Diana Tempest Volume I Part 4

Colonel Tempest looked once round the room, and then sat feebly down. It was as if for days he had been staring at a blank sheet, and now a dark slide had been suddenly taken from the magic lantern. The picture was before him in all its tawdry distinctness. _He knew what he had done._

Colonel Tempest was not a radically bad man. Who is? But there was in him a kind of weakness of fibre which consists in being subservient to the impulse of the moment. The effects of a feeble yielding to impulse are sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those of the most deliberate and thorough-paced sin.

He was conscious of good in himself, of a refined dislike to coa.r.s.eness and vice even when he dabbled in it, of vague longings after better things, of amiable, even chivalrous, inclinations towards others, especially towards women not of his own family. In his own family, where there had always been, even in his mother's time, some feminine weakness or imperfection for a manly nature to point out and ridicule, of course courtesy and tenderness could not be expected of him.

Thus at each juncture of his life he was obliged to justify what he would have called his failings, what some would have called sins, by laying the blame on others, and by this means to account for the glaring discrepancy between the inward and spiritual gracefulness of his feelings and the outward and visible signs of his actions.

A man with such good impulses, such an affectionate nature, cannot be a sinner. If there was one thing more than another that Colonel Tempest thoroughly believed in, it was in his affectionate nature. He might have his faults, he was wont to say, but his heart was in the right place. If things went amiss, the fault was in the circ.u.mstance, in the temptation, in the unfortunate character of those with whom his life was knit. Weakness has its superst.i.tion, and superst.i.tion its scapegoat. His father had spoilt him. His wife had not understood him. His brother had played him false. Swayne had tempted him.

What have not those to answer for who teach us in language, however spiritual, however orthodox, to lay our sins on others--on _any other_ except ourselves!

After the first shock of panic, of terror lest he had done something for which he might eventually have to suffer, Colonel Tempest struggled back to the well-worn position, now clutched with both hands, that he had been betrayed in a moment of pa.s.sion by a fiend in human shape, and that, if--anything happened, Swayne was the most to blame.

Still they were dreadful days at first--dreadful weeks in which he suffered for Swayne's sin. And Swayne seemed to have disappeared for good--or perhaps for evil.

And then--gradually--inasmuch as nothing had power to affect him for long together, the horror lightened.

The sun rose and set. The world went on. A year pa.s.sed. Archie wrote for money from school. Things took their usual course. Colonel Tempest had his hair cut as usual; he observed with keen regret that it was thinning at the top. Life settled back into its old groove.

_Nothing happened._

To persons gifted with imagination, what is more solemn, or more appalling, than the pause which follows on any decisive action which is perceived to have within it the seed of a result--a result which even now is germinating in darkness, is growing towards the light, foreseen, but unknown? With what body will they come, we ask ourselves--these slow results that spring from the dust of our spent actions? Faith sows and waits. Sin sows and trembles. The fool sows and forgets. Colonel Tempest was practically an Atheist. He did not believe in cause and effect; he believed in chance. He had sown, but perhaps nothing would come up. He had seen the lightning, but perhaps the thunder might not follow after all.

Suddenly, one winter morning, without warning, it growled on the horizon.

"That inconvenient little nephew of yours has precious nearly hooked it," said a man in the club to him as he came in. "His tutor must be a plucky chap. I should owe him a grudge if I were you."

The man held out the paper to him, and, turning away with a laugh, went out whistling. He meant no harm; but the smallest arrow of a refined pleasantry can p.r.i.c.k if it happens to come between the joints of the harness.

Colonel Tempest felt sea-sick. The room was empty except for the waiter, who was arranging his breakfast on one of the tables by the window. The fire leapt and blazed; everything swayed. He sat down mechanically in his accustomed place, still clutching the paper. He tried to read it, to find the place, but he could see nothing. At last he poured out a cup of coffee and drank it, and then tried again. There it was: Narrow escape of Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Tempest on the Metropolitan Railway. Mr. Goodwin and his charge, Mr. Tempest, were returning by the last train from the Crystal Palace. Tremendous crowd on the platform. Struggle for the train as it came in. Mr. Tempest pushed down between the still moving train and the platform. Heroic devotion of Mr. Goodwin. Rescue of Mr. Tempest uninjured. Serious injuries of Mr. Goodwin.

