"Oh, well for him whose will is strong!"
TENNYSON.
There come times in our lives when the mind lies broken on the revolving
wheel of our thought. "I am illegitimate." That was the one thought
which made John's bed for him at night, which followed him throughout
the spectral day until it brought him back to the spectral night again.
It was a quiver in which were many poisoned arrows. Because the first
that struck him was well-nigh unbearable, the others did not fail to
reach their mark.
If he were nameless and penniless, he could not marry Di. That was the
first arrow. Such marriages are possible only in books and in that
sacred profession which, in spite of numerous instances to the contrary,
believes that "the Lord will provide." Di would not be allowed to marry
him, even if she were willing to do so. And after a time--a long time,
perhaps--she would marry some one else, possibly Lord Hemsworth.
John writhed. He had set his heart on this woman. He had bent her strong
will to love him as a proud woman only can. She had been hard to win,
but she was his as much as if they were already married; his by right,
as the living Galatea was by right the sculptor's, who gave her marble
heart the throbbing life and love of his own.
"She is mine--I cannot give her up," he said aloud.
There was no voice, nor any that answered.
Strange how the ploughshare turns up little tags and ends of forgotten
rubbish buried by the mould of a few years' dust.
One utterance of Archie's, absolutely forgotten till now, was
continually recurring to John's mind. Its barbed point rankled.
"There must be a mint of money in an old barrack stuffed full of
gimcracks like this. 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."
And he would. If the thought of what Colonel Tempest and Archie would
achieve after his own death had stung John as Archie said that, how
should he bear to stand by and _see_ them do it? The books, the
pictures, the family manuscripts which he was even then arranging, the
jewels, the renowned diamond necklace that the Spanish government had
offered to buy from his grandfather, which he had hoped one day to
clasp on Di's neck--all the possessions of the past but almost regal
state of a great name, which he had kept with such a reverent hand--he
should live to see them cast right and left, lost, sold, squandered,
stolen. Archie would give the diamonds to the first actress who asked
for them. Colonel Tempest would be equally "open-handed."
As the days went on, John shut his eyes to the pictures in the gallery
as he passed through it. A mute suspense and reproach seemed to hang
about the whole place. The Velasquez and the Titian peered at him.
Tempest of the Red Hand clutched his sword-hilt uneasily. Mieris' old
Dutch-woman seemed to have lost her interest in selling her marvellous
string of onions to the little boy. Ribalta's Spanish Jesuit fingered
the red cross of Santiago embroidered on his breast, and looked askance
at John.
John turned back many times from the library door. The new books which
he had had bound in exact reproduction of a beautiful old missal of the
Tempest collection, and for the arrival of which he had been eagerly
waiting, remained untouched in their packing-cases. He could not look at
them.
Once he went into the dining-hall, unused when he was alone, and opened
one of the ponderous shutters. The rich light pierced the solemn gloom,
catching the silver sconces on the wall and the silver figures standing
in the carved niches above the fireplace.
"You will not give us up," they seemed to say; and the little cavalier
turned to his lady with a shake of his head.
As John closed the shutter his eyes fell on the Tempest motto on the
pane, "Je le feray durant ma vie;" and it stabbed him like a knife.
He went out into the open air like one pursued, and paced in the dead
forest waiting for the spring. All he had held so sacred meant nothing
then--nothing, nothing, nothing. The Tempest motto, round which he had
bound his life, round which his most solemn convictions and aspirations
had grown up, had nothing to do with him. He had been mocked. He, a
nameless bastard, the offspring of a mere common intrigue, had been
fooled into believing that he was John Tempest, the head of one of the
greatest families in England; that Overleigh belonged to him and he to
it as entirely as--nay, more than--his own hands and feet and eyes.
It was as if he had been acting a serious part to the best of his
ability on a stage with many others, and suddenly they had all dropped
their masks and were grinning at him with satyr faces in grotesque
attitudes, and he found that he alone had mistaken a screaming farce, of
which he was the butt, for a drama of which he had imagined himself one
of the principal figures.
John laughed a harsh wild laugh under the solemn overarching trees.
Everything, himself included, had undergone a hideous distortion. His
whole life was dislocated. His faith in God and man wavered. The
key-stone of his existence was gone from the arch, and the stones struck
him as they fell round him. The confusion was so great that for the
first few days he was incapable of action, incapable of reflection,
incapable of anything.
