Diana Tempest Volume Iii Part 18

It was a business letter, couched in the most matter-of-fact terms. John stated his case--expressed a formal regret that the facts he mentioned had not come to light at Mr. Tempest's death, mentioned that the acc.u.mulation of income during his minority had fortunately remained untouched, that he had desired his lawyer to communicate with Colonel Tempest, and signed himself "John Fane." He had written the word "Tempest," and had then struck it through.

Di pressed her forehead against the gla.s.s on which the rain was beating.

Was the emotion which was shattering her joy or sorrow, or both?

She knew it was joy. In a lightning-flash of comprehension she realized that it was this awful calamity which had kept John silent, which had held him back from coming to her, from asking her to marry him. He loved her still! Love, dead and buried, had risen out of his grave. The impossible had happened. John loved her still.

"I cannot bear it," she said; and for a moment the long yellow waves, and her father's impatient voice, and even John's letter, were alike blotted out, unheard.

Colonel Tempest considered Di's apathy, after she had read the letter, unfeeling and unsympathetic in the extreme, and he did not hesitate to tell her so. But when she presently turned her averted face towards him he was already off on another tack, his excitement, which seemed to increase rather than diminish, tossing him as a wave tosses a spar.

"Twenty years," he said tremulously. "Think of it, Di--not that you seem to care! Twenty years have I toiled and moiled in poverty, twenty years have I and my children been ground down while that nameless interloper has spent our money right and left. Oh, my G.o.d! I've got it at last.

I've got my own at last. But who will give me back those twenty years?"

and Colonel Tempest's voice broke into a sob.

Other consequences of that letter began to dawn on Di's awakening consciousness.

"Then John," she said, bewildered. "Oh, father, what will become of John?"

"John," said Colonel Tempest, bitterly, "is now just where I was twenty years ago--disinherited, penniless. He has kept me out all these years, and now at last Providence gives me my own."

It is to be hoped that Providence is not really responsible for all the shady transactions for which we offer up our best thanks.

"I dare say he has put by," continued Colonel Tempest. "He has had time enough."

"You have not read the letter carefully," said Di. "He only discovered all this less than three months ago, and you have been ill for more than two."

Colonel Tempest did not hear her. He had ceased for the last twenty years to hear anything he did not want to.

"Fifty thousand a year," he went on; "not a penny less. And the New River shares have gone up since Jack's day. And there was a large sum which rolled up during the minority. John is right there. There must be over a hundred thousand. You shall have that, Di. Archie will kick, but you shall have it. Eight thousand pounds John settled on you a year ago.

That was the amount of _his_ generosity to my poor girl. You shall not have a penny less than a hundred thousand. Not during my lifetime, of course; but when I die----" he added hastily.

Di could articulate nothing.

"I shall pay my own debts and Archie's in a moment," he continued, not noticing whether she answered or not. "If you want a new gown, Di, you may send the bill to me. I don't believe I owe a thousand, and Archie not so much, poor lad, though John was always pulling a long face over his debts. How deuced mean John was from first to last! Well, do as you would be done by. I'll do for him alone what he thought enough for the two of you. I'll never give him cause to say I'm close-fisted. He shall have your eight thousand, and he shall have three hundred a year, the same that he allowed Archie, as well."

"He won't take it."

"Won't take it!" said Colonel Tempest, contemptuously. "That's all you know about the world, Di. I tell you he'll have to take it. I tell you he has not a sixpence in the world at this moment, to say nothing of owing me twenty years' income."

Colonel Tempest rambled on of how Archie should leave the army and live at Overleigh, of how Di should live there too, and Mrs. Courtenay might go to the devil. Presently he fell to wondering what state the shooting was in, and how many pheasants John was breeding at that moment. Every instant it became more unbearable, till at last Di sent for the nurse, made an excuse of posting her letters, and slipped out of the room.

She went out to her old friends, the yellow waves, and, too exhausted to walk, sat down under the lee of one of the high wooden rivets between which the sea licks the pebbly sh.o.r.e into grooves.

Gradually the tension of her mind relaxed. Di sat and watched the waves until they washed away the high invalid voice vibrating in some acute recess of her brain; washed away the hideous thought that they were rich because John was penniless and dishonoured; washed away everything except the one fact that his silence was accounted for, and that he loved her after all.

Di looked out across the rain-trodden sea. If it was raining, she did not know it. What did anything in this wide world matter so long as John loved her? Poverty was nothing. Marriage was nothing either. What did it matter if they could not marry so long as they loved each other?

Once in a lifetime it is vouchsafed alike to the worldly and to the pure, to the earnest and to the frivolous, to discern that vision--which has been ever life's greatest reality or life's greatest illusion according to the character of the beholder--that to love and to be loved is enough.

