"I give thee sixpence! I will see thee d----d first."
CANNING.
Some one rejoiced exceedingly when, in those burning August days, John
came back to Overleigh. Mitty loved him. She was the only woman who as
yet had shown him any love at all, and his nature was not an unthankful
one. Mitty was bound up with all the little meagre happiness of his
childhood. She had given him his only glimpse of woman's tenderness.
There had never been a time when he had not read aloud to Mitty during
the holidays--when he had forgotten to write to her periodically from
school. When she had been discharged with the other servants at his
father's death, he had gone in person to one of his guardians to request
that she might remain, and had offered half his pocket-money annually
for that purpose, and a sum down in the shape of a collection of foreign
coins in a sock. Perhaps his guardian had a little boy of his own in
Eton jackets who collected coins. At any rate, something was arranged.
Mitty remained in the long low nurseries in the attic gallery. She was
waiting for him on the steps on that sultry August evening when he
returned. John saw her white cap twinkling under the stone archway as he
drove along the straight wide drive between the double rows of beeches
which approached the castle by the northern side.
Some houses have the soothing influence of the presence of a friend.
Once established in the cool familiar rooms and strong air of his
native home, he regained his health by a succession of strides, which
contrasted curiously with the stumbling ups and downs and constant
relapses which in the earlier part of his recovery had puzzled his
doctors.
For the first few days just to live was enough. John had no desire
beyond sitting in the shadow of the castle with Mitty, and feeling the
fresh heather-scented air from the moors upon his face and hands. Then
came the day when he went on Mr. Goodwin's arm down the grey lichened
steps to the Italian garden, and took one turn among the stone-edged
beds, under the high south wall. Gradually as the languor of weakness
passed he wandered further and further into the woods, and lay for hours
under the trees among the ling and fern. The irritation of weakness had
left him, the enforced inaction of slowly returning strength had not
yet begun to chafe. His mind urged nothing on him, required no
decisions of him, but, like a dear companion instead of a taskmaster,
rested and let him rest. He watched for hours the sunlight on the
bracken, listened for hours to the tiny dissensions and confabulations
of little creatures that crept in and out.
There had been days and nights in London when the lamp of life had
burned exceeding low, when he had never thought to lie in his own dear
woods again, to see the squirrel swinging and chiding against the sky,
to hear the cry of the water-hen to its mate from the reeded pools
below. He had loved these things always, but to see them again after
toiling up from the gates of death is to find them transfigured. "The
light that never was on sea or land" gleams for a moment on wood and
wold for eyes that have looked but now into the darkness of the grave.
Almost it seems in such hours as if God had passed by that way, as if
the forest had knowledge of Him, as if the awed pines kept Him ever in
remembrance. Almost. Almost.
* * * * *
Di was never absent from John's thoughts for long together. His dawning
love for her had as yet no pain in it. It wandered still in glades of
hyacinth and asphodel. Truly--
"Love is bonny, a little while, while it is new."
Its feet had not yet reached the stony desert places and the lands of
fierce heat and fiercer frost, through which all human love which does
not die in infancy must one day travel. The strain and stress were not
yet.
* * * * *
John was coming back one evening from a longer expedition than usual.
The violet dusk had gathered over the gardens. The massive flank and
towers of the castle were hardly visible against the sky. As he came
near he saw a light in the arched windows of the chapel, and through the
open lattice came the sound of the organ. Some one was playing within,
and the night listened from without; John stood and listened too. The
organ, so long dumb, was speaking in an audible voice--was telling of
many things that had lain long in its heart, and that now at last
trembled into speech. Some unknown touch was bringing all its pure
passionate soul to its lips. Its voice rose and fell, and the listening
night sighed in the ivy.
John went noiselessly indoors by the postern, and up the short spiral
staircase in the thickness of the wall, into the chapel, an arched
Elizabethan chamber leading out of the dining-hall. He stopped short in
the doorway.