_Mitty!_ That thought came next. That stung. He had nothing in the wide
world which he could call his own; no roof for Mitty, no fire to warm
her by. He was absolutely without means. His mother's small fortune he
had sunk in an annuity for Mr. Goodwin. What would become of Mitty? How
would she survive being uprooted from her little nest in the garret
gallery? How would she bear to see her lamb turned adrift upon the
world? Mitty was growing old, and her faithful love for him would make
the last years sorrowful which were so happy now. Oh, if he could only
wait till Mitty died!
John had not wept a tear for himself, but he hid his face against the
trunk of one of the trees that were not his, and sobbed aloud at the
thought of Mitty.
And next day came a letter from Archie, saying that Colonel Tempest was
at death's door in one of the London hospitals, owing to having
accidentally shot himself with a revolver. John sent money, much more
than was actually necessary, and drew breath. Nothing could be done
until Colonel Tempest was either convalescent or dead. He was reprieved
from telling Mitty anything for the moment.
And as the spring was just beginning to whisper to the sleeping earth,
and the buds of the horse-chestnut to grow white and woolly beneath the
nursery windows, as John had seen them many and many a time--how or why
I know not, but with the waking of the year Mitty began to fail.
She had never been ill in John's recollection. She had had "a bone in
her leg" occasionally, but excepting that mysterious ailment and a touch
of rheumatism in later years, Mitty had always been quite well. She was
not actually ill now, but----
It was useless to tell her not to "do" her nurseries herself, and to
positively forbid her to wash his socks and handkerchiefs. Mitty worked
exactly the same; and John with an ache at his heart came indoors every
day in time for nursery tea, and Mitty made him buttered toast, and was
happy beyond words; but I think her eyesight must have begun to fail
her, or she would have seen how grey and haggard the face of her "lamb"
became as the days went by.
* * * * *
Who shall say when a thought begins? Long before we see it, it was
there, but our eyes were holden. "L'amour commence par l'ombre." So do
many things besides love.
_The letters were destroyed._ When did John think of that first, or
rather, when did he first hear it whispered? Why was his mind always
going back to that?
He would not have burned them if he had taken time to consider, but the
first impulse to do with them as their writer had herself intended, had
been acted upon before he had even thought of their bearing upon himself
and others.
At any rate they were gone--quite gone--sprinkled to the four winds of
heaven.
_There was no other proof._
And his--no, not his father--Mr. Tempest, who knew all about him, had
intended him to be his heir. He had left him his name and his place,
with a solemn charge to do his duty by them.
"I have done it," said John to himself, "as those two would never have
done. Shall I let all go to rack and ruin now? If I was not born a
Tempest I have become one. I _am_ one, and if I marry one my children
will be Tempests, and those two fools will not be suffered to pull
Overleigh stone from stone, and drag a great name into the dust; as they
would, as they assuredly would."
Had not Mr. Tempest foreseen this when he exacted that solemn promise
from John on his death-bed to uphold the honour of the family? Could he
break that promise? And through the vain sophistries, upsetting them
all, a mad cry rang, "Di loves me! She loves me at last! I cannot give
her up!"
The challenge was thrown out into the darkness. No one took it up.
A fierce restlessness laid hold on John. He rushed up to London several
times to hear how Colonel Tempest was going on. Each time he told
himself that he was going to see Di. But although the first time he went
to Colonel Tempest's lodgings the servant informed him that Di was with
her father, he did not ask to see her. Each time he came back without
having dared to go to the little house in Kensington. He could not meet
those grave clear eyes with the new gentleness in them that went to his
head like wine. He knew they would make him forget everything,
everything except that he loved her, and would sell his very soul for
her.
Time stopped. In all this enormous interval the buds of the
horse-chestnut had not yet burst to green. It was ages since he had seen
the first primrose, and yet to-day, as he walked in the woods on the day
after his return from another futile journey to London, they were all
out in the forest still.
And something stirred within him that had not deigned to take notice of
all his feverish asseverations and wanderings, that had not rebuked him,
that had not even listened when he had said repeatedly that he could not
give up Di.
By an invisible hand the challenge was taken up, and John knew the time
of conflict was at hand.
He walked on and on, not knowing where he went, past the forest and the
meadowland, and away over the rolling moors, with only Lindo for his
companion.
At last his newly returned strength failing him, he threw himself down
in the dry windswept heather. He had not outstripped his thoughts. This
was the appointed place. He knew it even as he flung himself down. His
hour was come.
It was an April afternoon, pale and bleak. The late frost had come back,
and had silenced the birds. One only deeply in love, somewhere near at
hand, but invisible, repeated plaintively over and over again a small
bird-name in the silence of the shrinking spring.
And John's heart said over and over again one little word--
"Di, Di, Di!"
