Diana Tempest Volume I Part 9

"I intend to go my own way when I have decided where I want to go."

"Well, in the meanwhile don't commit yourself. Always leave yourself a loop-hole."

"I don't see the use of worrying about loop-holes if I don't want to back out of anything. I shall never consciously put myself anywhere where it might be necessary to wriggle out on all fours."

"Oh! I dare say. I thought all that in my salad days, but you'll grow out of it as you get older. You'll chip your sh.e.l.l, John, like the rest of us, he! he! and not be above a shift. There's not a man who won't stoop to a shift on a pinch, provided the pinch is sharp enough, any more than there is a woman, bespoken or otherwise, who does not like being made love to, provided it is done the right way. That is my experience."

Lord Frederick's experience was that of most men of his stamp, the crown of whose maturer years, earned by a youth of strenuous self-indulgence, is a disbelief in human nature. Secret contempt of women, coupled with a smooth and adulatory manner towards them, show only too plainly the school in which these opinions have been formed.

"Look at Hemsworth," continued Lord Frederick, as Mrs. Courtenay and Di, and Lord Hemsworth in close attendance, were being gradually drifted towards the room in which they were standing. "If Hemsworth goes on giving that girl a hold over him, he will find himself deuced uncomfortable one of these days. He had better hold hard while he can.

Discretion is the better part of valour. I've been telling him so."

"Why should he hold hard?" said John, rather absently. "After all, none but the brave deserve the fair."

"And none but the brave can live with some of them. He, he!" said Lord Frederick, chuckling. "There are cheaper ways of getting out of love than by marriage; but she is a fine woman. Hemsworth has got eyes in his head, I must own. I remember being dreadfully in love with her mother, nearly thirty years ago, and she with me. She had that sort of stand-off manner which takes some men more than anything; it did me. I wonder more women don't adopt it. I very nearly married her. He, he! But Tempest, your uncle, made a fool of himself while I hesitated, and was wretched with her, poor devil! I have never had such a shave since. Upon my word"

putting up his eyegla.s.s--"if I were a young man, I think I'd marry Di Tempest. Those large women wear well, John; they don't shrivel up to nothing like Mrs. Graham, or expand like Lady Torrington, that emblem of plenty without waist. He, he! Look at Mrs. Courtenay, too. There's a fine old pelican with an eye to the main chance. Always look at the mother and the grandmother if you can. But she is on too large a scale for you."

"Not in the least," said John, calmly. "I cherish thoughts of Miss Delmour, who is quite three inches taller."

"Don't marry a Delmour! They are too thin. Those girls have neither mind, body, nor estate. I have seen two generations of them. They have a sort of prettiness when they are quite new; but look at her married sisters. They all look as if they had shrunk in the wash."

"I must go and speak to Mrs. Courtenay," said John, from whose impenetrable face it would have been difficult to judge whether his companion's style of conversation amused or disgusted him. "Three years'

absence blunts the recollection of one's friends." And he moved away towards the next room. The recollection of a good many people, however, had apparently not become blunted, and it was some time before he could make his way to Mrs. Courtenay, who was talking with a Turkish Amba.s.sador and revolutionizing his ideas of English women.

She was genuinely glad to see John, having known him from a boy.

"You know your cousin Diana, of course?" she said, as Di came towards them.

"Indeed I do not," said John. "I asked who she was at the Thesinger wedding to-day, and found myself in the ludicrous position of not knowing my own first cousin."

"Not recognizing her, you mean?" said Mrs. Courtenay. "Surely you must have seen her often in my house before you went abroad; but I suppose she was in a chrysalis school-room state then, and has emerged into young ladyhood since. Here is your cousin saying he does not know you,"

continued Mrs. Courtenay, turning to Di. "John, this is Di. Di, this is your first cousin, John Tempest."

Both bowed, and then thought better of it and shook hands. Their eyes met on the exact level of equal height, and the steady keen glance that pa.s.sed between was like the meeting of two formidable powers. Each was taken by surprise. It was as if, instead of shaking hands, they had suddenly measured swords.

