"The little waves make the large ones, and are of the same
pattern."--GEORGE ELIOT.
John was dragging himself feebly across the hall to the smoking-room,
after a dutiful cup of tea with his aunt, who was prostrate with a
headache, when the door-bell rang, and he saw the champing profiles of a
pair of horses through one of the windows. Following his masculine
instincts, he hurried across the hall with all the celerity he could
muster, and had just got safe under cover when the footman answered the
bell. His ear caught the name of Mrs. Courtenay through the open door of
the smoking-room, and presently, though he knew Miss Fane did not
consider herself well enough to see visitors, there was a slow rustling
across the hall, and up the stairs, accompanied by a light firm footfall
that could hardly belong to James, whose elephantine rush had so often
disturbed him when he was ill.
As James came down again, John looked out of the smoking-room door.
"Who is with Miss Fane?"
"Mrs. Courtenay, sir."
"Any one else?"
"No, sir. Miss Fane could only see Mrs. Courtenay. Miss Tempest, as come
with her, is in the gold drawing-room."
John shut the smoking-room door and went and looked out of the window.
It was not a cheerful prospect, but that did not matter much, as he
happened to be looking at it without seeing it. Lindo got up on a chair
and looked solemnly out too, rolling the whites of his eyes
occasionally at his master from under his bushy brows, and yawning long
tongue-curling yawns of sheer _ennui_. The cowls on the chimney-pots
twirled. The dead plants on the leads were still dead. The cook's canary
was going up and down on its two perches like a machine. John reflected
that it was rather a waste of canary power; but, perhaps, there was
nothing to hold back for in its bachelor existence. It would stand still
enough presently when it was stuffed.
Could he get upstairs by himself? That was the question. He could come
down, but that was not of much interest to him just now. Could he get up
again? Only the first floor. Shallow stairs. Sit down half way. Awkward
to be found sitting there, certainly. One thing was certain: that he was
not going to be conveyed up in Marshall's solemn embrace as heretofore.
John reflected that he must begin to walk by himself some time. Why not
now? Very slowly, of course. Why not now?
It certainly was slow. But the stairs were shallow. There were
balusters. It was done at last. If that alpine summit--the upper
mat--was finally reached on hands and knees, who was the wiser?
John was breathless but triumphant. His hands were a trifle black; but
what of that? The door of the gold drawing-room was open. It was a
historic room, the decoration of which had been left untouched since the
days when the witty Mrs. Tempest, whom Gainsborough painted, held her
salon there. It was a long pillared room. Curtains of some old-fashioned
pale gold brocade, not made now, hung from the white pillars and
windows. The gold-coloured walls were closely lined with dim pictures
from the ceiling to the old Venetian leather of the dado. Tall, gilt
eastern figures, life size, meant to hold lamps, stood here and there,
raising their empty hands, hideous, but peculiar to the room, with its
bygone stately taste, and stiff white and gilt chairs and settees. John
drew aside the curtain, and then hesitated. A family of tall white
lilies in pots were gathered together in one of the further windows. Di
was standing by them, turned towards him, but without perceiving him.
She had evidently introduced herself to the lilies as a friend of the
family, and was touching the heads of those nearest to her very gently,
very tenderly with one finger. She stood in the full light, like some
tall splendid lily herself, against the golden background.
John drew in his breath. It was _his_ house; they were _his_ lilies. The
empty setting which seemed to claim her for its own, to group itself so
naturally round her, was all his. There was a tremor of prophesy in the
air. His brain seemed to turn slowly round in his head. He had come
upstairs too quickly. His hand clutched the curtain. He felt momentarily
incapable of stirring or speaking. The old physical pain, which only
loosed him at intervals, tightened its thongs. But he dreaded to see her
look up and find him watching her. He went forward and held out his hand
in silence.
Di looked up and her expression changed instantly. A lovely colour came
into her face, and her eyes shone. She advanced quickly towards him.
"Oh, John!" she said. "Is it really you? I was afraid we should not see
you before we left town. But you ought not to stand." (John's complexion
was passing from white to ashen grey, to pale green.) "Sit down." She
held both his passive hands in hers. She would not for worlds have let
him see that she thought he was going to faint. "This is a nice chair by
the window," drawing him gently to it. "I was just admiring your lilies.