Colonel Tempest read no more. He wiped his forehead.

Swayne's men were at their devil's work, then! Perhaps they had tried before and failed, and he had not heard of it? They would try again--presently. Perhaps next time they would succeed.

The old horror woke up again with an acuteness that for the moment seemed greater than he could bear. Weak men should abstain from wrong-doing. They cannot stand the brunt of their own actions; the kick of the gun is too much for them.

And from that time to this the horror never wholly left him; if it slumbered, it was only to reawaken. At long intervals incidents happened, sometimes of the most trifling description, and some of which he did not even hear of at the time, which roused it afresh. There seemed to be a fate against John at Eton which followed him to Oxford.

Archie, who was at Eton and Oxford with him, occasionally let things drop by chance which made Colonel Tempest's blood run cold.

"They have failed so far," he would say to himself; "but they will do it yet. I know they will do it in the end!"

At last he made a desperate attempt to find Swayne, and cancel the bet; but perhaps Swayne knew the man he had to deal with, and had foreseen a movement of that kind. At any rate, he was not to be discovered. Colonel Tempest found himself helpless.

Was there no anodyne for this recurring agony? He dared not drown it in drink. What might he not say under its influence? The consolations of religion, or rather of the Church, which he had always understood to be a sort of mental chloroform for uneasy consciences, did not seem to meet his case. The thought of John's danger never troubled him--John's possible death. The superst.i.tious terror was for himself alone. He wanted a religion which would adhere to him of its own accord, and be in the way when needed; and he tried various kinds recommended for the purpose, but--without effect.

Perhaps a religion for self-centred people remains to be invented. Even religiosity (the patent medicine of the spiritual life of the age--the universal pain-killer)--even religiosity, though it meets almost all requirements, does not quite fill that gap.

Colonel Tempest became subject to long attacks of nervous irritation and depression. He ceased to be a good, and consequently a popular, companion. His health, never strong, always abused, began to waver. At fifty-five he looked thin and aged. He had come before his time to the evil days and the years which have no pleasure in them.

As he turned out of St. George's Church, Hanover Square, on this particular spring afternoon, whither he had gone to a.s.sist at a certain fashionable wedding at which his daughter Diana had officiated as bridesmaid, he looked broken down and feeble beyond his years.

A broad-shouldered, dark man elbowed his way through the throng of footmen and spectators, and came up with him.

"Are not you going back to the house?" he asked.

"No," said Colonel Tempest--"I hate weddings! I hate the whole thing. I only went to have a look at my child, who was bridesmaid. Di is my only daughter, but I don't see much of her; others take care of that." His tone was pathetic. He had gradually come to believe that his child had been wrested from him by Mrs. Courtenay, and that he was a defrauded parent.

"I am not going to the house, either," said John Tempest, for it was he.

"I don't hate weddings, but I detest that one. Do you mind coming down to my club? I have not seen you really to speak to since I came back. I want to have a talk with you about Archie; he seems to have been improving the shining hours during these three years I have been away."

Colonel Tempest winced jealously. He knew John had paid the considerable debts that Archie had contrived to ama.s.s, not only during the short time he was at Oxford, before he left to cram for the army, but also at Sandhurst. But Colonel Tempest had felt no grat.i.tude on that score. Was not all John's wealth Archie's by right? and John must know it. Men do not grow up in ignorance of such a fact as a slur on their parentage.

What was a dole of a few hundred pounds now and again, when a man was wrongfully keeping possession of many thousands?

"Young men are all alike," said Colonel Tempest, testily. "Archie is no worse than the rest. Poor fellow, it's very little I can do for him!

