Diana Tempest Volume Iii Part 17

"Nous voici, 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 pa.s.sage into a long room.

There was a cl.u.s.ter 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 compa.s.sion, 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 thread Of 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.

Di 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 London _on 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 we _have_ met--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 pa.s.s," 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 pa.s.sed. Trouble has come. It is part of life. It will pa.s.s 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 until she 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 G.o.d," she said to herself, "that in the next world there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Perhaps G.o.d Almighty sees it's a mistake."

Di found Colonel Tempest wrapped up in a _duvet_ in 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 to cause 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 with Archie; 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 that _he_ did about her, and what her behaviour had been to _him_, 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 after luncheon," 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 the _duvet_, 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 the _duvet_, 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. There were 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 not anxious to hear her father's comments on John's letter, or the threadbare remark, sacred to the poor relation, that when the rich one _was_ sitting 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 p.r.o.nounce 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.