You will let me ring for a cup of tea, I know. I am so thirsty." It was
done in a moment, and she was back again beside him, only a voice now, a
voice among the lilies, which appeared and disappeared at intervals. One
tall furled lily head came and went with astonishing celerity, and the
voice spoke gently and cheerfully from time to time. It was like a
wonderful dream in a golden dusk. And then there was a little clink and
clatter, and a cup of tea suddenly appeared close to him out of the
darkness; and there was Di's voice again, and a momentary glimpse of
Di's earnest eyes, which did not match her tranquil unconcerned voice.
He drank the tea mechanically without troubling to hold the cup, which
seemed to take the initiative with a precision and an independence of
support, which would have surprised him at any other time. The tea, what
little there was of it, was the nastiest he had ever tasted. It might
have been made in a brandy bottle. But it certainly cleared the air.
Gradually the room came back. The light came back. He came back himself.
It was all hardly credible. There was Di sitting opposite him, evidently
quite unaware that he had been momentarily overcome, and assiduously
engaged in pouring out another cup of tea. She had taken off her gloves,
and he watched her cool slender hands give herself a lump of sugar.
(Only one _small_ lump, John observed. He must remember that.) Then she
filled up the teapot from the little gurgling silver kettle. What
forethought. Wonderful! and yet all apparently so natural. She seemed to
do it as a matter of course. He ought to be helping her, but somehow he
was not. Would she take bread and butter, or one of those little round
things? She took a piece of bread and butter. Perhaps it would be as
well to listen to what she was saying. He lost the first part of the
sentence because she began to stir her tea at the moment, and he could
not attend to two things at once. But presently he heard her say--
"Mrs. Courtenay thinks young people ought not to mind missing tea
altogether. But I do mind; don't you? I think it is the pleasantest meal
in the day."
John cautiously assented that it was. He felt that he must be very
careful, or a slight dizziness which was now rapidly passing off might
be noticed.
Di went on talking unconcernedly, bending her burnished golden head in
its little white bonnet over the teacups. She seemed to take a great
interest in the tea-things, and the date of the apostle spoons.
Presently she looked at him again, and a relieved smile came into her
face.
"Are you ready for another cup?" she said. And it was not a dream any
longer, but all quite real and true, and he was real too.
"No, thanks," said John, taking his cup with extreme deliberation from a
table at his elbow, where he supposed he had set it down. "There is
something wrong about the tea, I think. Do send yours away and have some
more. It has a very odd taste."
"Has it?" said Di, meeting his eye firmly, but with an effort. "I don't
notice it. On the contrary, I think it is rather good. Try another cup."
"Perhaps the water did not boil," suggested John feebly, reflecting that
his temporary indisposition might have been the cause of his dislike,
but anxious to conceal the fact.
"That is a direct reflection on my tea-making," said Di. "You had better
be more careful what you say." And she quickly pushed a stumpy little
liqueur-bottle behind the silver tea-caddy.
"I beg pardon, and ask humbly for another cup," said John, smiling. The
pain had left him again, as it generally did after he had remained quiet
for a time, and in the relief from it he had a vague impression that the
present moment was too good to last. He did not know that it was usual
to wash out a cup so carefully as Di did his, but she seemed to think it
the right thing, and she probably knew. Anyhow, the second cup was
capital. John was not allowed to drink tea. The doctors who were
knitting firmly together again the slender threads that had so far bound
him to this world, believed he was imbibing an emulsion of something or
other strengthening and nauseous at that moment.
"Oh! There is a tea-cake," said Di, discovering another dish behind the
kettle. "Why did not I see it before?"
"It is not too late, I hope," said John, anxiously. The stupidity of
James in putting a tea-cake (which might have been preferred to bread
and butter) out of sight behind an opaque kettle, caused him profound
annoyance.
But Di could not take a personal interest in the tea-cake. She looked
back at the lilies.
"Don't you long to be in the country?" she said. "I find myself dreaming
about green fields and flowers gratis. I have not seen a country lane
since Easter, and then it rained all the time. It is three years since I
have found a hedge-sparrow's nest with eggs in it. Don't you long to get
away?"