A wet glint came across the sea, exquisite and evanescent as the gleam across Di's heart.

"It is enough!" said Di; and her soul was flooded with a solemn joy a thousand times deeper than when she had first discovered her love for John, and his for her, and a brilliant future was before her.

Sorrow with his pick mines the heart. But he is a cunning workman. He deepens the channels whereby happiness may enter, and hollows out new chambers for joy to abide in, when he is gone.

CHAPTER XVI.

"Though the mills of G.o.d grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small."

LONGFELLOW.

The doctor was sitting with Colonel Tempest on Di's return to the hotel, and Di perceived that her father, who was still in a very excited state, had been telling him about his sudden change of fortune.

The doctor courteously offered his congratulations, and on leaving made a pretext of inquiring after Di's health in order to see her alone.

"Colonel Tempest has been telling me of his unexpected access of wealth," he said. "In his present condition of nervous prostration, and tendency to cerebral excitement, the information should most certainly have been withheld from him. His brain is not in a state to bear the strain which such an event might have put upon it, has put upon it. Were such a thing to occur again in his enfeebled condition, I cannot answer for the consequences."

"It was absolutely unforeseen," said Di. "None of us had the remotest suspicion. He has been in the habit of reading his letters for the past month."

"They must be kept from him for the present," replied the doctor. "Let them be brought to you in future, and use your own discretion about showing them to him after you have read them yourself. Your father must be guarded from all agitation."

This was more easily said than done. Nothing could turn Colonel Tempest's shattered, restless mind from hopping like a gra.s.shopper on that one subject for the remainder of the day. The bit of cork in his medicine, which at another time would have elicited a torrent of indignation, excited only a momentary attention. He talked without ceasing--hinted darkly at danger to John which that young man's creditable though tardy action had averted, alluded to pa.s.sages in his own life which nothing would induce him to divulge, and then lighting on a sentimental vein, discoursed of a happy old age (the old age of fiction), in which he should see Archie's and Di's children playing in the gallery at Overleigh. And the old name----

Di had not realized, until her parent descanted upon the subject in a way that set her teeth on edge, how hideous, how vulgar, is the seamy side of pride of birth. When Colonel Tempest began to dwell on "the goodness and the grace that on his birth had smiled," shall we blame Di if she put on the clock half an hour, and rang for the nurse?

Things were not much better next morning. Di gave strict orders that all letters and telegrams should be brought to her room. Colonel Tempest fidgeted because he had not heard from the lawyer in whose hands John had placed the transfer of the property. The letter was in Di's pocket, but she dared not give it to him, for though it contained nothing to agitate him, she knew that the fact that she had opened it would raise a whirlwind.

"And Archie," said Colonel Tempest, querulously--"I ought to have heard from him too. If John told him the same day that he wrote to me, we ought to have heard from Archie this morning. I should have imagined that though Archie did not give his father a thought when he was poor, he might have thought him worthy of a little consideration _now_."

"If that is the motive you would have given him if he had written, it is just as well he has not," said Di; but she wondered at his silence nevertheless.

But she did not wonder long.

She left her father busily writing to an imaginary lawyer, for he had neither the name nor address of John's, and on the landing met a servant bringing a telegram to her room. She took it upstairs, and though it was addressed to her father, opened it. She had no apprehension of evil. The old are afraid of telegrams, but the young have made them common, and have worn out their prestige.

The telegram was from John, merely stating that Archie had been taken seriously ill.

Di's heart gave a leap of thankfulness that her father had been spared this further shock. But Archie. Seriously ill. She was indignant at John's vague statement. What did seriously ill mean? Why could not he say what was the matter? And how could she keep the fact of his illness from her father? Ought she to go at once to Archie? Seriously ill. How like a man to send a telegram of that kind! She would telegraph at once to John for particulars, and go or stay according as the doctor thought she could or could not safely leave her father. Di put on her walking things, and ran out to the post-office round the corner, where she despatched a peremptory telegram to John; and then, seeing there was no one else to advise her, hurried to the doctor's house close at hand. For a wonder he was in. For a greater still, his last patient walked out as she walked in. The doctor, with the quickness of his kind, saw the difficulty, and caught up his hat to come with her.

"You shall go to your brother if you can," was the only statement to which he would commit himself during the two minutes' walk in the rain; the two minutes which sealed Colonel Tempest's fate.

No one knew exactly how it happened. Perhaps the hall porter had gone to his dinner, and the little boy who took his place for half an hour brought up the telegram to the person to whom it was addressed. No one knew afterwards how it had happened. It did happen, that was all.