Diana Tempest Volume Iii Part 19

Colonel Tempest had the pink paper in his hand as the doctor and Di entered the room. He was laughing softly to himself.

"Archie is dead," he said, chuckling. "That is what John would like me to believe. But I know better. It is John that is dead. It is John who had to be snuffed out. Swayne said so, and he knew. And John says it's Archie, and he will write. Ha, ha! We know better, eh, doctor? eh, Di?

John's dead. Eight and twenty years old he was; but he's dead at last.

He won't write any more. He won't spend my money any more. He won't keep me out any more."

Colonel Tempest dropped on his knees. The only prayer he knew rose to his lips. "For what we are going to receive, the Lord make us truly thankful."

For an awful day and night the fierce flame of delirium leaped and fell, and ever leaped again. With set face Di stood hour after hour in the blast of the furnace, till doctor and nurse marvelled at her courage and endurance.

On the evening of the second day John came. He had written to tell Colonel Tempest of his coming, but the letter had not been opened.

The doctor, thinking he was Di's brother, brought him into the sick-room, too crowded with fearful images for his presence to be noticed by the sick man.

"John is dead," the high-pitched terrible voice was saying. "Blundering fools. First there was the railway, but Goodwin saved him; d.a.m.n his officiousness. And then there was the fire. They nearly had him that time. How grey he looked! Burnt to ashes. Bandaged up to the eyes. But he got better. And then the carnival. They m.u.f.fed it again. Oh, Lord, how slow they were! But"--the voice sank to a frightful whisper--"they got him in Paris. I don't know how they did it--it's a secret; but they trapped him at last."

Suddenly the gla.s.sy eyes looked with horrified momentary recognition at John.

"Risen from the dead," continued the voice. "I knew he would get up again. I always said he would; and he has. You can't kill John. There's no grave deep enough to hold him. Look at him with his head out now, and the earth upon his hair. We ought to have put a monument over him to keep him down. He's getting up. I tell you I did not do it. The grave's not big enough. Swayne dug it for him when he was a little boy--a little boy at school."

Di turned her colourless face to John, and smiled at him, as one on the rack might smile at a friend to show that the anguish is not unbearable.

She felt no surprise at seeing him. She was past surprise. She had forgotten that she had ever doubted his love.

In silence he took the hand she held out towards him, and kept it in a strong gentle clasp that was more comfort than any words.

Hour after hour they watched and ministered together, and hour by hour the lamp of life flared grimly low and lower. And after he had told everything--everything, everything that he had concealed in life--after John and Di had heard, in awed compa.s.sion and forgiveness, every word of the guilty secret which he had kept under lock and key so many years, at last the tide of remembrance ebbed away and life with it.

Did he know them in the quiet hours that followed? Did he recognize them? They bent over him. They spoke to him gently, tenderly. Did he understand? They never knew.

And so, in the grey of an April morning, poor Colonel Tempest, unconscious of death, which had had so many terrors for him in life, drifted tranquilly upon its tide from the human compa.s.sion that watched by him here, to the Infinite Pity beyond.

CONCLUSION.

"Where there are twa seeking there will be a finding."

After John had taken Di back to London he returned to Brighton, and from thence to Overleigh, to arrange for the double funeral. He had not remembered to mention that he was coming, and in the dusk of a wet afternoon he walked up by the way of the wood, and let himself in at the little postern in the wall. He had not thought he should return to Overleigh again, yet here he was once more in the dim gallery, with its faint scent of _pot-pourri_, his hand as he pa.s.sed stirring it from long habit. The pictures craned through the twilight to look at him. He stole quietly upstairs and along the garret gallery. The nursery door was open. A glow of light fell on Mitty's figure. What was she doing?

John stopped short and looked at her, and, with a sudden recollection as of some previous existence, understood.

Mitty was packing. Two large white grocery boxes were already closed and corded in one corner. John saw "Best Cubes" printed on them, and it dawned upon his slow masculine consciousness that those boxes were part of Mitty's luggage.

Mitty was standing in the middle of the room, holding at arm's length a little red flannel dressing-gown, which knocked twenty years off John's age as he looked.

"I shall take it," she said, half aloud. "It's wore as thin as thin behind; that and the open socks as I've mended and better-be-mended;"

and she thrust them both hastily, as if for fear she should repent, into a tin box, out of which the battered head of John's old horse protruded.

If there was one thing certain in this world, it was that the Noah's ark would not go in unless the horse came out. Mitty tried many ways, and was contemplating them with arms akimbo when John came in.

She showed no surprise at seeing him, and with astonishment John realized that it was only six days since he had left Overleigh. It was actually not yet a week since that far-distant afternoon, separated from the present by such a chasm, when he had lain on his face in the heather, and the deep pa.s.sions of youth had rent him and let him go.

Here at Overleigh time stopped. He came back twenty years older, and the almanac on his writing-table marked six days.

John made the necessary arrangements for the funeral to take place at midnight, according to the Tempest custom, which he knew Colonel Tempest would have been the last to waive. He wrote to tell Di what he had settled, together with the hour and the date. He dared not advise her not to be present, but he remembered the vast concourse of people who had a.s.sembled at his father's funeral to see the torchlight procession, and he hoped she would not come.

But Mrs. Courtenay wrote back that her granddaughter was fixed in her determination to be present, that she had reluctantly consented to it, and would accompany her herself. She added in a postscript that no doubt John would arrange for them to stay the night at Overleigh, and they should return to London the next day.

The night of the funeral was exceeding dark and still; so still that many, watching from a distance on Moat-hill, heard the voice saying, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."

And again--

"We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out."

The night was so calm that the torches burned upright and unwavering, casting a steadfast light on church and graveyard and tilted tombstones, on the crowded darkness outside, and on the worn faces of a man and woman who stood together between two open graves.

John and Di exchanged no word as they drove home. There were lights and a fire in the music-room, and she went in there, and began absently to take off her hat and long crepe veil. Mrs. Courtenay had gone to bed.

John followed Di with a candle in his hand. He offered it to her, but she did not take it.

"It is good-bye as well as good night," he said, holding out his hand.

"I must leave here very early to-morrow."

Di took no notice of his outstretched hand. She was looking into the fire.

"You must rest," he said gently, trying to recall her to herself.

A swift tremor pa.s.sed over her face.

"You are right," she said, in a low voice. "I will rest--when I have had five minutes' talk with you."

John shut the door, and came back to the fireside. He believed he knew what was coming, and his face hardened. It was bitter to him that Di thought it worth while to speak to him on the subject. She ought to have known him better.

She faced him with difficulty, but without hesitation. They looked each other in the eyes.

"You are going to London early to see your lawyer," she said, "on the subject that you wrote to father about."

"I am."

"That is why I must speak to you to-night. I dare not wait." Her eyes fell before the stern intentness of his. Her voice faltered a moment, and then went on. "John, don't go. It is not necessary. Don't grieve me by leaving Overleigh, or--changing your name."

A great bitterness welled up in John's heart against the woman he loved--the bitterness which sooner or later few men escape, of realizing how feeble is a woman's perception of what is honourable or dishonourable in a man.