"I long to get back to Overleigh," said John. "I went there for a few
days in the spring on my return from Russia. The place was looking
lovely; but," he added, as if it were a matter of course, "naturally
Overleigh always looks beautiful to me."
Di did not answer.
"You know the wood below the house," he went on. "When I saw it last all
the rhododendrons were out."
"I have never seen Overleigh," said Di, looking at the lilies again, and
trying to speak unconcernedly. She knew Lord Hemsworth's tiresome old
Border castle. She had visited at many historic houses. She and Mrs.
Courtenay were going to some shortly. But her own family place, the one
house of all others in the whole world which she would have cared
to see, she had never seen. She had often heard about it from
acquaintances, had looked wistfully at drawings of it in illustrated
magazines, had questioned Mrs. Courtenay and Archie about it, had
wandered in imagination in its long gallery, and down the lichened steps
from the postern in the wall, that every artist vignetted, to the
stone-flagged Italian gardens below. But with her bodily eyes she had
never beheld it, and the longing returned at intervals. It had returned
now.
"Will you come and see it?" said John, looking away from her. It seemed
to him that he was playing a game in which he had staked heavily,
against some one who had staked nothing, who was not even conscious of
playing, and might inadvertently knock over the board at any moment. He
felt as if he had noiselessly pushed forward his piece, and as if
everything depended on the withdrawal of his hand from it unobserved.
"I have wished to see Overleigh from a child," said Di, flushing a
little. "Think what you feel about it, and my father, and our
grandfather. Well--I am a Tempest too."
John was vaguely relieved. He glanced from her to the Gainsborough in
the feathered hat that hung behind her. There was just a touch of
resemblance under the unlikeness, a look in the pose of the head, in its
curled and powdered wig that had reminded him of Di before. It reminded
him of her more than ever now.
"Archie has been to Overleigh so constantly that I had not realized you
had never seen it," said John. "But I suppose you were not grown up in
those days; and since you grew up I have been abroad."
"Shall you go abroad again?"
"No. I have given up my secretaryship. I have come back to England for
good."
"I am glad of that."
"I have been away too long as it is."
"Yes," said Di. "I have often thought so."
"Why?"
There was a pause.
"We are not represented," said Di proudly. She was speaking to one of
her own family, and consequently she was not careful to choose her
words. She had evidently no fear of being misunderstood by John. "We
have always taken a place," she went on. "Not a particularly high one,
but one of some kind. There was Amyas Tempest the cavalier general, and
John who was with Charles of Bourbon at the sacking of Rome; and there
were judges and admirals. Not that that is much when one looks at other
families, the Cecils, for instance, but still they were always among the
men of the day. And then our great-grandfather who lies in Westminster
Abbey really was a great man. I was reading his life over again the
other day. I suppose his son only passed muster because he was his son,
and owing to his wife's ability. She amused old George IV., and made
herself a power, and pushed her husband."
"My father never did anything," said John.
"No. I have always heard he had brains, but that he let things go
because he was unhappy. Just the reason for holding on to them all the
tighter, I should have thought, wouldn't you?"
"Not with some people. Some people can't do anything if there is no one
to be glad when they have done it. I partly understand the feeling."
"I don't," said Di. "I mean, I do, but I don't understand giving in to
it, and letting a little bit of personal unhappiness, which will die
with one, prevent one's being a good useful link in a chain. One owes
that to the chain."
"Yes," said John. "And yet I know he had a very strong feeling of
responsibility from what he said to me on his death-bed. I have often
thought about him since, and tried to piece together all the little
fragments I can remember of him; but I think there is no one I can
understand less than my own father. He seemed a hard cold man, and yet
that face is neither hard nor cold."
John pointed to a picture behind her, and Di rose and turned to look at
it.
It was an interesting refined face, destitute of any kind of good looks,
except those of high breeding. The eyes had a certain thoughtful
challenge in them. The lips were thin and firm.
Both gazed in silence for a moment.
"He looks as if he might have been one of those quiet equable people who
may be pushed into a corner," said Di, "and then become rather
dangerous. I can imagine his being a harsh man, and an unforgiving one
if life went wrong."
"I am afraid he did become that," said John. "As he could not find room
for forgiveness, there was naturally no room for happiness either."
"Was there some one whom he could not forgive?" asked Di, turning her
keen glance upon him. She evidently knew nothing of the feud of the last
generation.
