Diana Tempest Volume Iii Part 5

More days pa.s.sed.

And gradually, among the tottering _debris_ of a life undermined from its youth, one other thought began, mole-like, to delve and creep in the darkness.

Truly the way of transgressors is hard.

No one cared what he suffered, what he went through. This was the constant refrain of these latter days. He had paroxysms of angry tears of self-pity with his head in his hands, his heart rent to think of himself sitting bowed with anguish by his solitary fireside. Love holds the casting vote in the destinies of most of us. There is only one love which wrings the heart beyond human endurance--the love of self.

And yet more days. The sun gave no light by day, neither the moon by night.

To the severe cold of January a mild February had succeeded. March was close at hand. The hope and yearning of the spring was in the air already. Already in Kensington Gardens the silly birds had begun to sing, and the snowdrops and the little regiments of crocuses had come up in double file to listen.

On this particular afternoon a pale London sun was s.h.i.+ning like a new s.h.i.+lling in the sky, striking as many sparks as he could out of the Round Pond. There was quite a regatta at that Cowes of nursery s.h.i.+pping.

The mild wind was just strong enough to take sailing-vessels across. The big man-of-war belonging to the big melancholy man who seemed open to an offer, the yachts and the little fis.h.i.+ng-smacks, everything with a sail, got over sooner or later. The tiny hollow boats with seats were being towed along the edge in leading-reins. A wooden doll with joints took advantage of its absence of costume to drop out of the boat in which it was being conveyed, and take a swim in the open. But it was recovered. An old gentleman with spectacles hooked it out with the end of his umbrella in a moment, quite pleased to be of use. The little boys shouted, the little girls tossed their manes, and careered round the pool on slender black legs. Solemn babies looked on from perambulators.

The big man started the big man-of-war again, and the whole fleet came behind in its wake.

Colonel Tempest was sitting on a seat near the landing-place, where the s.h.i.+p-owners had run to clutch their property a moment ago. His hand was clenched on something he held under his overcoat.

"When the big s.h.i.+p touches the edge," he said to himself.

They came slowly across the pool in a flock. Every little boy shrieked to every other little boy of his acquaintance to observe how his particular craft was going. The big man alone was perfectly apathetic, though his priceless possession was the first, of course. He began walking slowly round. Half the children were at the landing before him, calling to their boats, and stretching out their hands towards them.

The big one touched land.

"Not this time," said Colonel Tempest to himself; "next time."

How often he had said that already! How often his hand had failed him when the moment which he and that other self had agreed upon had arrived! How often he had gone guiltily back to the rooms to which he had not intended to return, and had lain down once more in the bed which had become an accomplice to the torture of every hour of darkness!

Between the horror of returning once again, and the horror of the step into another darkness, his soul oscillated with the feeble violence of despair.

He remembered the going back of yesterday.

"I will not go back again," he said to himself, with the pa.s.sion of a spoilt child. "I will not--I will not."

"It is time to go home, Master Georgie," said a nursery-maid.

"Just once more, Bessie," pleaded the boy. "Just one _single_ once more."

"Well, then, it must be the last time, mind," said the good-natured arbiter of fate, turning the perambulator, and pus.h.i.+ng it along the edge, while the occupant of the same added to the hilarity of the occasion by beating a much-chewed musical rattle against the wheel.

"_The last time._" The chance words seized upon Colonel Tempest's shuddering panic-stricken mind, and held it as in a vice.

"Next time," he said over and over again to himself. "Next time shall really be the last time--really the last, the very last."

The boats were coming across again, straggling wide of each other; how quick, yet what an eternity in coming! The top-heavy boat with the red sail would be the first. It had been started long before the others. The wind caught it near the edge. It would turn over. No, it righted itself.

It neared, it bobbed in the ripple at the brink; it touched.

Colonel Tempest's mind had become quite numb. He only knew that for some imperative reason which he had forgotten he must pull the trigger. He half pulled it; then again more decidedly.