The light of a solitary candle at the further end gave shadows to the
darkness. As by an artistic instinct, it just touched the nearest of the
pipes, and passing entirely over the prosaic footman, blowing in his
shirt-sleeves, lit up every feature of the fair exquisite face of the
player. Beauty remains beauty, when all has been said and done to
detract from it. Archie was very good to look upon. Even the footman,
who had been ruthlessly torn away from his supper to blow, thought so.
John thought so as he stood and looked at his cousin, who nodded to him,
and went on playing. The contrast between the two was rather a cruel
one, though John was unconscious of it. It was Archie who mentally made
the comparison whenever they were together. Ugliness would be no
disadvantage, and beauty would have no power, if they did not appear to
be the outward and visible signs of the inner and spiritual man.
Archie was so fair-haired, he had such a perfect profile, such a clear
complexion, and such tender faithful eyes, that it was impossible to
believe that the virtues which clear complexions and lovely eyes so
plainly represent were not all packed with sardine-like regularity in
his heart. His very hair looked good. It was parted so beautifully, and
it had a little innocent wave on the temple which carried conviction
with it--to the young of the opposite sex. It was not because he was so
handsome that he was the object of a tender solicitude in many young
girls' hearts--at least, so they told themselves repeatedly--but because
there was so much good in him, because he was so misunderstood by
elders, so interesting, so unlike other young men. In short, Archie was
his father over again.
Nature had been hard on John. Some ugly men look well, and their
ugliness does not matter. John's was not of that type dear to fiction.
His features were irregular and rough, his deep-set eyes did not redeem
the rest of his face. Nothing did. A certain gleam of nobility shining
dimly through its harsh setting would make him better-looking later in
life, when expression gets the mastery over features. But it was not so
yet. John looked hard and cold and forbidding, and though his face awoke
a certain interest by its very force, the interest itself was without
attraction. It must be inferred that John had hair, as he was not bald,
but no one had ever noticed it except his hair-cutter. It was short and
dark. In fact, it was hair, and that was all. Mitty was the only other
person who had any of it, in a lozenge-box; but who shall say in what
lockets and jewel-cases one of Archie's flaxen rings might not be
treasured? Archie was a collector of hair himself, and there is a
give-and-take in these things. He had a cigar-box full of locks of
different colours, which were occasionally spread out before his more
intimate friends, with little anecdotes respecting the acquisition of
each. A vain man has no reticence except on the subject of his rebuffs.
Bets were freely exchanged on the respective chances of the donors of
these samples of devotion, and their probable identity commented on.
"Three to one on the black." "Ten to one on the dyed amber." "Forty to
one on the lank and sandy, it's an heiress."
Archie would listen in silence, and smile his small saintly smile.
Archie's smile suggested anthems and summer dawns and blanc-mange all
blent in one. And then he would gather up the landmarks of his
affections, and put them back into the cigar-box. They were called
"Tempest's scalps" in the regiment.
Archie had sat for "Sir Galahad" to one of the principal painters of
the day. He might have sat for something very spiritual and elevating
now. What historic heroes and saints have played the organ? He would
have done beautifully for any one of them, or Dicksee might have worked
him up into a pendant to his "Harmony," with an angel blowing instead of
the footman.
And just at the critical moment when the organ was arriving at a final
confession, and swelling towards a dominant seventh, the footman let the
wind out of her. There was a discord, and a wheeze, and a death-rattle.
Archie took off his hands with a shudder, and smiled a microscopic smile
at the perspiring footman. Archie never, never, never swore; not even
when he was alone, and when he cut himself shaving. He differed from his
father in that. He smiled instead. Sometimes, if things went very
wrong, the smile became a grin, but that was all.
"That will do, thank you!" he said, rising. "Well, John, how are you?
Better? I did not wait dinner for you. I was too hungry, but I told them
to keep the soup and things hot till you came in."
They had gone through the open double doors into the dining-hall. At the
further end a table was laid for one.
"When did you arrive?" asked John.
"By the seven-ten. I walked up and found you were missing. It is
distressing to see a man eat when one is not hungry one's self,"
continued Archie plaintively as the servant brought in the "hot things"
which he had been recently devastating. "No, thanks, I won't sit
opposite you and watch you satisfying your country appetite. You don't
mind my smoking in here, I suppose? No womankind to grumble as yet."
