Diana Tempest Volume Iii Part 11

"Tell me what you think," said Di again.

"I think," said Mrs. Courtenay, "that if John had been seriously attached to you, he would either have come, or have answered your letter by this time. I am afraid we have made a mistake."

Di did not answer. The world was crumbling down around her.

"I may be making one now," said Mrs. Courtenay; "but it appears to me he has had every opportunity given him, and he has made no use of them.

Men worth their salt _make_ their opportunities, but if they don't even take them when they are ready-made to their hand, they cannot be in earnest. Women don't realize what a hateful position a man is in who is deeply in love, and who has no knowledge of whether it is returned or not. He won't remain in it any longer than he can help."

"John is not in that position," said Di, colouring painfully. "Granny, why don't you reproach me for writing that letter?"

"Because, my dear, though I regret it more than I can say, I should have done the same in your place."

"And--and what would you do _now_ in my place?"

"This," said Mrs. Courtenay. "You cannot dismiss the subject from your mind, but whenever it comes into your thoughts, hold steadily before you the one fact that he is certainly aware you are attached to him, and he has not acted on that knowledge."

"They say men don't care for anything when once they know they can have it," said Di hoa.r.s.ely, pride wringing the words out of her. "Perhaps John is like that. He knows I--am only waiting to be asked."

"Fools say many things," returned Mrs. Courtenay. "That is about as true as that women don't care for their children when they get them. A few unnatural ones don't; the others do. I have seen much trouble caused by love affairs. After middle life most people decry them, especially those who have had superficial ones themselves; for there is seldom any love at all in the mutual attraction of two young people, and the elders know very well that if it is judiciously checked it can also be judiciously replaced by something else. But a real love which comes to nothing is more like the death of an only child than anything else. It _is_ a death. The great thing is to regard it so. I have known women go on year after year waiting, as we have been doing during the last two months, refusing to believe in its death; believing, instead, in some misunderstanding; building up theories to account for alienation; clinging to the idea that things might have turned out differently if only So-and-so had been more tactful, if they had not refused a certain invitation, if something they had said which might yet be explained had not been misconstrued. And all the time there is no misunderstanding, no need of explanation. The position is simple enough. No man is daunted by such things except in women's imaginations. What men want they will try to obtain, unless there is some positive bar, such as poverty. And if they don't try, remember the inference is _sure_, that they don't really want it."

Di did not answer. Her face had taken a set look, which for the first time reminded Mrs. Courtenay of her mother. She had often seen the other Diana look like that.

"My child," she said, stretching out her soft old hand, and laying it on the cold clenched one, "a death even of what is dearest to us, and a funeral and a headstone to mark the place, hard as it is, is as nothing compared to the death in life of an existence which is always dragging about a corpse. I have seen that not once nor twice. I want to save you from that."

Di laid her face for a moment on the kind hand.

"I will bury my dead," she said.

CHAPTER X.

"And now we believe in evil Where once we believed in good.

The world, the flesh, and the devil Are easily understood."

GORDON.

It seems a pity that our human destinies are too often so const.i.tuted that with our own hands we may annul in one hour--our hour of weakness--the long, slow work of our strength; annul the self-conquest and the renunciation of our best years. We ought to be thankful when the gate of the irrevocable closes behind us, and the power to defeat ourselves is at last taken from us. For he who has once solemnly and with conviction renounced, and then, for no new cause, has taken to himself again that which he renounced, has broken the mainspring of his life.

John went early the following morning to London, for he had business with three men, and he could not rest till he had seen them, and had shut that gate upon himself for ever.

So early had he started that it was barely midday when he reached Lord Frederick's chambers. The valet told him that his lordship was still in bed, and could see no one; but John went up to his bedroom, and knocked at the door.

"It is I--John Tempest," he said, and went in.

Lord Frederick was sitting up in bed, sallow and shrunk like a mummy, in a blue watered-silk dressing-gown. His thin hair was brushed up into a crest on the top of his head. The bed was littered with newspapers and letters. There was a tray before him, and he was in the act of chipping an egg as John came in.

He raised his eyebrows and looked first with surprised displeasure, and then with attention, at his visitor.

"Good morning," he said; and he went on tapping his egg. "Ah," he said, shaking his head, "hard-boiled again!"

John looked at him as a plague-stricken man might look at the carcase of some obscene animal found rotting in his water-spring.

Lord Frederick's varied experiences had made him familiar with the premonitory symptoms of those outbursts of anger and distress which he designated under the all-embracing term of "scenes." He felt idly curious to know what this man with his fierce white face had to say to him.

"Oblige me by sitting down," he said; "you are in my light."

"I have been reading my mother's letters to you," said John, still standing in the middle of the room, and stammering in his speech. He had not reckoned for the blind paroxysm of rage which had sprung up at the mere sight of Lord Frederick, and was spinning him like a leaf in a whirlwind.

"Indeed!" said Lord Frederick, raising his eyebrows, and carefully taking the sh.e.l.l off his egg. "I don't care about reading old letters myself, especially the private correspondence of other people; but tastes differ. You do, it seems. I had imagined the particular letters you allude to had been burnt."

"My mother intended to burn them."

"It would certainly have been wiser to do so, but probably for that reason they remained undestroyed. From time immemorial womankind has shown a marked repugnance to the dictates of common sense."

"I have burnt them."

"Just so," said Lord Frederick, helping himself to salt. "I commend your prudence. Had you burnt them unread, I should have been able to commend your sense of honour also."

"What do you know about honour?" said John.

The two men looked hard at each other.

"That remark," said Lord Frederick, joining the ends of his fingers and half shutting his eyes, "is a direct insult. To insult a man with whom you are not in a position to quarrel is, in my opinion, John, an error of judgment. We will consider it one, and as such I will let it pa.s.s.

The letters, I presume, contained nothing of which you were not already aware?"

"Only the fact that I am your illegitimate son."

"I deplore your coa.r.s.eness of expression. You certainly have not inherited it from me. But, my dear Galahad, it is impossible that even your youth and innocence should not have known of my _tendresse_ for your mother."

"Is that the last new name for adultery?" said John huskily, advancing a step nearer the bed. His face was livid. His eyes burned. He held his hands clenched lest they should rush out and wrench away all semblance of life and humanity from that figure in the watered-silk dressing-gown.

Lord Frederick lay back on his pillows, and looked at him steadily. He was without fear, but it appeared to him that he was about to die. The laws of his country, of conscience and of principle, all the protection that envelops life, seemed to have receded from him, to have slipped away into the next room, or downstairs with the valet. They would come back, no doubt, in time, but they might be a little late, as far as he was concerned.

"He has strong hands, like mine," he said to himself, his pale, unflinching eyes fixed upon his son's; while a remembrance slid through his mind of how once, years ago, he had choked the life out of a mastiff which had turned on him, and how long the heavy brute had taken to die.

"Do not spill the coffee," he said quietly, after a moment.

John started violently, and wheeled away from him like a man regaining consciousness on the brink of an abyss. Lord Frederick put out his lean hand, and went on with his breakfast.

There was a long silence.

"John," said Lord Frederick at last, not without a certain dignity, "the world is as it is. We did not make it, and we are not responsible for it. If there is any one who set it going, it is his own look out.

Reproach _him_, if you can find him. All we have to do is to live in it.

And we can't live in it, I tell you we can't exist in it, with any comfort until we realize that it is rotten to the core."

John was leaning against the window-sill shaking like a reed. It seemed to him that for one awful moment he had been in h.e.l.l.