising his autumn reverie. Joy and sadness were blent together in the solemn beauty of transition.

The voice of the brook was sunk to a whisper to-day. Through the still air the tangled voices of the church bells came from the little grey church in the valley. A rival service was going on in the rookery on Moat Hill, in which the congregation joined with hoa.r.s.e unanimity.

Miss Fane did not go to church in the morning, so John and Di went together down the steep path through the wood, across the park, over the village beck, and up the low hollowed steps into the churchyard.

Overleigh was a primitive place.

The little congregation was sitting on the wall, or standing about among the tilted tombstones, according to custom, to see John and the clergyman come in. And then there was a general clump and clatter after them into church; the bells stopped, and the service began.

Di and John sat at a little distance from each other in the carved Tempest pew. The Tempests were an overbearing race. The little rough stone church with its round Norman arches was a memorial of their race.

"Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from one generation to another," was graven in the stones of the wall just before Di's eyes. Beneath was a low arch surmounting the tomb of a knight in effigy. Beyond there were more tombs and arches. The building was thronged with the sculptured dead of one family--was a mortuary chapel in itself. Tattered flags hung where pious hands, red with infidel blood, had fastened them. With a simple confidence in their own importance, and the approval of their Creator, the Tempests had raised their memorials and hung their battered swords in the house of their G.o.d. The very sun himself smote, not through the gaudy figures of Scripture story, but through the painted arms of the Malbys; of the penniless, pious Malby who sold his land to his clutching Tempest brother-in-law in order to get out to the Crusades.