He lit his pipe, and began wandering slowly about the room, which was
lit with candles in silver sconces at intervals along the panelled
walls.
John wondered how much money he wanted, and ate his cutlets in silence.
He had as few illusions about his fellow-creatures as the steward of a
Channel steamer, and it did not occur to him that Archie could have any
reason but one for coming to Overleigh out of the shooting season.
Archie was evidently pensive.
"It is a large sum," said John to himself.
Presently he stopped short before the fireplace, and contemplated the
little silver figures standing in the niches of the highcarved
mantelshelf. They had always stood there in John's childhood, and when
he had come back from Russia in the spring he had looked for them in the
plate-room, and had put them back himself: the quaint-frilled courtier
beside the quaint-ruffed lady, and the little Cavalier in long boots
beside the Abbess. The dresses were of Charles I.'s date, and there was
a family legend to the effect that that victim of a progressive age had
given them to his devoted adherent Amyas Tempest the night before his
execution. It was extremely improbable that he had done anything of the
kind, but, at any rate, there they were, each in his little niche.
Archie lifted one down and examined it curiously.
"Never saw that before," he said, keeping his teeth on the pipe, which
desecrated his profile.
"Everything was put away when I was not regularly living here," said
John. "I dug out all the old things when I came home in the spring, and
Mitty and I put them all back in their places."
"Barford had a sale the other day," continued Archie, speaking through
his teeth. "He was let in for a lot of money by his training stables,
and directly the old chap died he sold the library and half the
pictures, and a lot of stuff out of the house. I went to see them at
Christie's, and a very mouldy-looking assortment they were; but they
fetched a pile of money. Barford and I looked in when the sale of the
books was on, and you should have seen the roomful of Jews and the way
they bid. One book, a regular old fossil, went for three hundred while
we were there; it would have killed old Barford on the spot if he had
been there, so it was just as well he was dead already. And there were
two silver figures something like these, but not perfect. Barford said
he had no use for them, and they fetched a hundred apiece. He says
there's no place like home for raising a little money. Why, John,
Gunningham can't hold a candle to Overleigh. There must be a mint of
money in an old barrack stuffed full of gimcracks like this."
"Yes, but they belong to the house."
"Do they? Well, if I were in your place I should say they belonged to
the owner. What is the use of having anything if you can't do what you
like with it? If ever I wanted a hundred or two I would trot out one of
those little silver Johnnies in no time if they were mine."
John did not answer. He was wondering what would have happened to the
dear old stately place if he had died a month ago, and it had fallen
into the hands of those two spendthrifts, Archie and his father. He
could see them in possession whittling it away to nothing, throwing its
substance from them with both hands. Easy-going, self-indulgent, weakly
violent, unstable as water, he saw them both in one lightning-flash of
prophetic imagination drinking in that very room, at that very table.
The physical pain of certain thoughts is almost unbearable. He rose
suddenly and went across to the deep bay window, on the stone sill of
which Amyas Tempest and Tom Fairfax, his friend, who together had held
Overleigh against the Roundheads, had cut their names. He looked out
into the latticed darkness, and longed fiercely, passionately for a son.
Archie's light laugh recalled him to himself with a sense of shame. It
is irritating to be goaded into violent emotion by one who is feeling
nothing.
"A penny for your thoughts," said Sir Galahad.
There was something commonplace about the young warrior's manner of
expressing himself in daily life which accorded ill with the refined
beauty of his face.
"They would be dear at the price," said John, still looking out.
"Care killed a cat," said Archie.
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 circumlocution, 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 incumbent 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 attitude 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 assistance 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 fortitude. 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 sunshine 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 assumed 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 passion 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 passing 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 manuscripts, 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-balls 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 glass, 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 association 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 worshipped 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 Yorkshire was divided,
having shields on them with armorial bearings of the gentry of the
county entitled 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 glass, 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 noble 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 sunshine across the room. Overleigh had coloured his life as
its painted glass was colouring the sunshine. 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 God 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 glass.
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._