Diana Tempest Volume Ii Part 6

He had a stock of small sayings of that calibre. Sometimes they fitted the occasion, and sometimes not.

There was a short silence.

"Quicksilver is lame," said Archie.

"What have you been doing with her?" asked John, facing round.

"Nothing in particular. I rode her in the Pierpoint steeplechase last week, and she came down at the last fence, and lost me fifty pounds. I came in third, but I should have been first to a dead certainty if she had stood up."

"Send her down here at once."

"Yes, and thanks awfully and all that sort of thing for lending her, don't you know. Very good of you, though of course you could not use her yourself when you were laid up. I am going back to town first thing to-morrow morning; only got a day's leave to run down here; thought I ought to tell you about her. I'll send her off the day after to-morrow if you like, but the truth is----"

A good deal of circ.u.mlocution, that favourite attire of certain truths, was necessary before the simple fact could be arrived at that Quicksilver had been used as security for the modest sum of four hundred and forty-five pounds, which it had been absolutely inc.u.mbent on Archie to raise at a moment's notice. Heaven only knew what would not have been involved if he had not had reluctant recourse to this obvious means of averting dishonour. When Colonel Tempest and Archie began to talk about their honour, which was invariably mixed up with debts of a dubious nature, and an overdrawn banking account, and an unpaid tailor, John always froze perceptibly. The Tempest honour was always having narrow escapes, according to them. It required constant support.

"I would not have done it if I could have helped it," explained Archie in an easy att.i.tude on the window-seat. "Your mare, not mine. I knew that well enough. I felt that at the time; but I had to get the money somehow, and positively the poor old gee was the only security I had to give."

Archie was not in the least ashamed. It was always John who was ashamed on these occasions.

There was a long silence. Archie contemplated his nails.

"It's not the money I mind," said John at last, "you know that."

"I know it isn't, old chap. It's my morals you're afraid of; you said so in the spring."

"Well, I'm not going to hold forth on morals again, as it seems to have been of so little use. But look here, Archie, I've paid up a good many times, and I'm getting tired of it. I would rather build an infants'

school or a home for cats, or something with a pretence of common sense, with the money in future. It does you no manner of good. You only chuck it away. You are the worse for having it, and so am I for being such a fool as to give it you. It's nonsense telling you suddenly that I won't go on paying when I've led you to expect I always shall because I always have. Of course you think, as I'm well off, that you can draw on me for ever and ever. Well, I'll pay up again this once. You promised me in April it should be the last time you would run up bills. Now it is my turn to say this is the last time I'll throw money away in paying them."

Archie raised his eyebrows. How very "close-fisted" John was becoming!

And as a boy at school, and afterwards at college, he had been remarkably open-handed, even as a minor on a very moderate allowance.

Archie did not understand it.

"I'll buy back my own horse," continued John, trying to swallow down a sense of intense irritation; "and if there is anything else--I suppose there is a new crop by this time--I'll settle them. You must start fair.

And I'll go on allowing you three hundred a year, and when you want to marry I'll make a settlement on your wife, but, by ---- I'll never pay another sixpence for your debts as long as I live."

Archie smiled faintly, and stretched out his legs. John rarely "cut up rough" like this. He had an uneasy suspicion that the present promptly afforded a.s.sistance would hardly compensate for the opening vista of discomfort in the future. And John's tone jarred upon him. There was something fixed in it, and Archie's nebulous easy-going temperament had an invincible repugnance to anything unpliable. He had as little power to move John as a mist has to move a mountain. He had proved on many occasions how little amenable John was to persuasion, and each recurring occasion had filled him with momentary apprehension. He felt distinctly uncomfortable after the two had parted for the night, until a train of reasoning, the logic of which could not be questioned, soothed him into his usual trustful calm.

John, he said to himself, had been out of temper. He had eaten something that had disagreed with him. That was why he had flown out. How frightfully cross he himself was when he had indigestion! And he, Archie, would never have grudged John a few pounds now and again if their positions had been reversed. Therefore, it was not likely John would either. And John had always been fond of him. He had nursed him once at college through a tedious illness, unadorned on his side by Christian patience and fort.i.tude. Of course John was fond of him.

Everybody was fond of him. It had been an unlucky business about Quicksilver. No wonder John had been annoyed. He would have been annoyed himself in his place. But (oh, all-embracing phrase!) _it would be all right_. He was eased of money difficulties for the moment, and John was not such a bad fellow after all. He would not really "turn against" him.

He would be sure to come round in the future, as he had always done with clock-like regularity in the past.

Archie slept the sleep of the just, and went off in the best of spirits and the most expensive of light overcoats next morning with a cheque in his pocket.

John went back into the dining-hall after his departure to finish his breakfast, but apparently he was not hungry, for he forgot all about it.

He went and stood in the bay window, as he had a habit of doing when in thought, and looked out. He did not see the purple pageant of the thunderstorm sweeping up across the moor and valley and already vibrating among the crests of the trees in the vivid suns.h.i.+ne below the castle wall. He was thinking intently of those two men, his next-of-kin.