There was a report. It stunned him back to a kind of consciousness of what he had done, but he felt nothing.

There was a great silence, and then a shrieking of terrified children, and a glimpse of agitated people close at hand, and others running towards him.

The man with the big boat under his arm said, "By gum!"

Colonel Tempest looked at him. He felt nothing. Had he failed?

The smoke came curling out at his collar, and something dropped from his nerveless hand and lay gleaming on the gra.s.s. There was a sound of many waters in his ears.

"He might have spared the children," said a man's voice, tremulous with indignation.

"That is always the way. No one thinks of _me_," thought Colonel Tempest. And the Round Pond and the growing crowd, and the child nearest him with its convulsed face, all turned slowly before his eyes, slid up, and disappeared.

CHAPTER V.

"Vous avez bien froid, la belle; Comment vous appelez-vous?

Les amours et les yeux doux De nos cercueils sont les clous.

Je suis la morte, dit-elle.

Cueillez la branche de houx."

VICTOR HUGO.

As John lay impatiently patient upon his bed in the round oak-panelled room at Overleigh during the weeks that followed his accident, his thoughts by day, and by night, varied no more than the notes of a chaffinch in the trees outside.

"Oh, let the solid earth Not fail beneath my feet, Before I too have found What some have found so sweet!"

That was the one constant refrain. The solid earth had nearly failed beneath his feet, nearly--nearly. If the world might but cohere together and not fly off into s.p.a.ce; if body and soul might but hold together till he had seen Di once more, till he knew for certain from her own lips that she loved him! Unloved by any woman until now, wistfully ignorant of woman's tenderness, even of its first alphabet learned at a mother's knee, unread in all its later language,--in these days of convalescence a pa.s.sionate craving was upon him to drink deep of that untasted cup which "some have found so sweet."

He had Mitty, and Mitty at least was radiantly happy during these weeks, with John fast in bed, and in a condition to dispense with other nursing than hers. She sat with him by the hour together, mending his socks and s.h.i.+rts, for she would not suffer any one to touch his clothes except herself, and discoursing to him about Di--a subject which she soon perceived never failed to interest him.

"Miss Dinah," Mitty would say for the twentieth time, but without wearying her audience--"now, there's a fine upstanding lady for my lamb."

"Lady Alice Fane is very pretty, too," John would remark, with the happy knack of self-concealment peculiar to the ostrich and the sterner s.e.x.

"Hoots!" Mitty replied. "She's nothing beside Miss Dinah. If you have Lady Fane with her silly ways, and so snappy to her maid, you'll repent every hair of your head. You take Miss Dinah, my dear, as is only waiting to be asked. She wants you, my precious," Mitty never failed to add. "I tell you it's as plain as the nose on your face" (a simile the force of which could not fail to strike him). "It's not that Lord Hemst.i.tch, for all his pretty looks. It's _you_."

And John told himself he was a fool, and then secretly felt under the pillow for a certain pencilled note which Di had left with the doctor on her hurried departure to London the morning after the ice carnival. It had been given to him when he was able to read letters. It was a short note. There was very little in it, and a great deal left out. It did not even go over the page. But nevertheless John was so very foolish as to keep it under his pillow, and when he was promoted to his clothes it followed into his pocket. Even the envelope had a certain value in his eyes. Had not her hand touched it, and written his name upon it?

Lindo and Fritz, who had been consumed with ennui during John's illness, were almost as excited as their master when he hobbled, on Mitty's arm, into the morning-room for luncheon. Lindo was aweary of sediments of beef-tea and sticks of toast. Fritz, who had had a plethora of whites of poached eggs, sniffed anxiously at the luncheon-tray with its roast pheasant.

There were tricks and Albert biscuits after luncheon, succeeded by heavy snoring on the hearthrug.

John was almost as delighted as they were to leave his sick-room. It was the first step towards going to London. When should he wring permission from his doctor to go up on "urgent business"? Five days, seven days?