There are some sacrifices which partake of the nature of
self-mutilation. That is why principle often falls before the onslaught
of a deep human passion, which is nothing but the rebellion of human
nature brought to bay, against the execution upon itself of that dread
command of the spiritual nature, "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it
off."
To give up certain affections is with some natures to give up all
possibility of the quickening into life of that latent maturer self that
craves for existence in each one of us. It is to take, for better for
worse, a more meagre form of life, destitute, not of happiness perhaps,
but of those common joys and sorrows which most of all bind us in
sympathy with our fellow-men. What marriage in itself is to the
majority, the love of one fellow-creature, and one only, is to the few.
To a few, happily a very few, there is only one hand that can minister
among the pressure of the crowd. There was none other woman in the world
for John, save only Di. Sayings common to vulgarity, profaned by every
breach of promise case, can yet be true sometimes.
"Di, Di, Di!" said John.
He tried to recall her face, but he could not. When they were together
he had not seen her; he had only felt her presence, only trembled at
each slight movement of her hands. He always watched them when he was
talking to her. He knew every movement of those strong, slender hands by
heart. She had a little way of opening and shutting her left hand as she
talked. He smiled even now as he thought of it. And she had a certain
wave in her hair just above the ear, that was not the same over the
other ear. But her face--no, he could not see her face.
He tried again. They were sitting once again, he and she, not very near,
nor very far apart, in the low entresol room at Overleigh. He could see
her now. She was arranging the lilies of the valley, and he was saying
to himself, as he watched her with his chin in his hands, "This is only
the beginning. There will be many times like this, only dearer and
sweeter than this."
Many times! That deep conviction had proved as false as all the rest--as
false as everything else which he had trusted.
And all in a moment as he looked, as he remembered, was it endurance,
was it principle, that seemed to snap?
He set his teeth and ground his heel into the earth. Agony had come upon
him. Passion, writhing in torment, rose gigantic without warning and
seized him in a Titan grip. It was a duel to the death.
* * * * *
John sat motionless in the solitude of the heather. The bird was silent.
On either hand the level moors met the level sky. Lindo walked in and
out in semi and total eclipse near at hand, now emerging life-size upon
a hillock, now visible only as an erect travelling tail amid the
heather. The sun came faintly out. There was a little speech of bees, a
little quivering among the poised spears of the tall bleached grasses
against the sky.
Time passed.
John's was not the easy faith which believes that in another world what
has been given up in this will be restored a thousandfold. The hope of
future reward had no more power to move him than the fear of future
punishment. The heaven of rewards of which those speak who have
authority, would be no heaven at all to many; a place from which the
noblest would turn away. Love worthy of the name, even down here, gives
all, asking nothing back.
John did not try to define even to himself the faith by which he had
lived so far; but as the veiled sun stooped near and nearer to the west,
he began to see, as clearly as he saw the sword-grass shaking against
the sky, that he was about to remain true to it, or be false to it for
ever.
Perhaps that faith was more than anything else a stern allegiance to the
Giver of that law within the heart which independent natures ever
recognize as the only true authority; which John had early elected to
obey, which he had obeyed with ease, till now. He had been condemned by
many as a freethinker; for to be obedient to the divine prompting has
ever been stigmatized as lawlessness by those who are obedient to a
written code. John had no code.
Yet God, who made (if the tourists who cheaply move in flocks on beaten
highways could only believe it) those solitary, isolated natures, knew
what He was about. And to those to whom little human guidance is
vouchsafed He adds courage, and that self-reliance which comes only of a
deep-rooted faith in a God who will not keep silence, who will not
leave the traveller journeying towards Him unpiloted upon a lonely
shore, or ultimately suffer His least holy one to see corruption.
John looked wildly round him. Even nature seemed to have turned against
him. It spoke of peace when there was no peace. For nature has no power
to mitigate the bitterness of that cup of self-surrender which even
Christ Himself, beneath the kindred stars of still Gethsemane, prayed
might pass from Him.
John hid his convulsed face in his hands.
The crises of life have their hour of loneliness and prostration, their
agony and bloody sweat. That cup which may not pass, how ennobling it is
to read of in the lives of others, how interesting to theorize upon in
our own; how appalling in actual experience, when it is in our hands to
drink or to refuse; refusing for ever with it, if we accept it not, the
hand of Him who offers it!
* * * * *
The solemn world of grey earth and sky waited. The light in the west
waited. How much longer were they to wait? How much longer would this
bowed figure sway itself to and fro?
"I will do it!" said John suddenly, and with a harsh inarticulate cry he
flung himself down on his face among the heather, clutching the soft
earth; for the Hand of the God whom he would not deny was heavy on him.