"Toute passion nuisible attire, comme le gouffre, par le
vertige. La faiblesse de volonte amene la faiblesse de tete, et
l'abime, malgre son horreur, fascine alors comme un
asile."--AMIEL.
People said that John had a charmed life. The divergence of an eighth of
an inch, of a hundredth part of an inch, of a hair's-breadth and the
little bead that passed right through his neck would have pierced the
jugular artery, and John would have added one more to the long list of
names in Overleigh Church. As it was, when once the direction of the
bullet had been ascertained, he was pronounced to be in little danger.
He rallied steadily, and without relapse.
People said that he bore a charmed life, and they began to say something
more, namely, that it was an object to somebody that it should be wiped
out. Men are not shot at for nothing. John was not an Irish landlord.
Some one evidently bore him a grudge. Society instantly formed several
more or less descreditable reasons to account for John's being the
object of some one's revenge. Half-forgotten rumours of Archie's doings
were revived with John's name affixed to them. Decidedly there had been
some "entanglement," and John had brought his fate upon himself. Colonel
Tempest, just returned from foreign travel, heard the matter discussed
at his club. His opinion was asked as to the truth of the reports, but
he only shrugged his shoulders, and it was supposed that he could not
deny them. Di's, Lady Alice Fane's, and Miss Crupps' names were all
equally associated with John's in the different versions of the
accident.
Colonel Tempest did not go to see his daughter. She had been telegraphed
for the morning after the ice carnival by Mrs. Courtenay, who had
actually developed with the thaw the bronchitis which she had dreaded
throughout the frost. Di and Archie, whose leave was up, returned to
town together for once.
Archie had experienced a distinct though shamed pang of disappointment
when John's state was pronounced to be favourable.
All night long, as he had sat waking and dozing beside the gallery fire
opposite Lord Hemsworth's motionless, wakeful figure, visions of wealth
passed in spite of himself before his mind; visions of four-in-hands,
and screaming champagne suppers, and smashing things he could afford to
pay for, and running his own horses on the turf. He did not want John
to die. He had been dreadfully shocked when he had first caught sight of
the stony upturned face almost beneath his feet, and had strained every
nerve in his body to overtake the murderer. He did not want John to go
where he, Archie, would have been terrified to go himself. But--he
wanted the things John had, which his father had often told him should
by rights have been his, and they could not both have them at one and
the same time.
He could not understand his father's fervent "Thank God!" when he
assured him that John was out of danger.
"A miss is as good as a mile," said Archie, with his smallest grin. He
was desperately short of money again by this time, and he had no one to
apply to. He knew enough of John to be aware that nothing was to be
expected from that quarter. Twenty-four hours ago he had thought--how
could he help it?--that perhaps there would be no further trouble on
that irksome, wearisome subject; for lack of money, and the annoyance
entailed by procuring it, was the thorn in Archie's flesh. But now the
annoyance was still there, beginning as it were all over again, owing
to--John. Madeleine would lend him money, he knew, but he would be a cad
to take it. He could not think of such a thing, he said to himself, as
he turned it over in his mind.
The ice carnival and John's escape were a nine days' wonder. In ten days
it was forgotten for a _cause celebre_ by every one except Colonel
Tempest.
Colonel Tempest had had a fairly pleasant time abroad. While his small
stock of ready money lasted, the remainder of the five hundred
subtracted from the sum he had returned to John after his interview
with Larkin, he had really almost enjoyed himself. He had picked up a
few old companions of the hanger-on species at Baden and Homburg, and
had given them dinners--he was always open-handed. He had the natural
predilection for the society of his social inferiors which generally
accompanies a predilection for being deferred to, and regarded as a
person of importance. He was under the impression that he was the most
liberal-minded of men in the choice of his companions, and without the
social prejudices of his class. He had won a little at "baccarat." His
health also had improved. On his return in December to the lodgings
which he had left in such a panic in July, he told himself that he had
been in a morbid state of health, that he had taken things too much to
heart, that he had been over-sensitive; that there was no need to be
afraid. Five months had elapsed. It would be all right.
And it had been all right for about a month, and then----
If the distressing theory that virtue is its own reward has any truth,
surely sin is its own punishment.
The old monotonous pains took Colonel Tempest.
It is a popular axiom among persons in robust health that others
labouring long under a painful disease become accustomed to it. It is
perhaps as true as all axioms, however freely laid down by persons in
one state respecting the feelings of others in a state of which they are
ignorant, can be.
The continual dropping of water wears away the stone. The stone ought,
of course, to put up an umbrella--any one can see that--or shift its
position. But it seldom does so.