Supposing he did not marry. Supposing he died childless. Overleigh and the other vast Tempest properties were entailed, in default of himself and his children, on Colonel Tempest and his children. Colonel Tempest and Archie came next behind him; one slip, and they would be in possession.

And John had almost slipped several times, had several times touched that narrow brink where two worlds meet. He had no fear of death, but nevertheless Death had a.s.sumed larger proportions in his mind and in his calculations than is usual with the young and the strong, simply because he had seen him very near more than once, and had ceased to ignore his reality. He might die. What then?

John had an attachment which had the intensity of a pa.s.sion and the unreasoning faithfulness of an instinct for certain carved and pictured rooms and lichened walls and forests and valleys and moors. He loved Overleigh. His affections had been "planted under a north wall," and like some hardy tenacious ivy they clung to that wall. Overleigh meant much to him, had always meant much, more than was in the least consistent with the rather advanced tenets which he, in common with most young men of ability, had held at various times. Theories have fortunately little to do with the affections.

He could not bear to think of Overleigh pa.s.sing out of his protecting love to the careless hands and selfish heedlessness of Colonel Tempest and Archie. There are persons for whom no income will suffice. John's nearest relations were of this time-honoured stamp. As has been well said, "In the midst of life they are in debt."

John saw Archie in imagination "trotting out the silver Johnnies." The miniatures, the pictures, the cameos, the old Tempest ma.n.u.scripts, for which America made periodic bids, the older plate--all, all would go, would melt away from niche and wall and cabinet. Perhaps the books would go first of all; the library to which he in his turn was even now adding, as those who had gone before him had done.

How they had loved the place, those who had gone before! How they must have fought for it in the early days of ravages by Borderer and Scot!

How Amyas the Cavalier must have sworn to avenge those Roundhead cannon-b.a.l.l.s which crashed into his oak staircase, and had remained imbedded in the stubborn wood to this day! Had any one of them loved it, John wondered, with a greater love than his?

He turned from the blaze outside, and looked back into the great shadowed room, in the recesses of which a beautiful twilight ever lingered. The sunlight filtered richly but dimly through the time-worn splendour of its high windows of painted gla.s.s, touching here and there inlaid panel and carved wainscoting, and laying a faint mosaic of varied colour on the black polished floor.

It was a room which long a.s.sociation had invested with a kind of halo in John's eyes, far removed from the appreciative or ignorant admiration of the stranger, who saw in it only an unique Elizabethan relic.

Artists wors.h.i.+pped it whenever they got the chance, went wild over the Tudor fan vaulting of the ceiling with its long pendants, and the quaint inlaid frets on the oak chimney-piece; talked learnedly of the panels above the wainscot, on which a series of genealogical trees were painted representing each of the wapentakes into which Yorks.h.i.+re was divided, having s.h.i.+elds on them with armorial bearings of the gentry of the county ent.i.tled in Elizabeth's time to bear arms.

Strangers took note of these things, and spelt out the rather apocryphal marriages of the Tempests on the painted gla.s.s, or examined the date below the dial in the southern window with the name of the artist beneath it who had blazoned the arms.--_Bernard Diminckhoff fecit, 1585._

John knew every detail by heart, and saw them never, as a man in love with a n.o.ble woman gradually ceases to see beauty or the absence of beauty in brow and lip and eyelid, in adoration of the face itself which means so much to him.

John's deep-set steady eyes absently followed the slow travelling of the coloured suns.h.i.+ne across the room. Overleigh had coloured his life as its painted gla.s.s was colouring the suns.h.i.+ne. It was bound up with his whole existence. The Tempest motto graven on the pane beside him, _Je le feray durant ma vie_, was graven on John's heart as indelibly. Mr.

Tempest's dying words to him had never been forgotten. "It is an honour to be a Tempest. You are the head of the family. Do your duty by it."

The words were sunk into the deep places of his mind. What the child had promised, the man was resolved to keep. His responsibility in the great position in which G.o.d had placed him, his duty, not only as a man, but as a Tempest, were the backbone of his religion--if those can be called religious who "trust high instincts more than all the creeds." The family motto had become a part of his life. It was perhaps the only oath of allegiance which John had ever taken. He turned towards the window again, against which his dark head had been resting.

The old thoughts and resolutions so inextricably intertwined with the fibre of pride of birth, the old hopes and aspirations, matured during three years' absence, temporarily dormant during these months of illness, returned upon him with the unerring swiftness of swallows to the eaves.

He pressed his hand upon the pane.

The thunderstorm wept hard against the gla.s.s.

The sable Tempest lion rampant on a field argent surmounted the scroll on which the motto was painted, legible still after three hundred years.

John said the words aloud.

_Je le feray durant ma vie._

CHAPTER V.

"There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike called love."--GEORGE ELIOT.

"These are troublous times, granny," said Di to Mrs. Courtenay, coming into her grandmother's room on a hot afternoon early in September. "I can't get out, so you see I am reduced to coming and sitting with you."

"And why are the times troublous, and why don't you go out-of-doors again?"

"I have been to reconnoitre," said Di, wrathfully, "and the coast is not clear. He is sitting on the stairs again, as he did yesterday."