"If you don't know each other you ought to," continued Mrs. Courtenay.

"Lord Hemsworth, what is that unwholesome-looking compound you have got hold of?"

"Lemonade for Miss Tempest."

"Kindly fetch me some too." And Mrs. Courtenay turned away to continue her conversation with the Turk, who was still hovering near, and whose bead-like eyes under his red fez showed a decided envy of John.

He and Di were standing in the doorway that led into the last room where the refreshments were, and a stream of people beginning at that moment to press out again, pressed them back into the room they had just been leaving.

"I shall upset this down some one's back in another minute and make an enemy for life," said Di, holding her gla.s.s as best she could. She would have given anything at that instant to say something unusually frivolous in order to shake off the impression of the moment before; but her frivolity had temporarily departed with Lord Hemsworth.

"Don't oppose the stream; subside into this backwater," said John, placing his square shoulders between the throng and herself, and nodding to a recess by one of the high arched windows.

Having reached it, Di sipped the highwater mark off her lemonade.

"It's safe now," she said. "I don't know why I took it; I don't want it now I've got it. Have you seen Archie since you came back? You know _him_, of course? He often talks about you."

"Yes, I saw him at the Thesinger wedding to-day."

"Were you there?"

"Yes, but only at the church. I did not go on to the house; I disliked the whole affair too much. Many marriages, half the marriages one sees, are only irrevocable flirtations; but the ceremony of to-day was not even that."

Di looked away through the mullioned window out across the river and its gliding shimmer to the lights beyond. She did not know how long it was before she spoke.

"I think it was a great sin," she said, at last, in a low voice, unconscious of a pause that to her companion was full of meaning.

"Or a great mistake," he said, gently.

"No, not a mistake," said Di, still looking out. "The others, the irrevocable flirtations, are the mistakes. There was no mistake to-day.

But it was a dull wedding," she added, with sudden self-recollection and a change of manner. "Not like one I was at last autumn in the country. I was staying in the same house as the bridegroom, and he and the best man, a Mr. Lumley, got up at an early hour, woke some of the other men, and paraded the house with an _impromptu_ band of music. I remember the bridegroom performed piercingly upon the comb. I wonder people ever play the comb; it is so plaintive. But perhaps it is your favourite instrument, perfected in the course of foreign travel, and I am trampling on your feelings unawares."

"I used to play upon it," said John, "but not of late years. I left it off because it tickled and increased the natural melancholy of my disposition. What were the other instruments?"

"Let me see, Lord Hemsworth murmured upon a gong, and Mr. Lumley uttered his dark speech upon a tray. The whole was very effective. He told me afterwards that it was a relief to his feelings, which had been much lacerated by the misplaced affections of the bride."

Di's laughing mischievous eyes met John's fixed upon her with a grave attention that took her aback. She had an uncomfortable sense that he was regarding her with secret amus.e.m.e.nt. A moment before she had been sorry that she had inadvertently spoken with a force that was unusual to her. Now she was equally vexed that she had been flippant.

"Here you are," said Lord Hemsworth, elbowing his way up to them. "I have been looking for you everywhere. Mrs. Courtenay is going, and is asking for you."

CHAPTER VIII.

"Psyche-papillon, un jour Puisses-tu trouver l'amour Et perdre tes ailes!"

"Di," said Mrs. Courtenay, as they drove away at last, after the usual half-hour's waiting for the carriage, the tedium of which Lord Hemsworth had exerted himself to relieve, "do you usually talk quite so much nonsense to Lord Hemsworth as you did to-night?"

"Generally, granny. Yes, I think it was about the usual quant.i.ty.

Sometimes it is rather more, a good deal more, when you are not there."

Mrs. Courtenay was silent for a few minutes.

"You are making a mistake, Di," she said at last.

"How, granny?"

"In your manner to Lord Hemsworth. You make yourself cheap to him. A woman should never do that!"

Di did not answer.

"When I was young," said Mrs. Courtenay, "I should have been proud to have been admired by a man of his stamp."