There was a continual dropping of a slowly diluted torture on the
crumbling sandstone of Colonel Tempest's heart. The few months of
intermission only rendered more acute the agony of the inevitable
recommencement.
As he felt in July after the fire in John's lodgings, so he felt now;
just the same again, all over again, only worse. The porous sandstone
was wearing down.
He wandered like a ghost in the snowy places in the Park--for snow had
followed the thaw--or paced for hours by the Serpentine, staring at the
water. Once in a path across the Park he suddenly caught sight of John
walking slowly in the direction of Kensington. The young man passed
within a couple of yards of him without seeing him, his head bent, and
his eyes upon the ground.
"It is his ghost," said Colonel Tempest to himself, clutching the
railing, and looking back at the receding figure with an access of
shuddering horror.
Another figure passed, a heavy man in an ulster.
"He is being followed," thought Colonel Tempest. "It is Swayne, and he
is following him."
He rushed panting after the second figure, and overtook it at a meeting
of the ways.
"Swayne!" he gasped; "for mercy's sake, Swayne, don't----"
A benevolent elderly face turned and peered at him in the twilight, and
Colonel Tempest remembered that Swayne was dead.
"My name is Smith," said the man, and after waiting a moment passed on.
In a flash of memory Colonel Tempest saw Swayne's huddled figure
crouching in the disordered bed, and the check trousers over a chair,
and the candle on the window-sill bent double by the heat. That had
been the manner of Swayne's departure. How had he come to forget he was
dead, and that John was laid up at Overleigh?
"I am going mad," he said to himself. "That will be the end. I shall go
mad and tell everything."
The new idea haunted him. He could not shake it off. There was nothing
in the wide world to turn to for a change of thought. If he fell asleep
at night he was waked by the sound of his own voice, to find himself
sitting up in bed talking loudly of he knew not what. Once he heard
himself call Swayne's and John's names aloud into the listening
darkness, and broke into a cold sweat at the thought that he might have
been heard in the next room. Perhaps the other lodger, the young man
with the red hair, cramming for the army, knew everything by this time.
Perhaps the lodging-house people had been listening at the door, and
would give him in charge in the morning. Did he not at that very moment
hear furtive steps and whispering on the landing? He rushed out to see
the thin tabby cat, the walking funeral of the beetles and mice of the
establishment, slip noiselessly downstairs, and he returned to his room
shivering from head to foot, to toss and shudder until the morning, and
then furtively eye the landlady and her daughter in curl-papers.
More days passed. Colonel Tempest had had doubts at first, but gradually
he became convinced that the people in the house knew. He was sure of it
by the look in their faces if he passed them on the stairs. It was
merely a question of time. They were waiting to make certain before they
informed against him. Perhaps they had written to John. There was no
news of John, except a rumour in the _World_ that he was to stand at the
coming general election.
Colonel Tempest became the prey of an _idee fixe_. When John came
forward on the hustings he would be shot at and killed. He became as
certain of it as if it had already happened. At times he believed it
_had_ happened--that he had been present and had seen him fall forward;
and it was he, Colonel Tempest, who had shot him, and had been taken
red-handed with one of his old regimental pistols smoking in his hand.
Colonel Tempest had those pistols somewhere. One day he got them out and
looked at them, and spent a long time rubbing them up. They used to hang
crosswise under a photograph of himself in uniform in his wife's little
drawing-room. He recollected, with the bitterness that accompanies the
remembrance of the waste of lavished affections, how he had sat with his
wife and child a whole wet afternoon polishing up those pistols, while
another man in his place would have gone off to his club. (Colonel
Tempest always knew what that other man would have done.) And Di had
been gentle and affectionate, and had had a colour for once, and had
played with her creeping child like a cat with its kitten. And they had
had tea together afterwards, sitting on the sofa with the child asleep
between them. Ah! if she had only been always like that, he thought, as
he remembered the cloud that, owing to her uncertain temper, had
gradually settled on his home-life.
An intense bitterness was springing afresh in Colonel Tempest's mind
against his dead wife, against his dead brother, against Swayne, against
his children who never came near him (Di was nursing Mrs. Courtenay in
bronchitis, but that was of no account), against the world in general
which did not care what became of him. No one cared.
"They will be sorry some day," he said to himself.
And still the waking nightmare remained of seeing John fall, and of
finding he had shot him himself.
More days passed.
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 shining like a new
shilling 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 shipping.
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 fishing-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
ship-owners had run to clutch their property a moment ago. His hand was
clenched on something he held under his overcoat.
"When the big ship 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 passion 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 pushing 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 grass. 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.