It's deuced expensive living in the Guards; I found it so myself."

John might have asked, except that these are precisely the questions that make enmity between relations, why Colonel Tempest had put him in the Guards, considering that it was an idle life, and Archie was absolutely without expectations of any description. He and his sister Di had not even the modest fortune of a younger son eventually to divide between them. One of the beauties of Colonel Tempest's romantic clandestine marriage had been the lack of settlements, which, though it had prevented his wife bringing him anything owing to the rupture with her family, had at any rate enabled him to whittle away his own private fortune at will, and to inveigh at the same time against the miserliness of the Courtenays, who ought, of course, to have provided for his children.

How Colonel Tempest kept going at all no one knew. How Archie was kept going most people knew, or rather guessed without difficulty. John and Archie had held firmly together at Eton, and afterwards at Oxford. John had untied a very uncomfortable knot that had arranged itself round the innocent Archibald at Sandhurst. It could hardly be said that there was friendship between the two, but John, though only one year his cousin's senior, had taken the position of elder brother from the first, and had stood by Archie on occasions when that choice, but expensive, spirit needed a good deal of standing by. Archie had inherited other things from his father besides his perfect profile, and knew as well as most men which side his bread was b.u.t.tered. They were friends in the ordinary acceptance of that misused term. John had just returned from three years' absence at the Russian and Austrian Courts, and Archie, who had begun to feel his absence irksome in the extreme, had welcomed him back with effusion.

"Come into the Carlton and let us talk things over," said John.

In spite of himself, Colonel Tempest occasionally almost liked John, even while he kicked against the p.r.i.c.ks of a certain respect which he could not entirely smother for this grave quiet man of few words. When he was not for the moment jealous of him--and there were such moments--he could afford to indulge a sentiment almost of regret for him. At times he still hated him with the perfect hatred of the injurer for the injured; but nothing to stir that latent superst.i.tious horror, and consequent detestation of the cause of the horror, had occurred of late years. They had walked slowly down Bond Street and St. James's Street, and had reached the Carlton. Close by the steps a man was lounging. Colonel Tempest saw him look attentively at John as they came up, and the blood left his heart. It was Swayne.

In a moment the horror was awake again--wide awake, hydra-headed, close at hand, insupportable.

Swayne stared for a moment full at Colonel Tempest, and then turned away and sauntered slowly along Pall Mall.

"Won't you come in?" said John, as his companion hesitated.

"Not to-day. Another time," said Colonel Tempest, and incoherently making he knew not what excuse, he left John to join another man who was entering at that moment, and hurried after Swayne. He overtook him as he pa.s.sed through the gates into St. James's Park. It was a dull, foggy afternoon, and there were not many people about.

Swayne nodded carelessly to him as he joined him. He evidently did not mind being overtaken.

"Well, Colonel," he said, in the half insolent manner that in men like Swayne implies a knowledge that they have got the whip hand. Swayne was not to be outshone in the art of grovelling by any of his own species of fellow-worm, but he did not grovel unnecessarily. His higher nature was that of a bully.

"---- you, Swayne, where have you been all these years?" said Colonel Tempest, hurriedly. "I've tried to find you over and over again."

"I've been busy, Colonel," returned Mr. Swayne, swaying himself on tight light-checked legs, and pushing back his grey high hat. "Business before pleasure. That's my motto. And I've been mortal sick, too. Thought I should have gone up this time last year. I did indeed. You look the worse for wear too; but I must not be standing talking here, pleasant as it is to meet old friends."

"Look here, Swayne," said Colonel Tempest, in great agitation, laying a spasmodic clutch on Swayne's arm, "I can't stand it any longer. I can't indeed. It's wearing me into my grave. I want you--to cancel the bet.

You must cancel it. I won't bear it. If you won't cancel it, I won't pay up when the--if the time comes."

"Won't you?" said Swayne, with contempt. "I know better."

"I must get out of it. It's killing me," repeated Colonel Tempest, ignoring Swayne's last remark.