At this moment the rush of James the elephant-footed was heard, and he
announced that Mrs. Courtenay was getting into the carriage, and had
sent for Miss Tempest.
"Good-bye," said Di, cordially, gathering up her gloves and parasol. "Go
to Overleigh and get strong. And--you will have so many other things to
think of--try not to forget about asking us."
"I will remember," said John, as if he would make a point of burdening
his memory.
He was holding aside the curtain for her to pass.
"You see," said Di, looking back, "when we are on the move we can do
things, but once we get back to London we cannot go north again till
next year. We can't afford it."
"I will be sure to remember," said John again. He was a little
crestfallen, and yet relieved that she should think he might forget. He
felt that he could trust his memory.
She smiled gratefully and was gone. She had forgotten to shake hands
with him. He knew she had not been aware of the omission. She had been
thinking of something else at the moment. But it remained a grievous
fact all the same.
He walked back absently into the drawing-room and stopped opposite the
tea-table.
"Vinegar," he said to himself. "What can James have been about? I draw
the line at vinegar at five o'clock tea. I hope she did not see it."
He took out the glass stopper.
Not vinegar. No. There is but one name for that familiar, that searching
smell.
"It's brandy," said John aloud, speaking to himself, while the past
unrolled itself like a map before his eyes. "Yes, look at it. Would you
like to smell it again? There is no need to be so surprised. You had
some of it not ten minutes ago, you poor deluded, blinded, bandaged
idiot."
* * * * *
"Whom do you think _I_ have seen?" said Di, as they drove away.
Mrs. Courtenay made no attempt to guess, which was the more remarkable
because, when Miss Fane had ordered a cup of tea for Di, James had
volunteered the information that he had already taken tea to Mr. and
Miss Tempest.
"Whom but John himself," continued Di.
"I thought he was still invisible."
"I am sure he ought to be. I never saw any one look so ill. We had tea
together. I really thought you were never going away at all, but I was
glad you were such a long time, because it was so pleasant seeing him
again. I like John; don't you? I have liked him from the first."
"He is a sensible man, but I prefer people with easier manners myself."
"He is more than sensible, I think."
"We shall be too late for the pony races," said Mrs. Courtenay. "It is
nearly six now, and I told Lord Hemsworth we would be at the entrance at
half-past five."
"He will survive it," said Di, archly. "And, granny, John is going to
ask us to Overleigh. I told him I had never seen it."
"Good gracious!" exclaimed Mrs. Courtenay, and there was no doubt about
her interest this time. "You did not _suggest_ our going, did you?"
"I am not sure I did not," said Di, unfurling her parasol. "Look,
granny, there is Mrs. Buller nodding to you, and you won't look at her.
Yes, I rather think I did. I can't remember exactly what I said, but he
promised he would not forget, and I told him we could only come when we
were on the move. I impressed that upon him."
"Really, Di," said Mrs. Courtenay with asperity, "I wish you would
prevent your parasol catching in my bonnet, and not offer visits without
consulting me. It would have been quite time enough to have gone when he
had asked us."
"He might not have asked us."
Mrs. Courtenay, who had seen a good deal of John in the weeks that
preceded his accident, was perhaps of a different opinion; but she did
not express it. Neither did she mention her own previously fixed
intention of going to Overleigh somehow or other during the course of
her summer visits.
"What is the use of near relations," continued Di, "if you can't tell
them anything of that kind? I believe John will be quite pleased to have
us now that he knows we wish to come; if only he remembers. Come,
granny, if I take you to Archelot to please you, you ought to take me to
Overleigh to please me. That's fair now, isn't it?"
"It may be extremely inconvenient," said Mrs. Courtenay, still ruffled.
"And I had rheumatism last time I was there."
"Think what rheumatism you always have at Archelot, which sits up to its
knees in mist every night in the middle of its moat; and yet you would
insist on going again. There is that nice Mr. Sinclair taking off his
hat. Won't you recognize him? You thought him so improved, you said,
since his elder brother's death."
"My dear," said Mrs. Courtenay, "I am not so perpetually on the look out
for young men as you appear to be. All the same, you may put up my
parasol, for I can see nothing with the sun in my eyes."