"For human bliss and woe in the frail thread
Of human life are all so closely twined,
That till the shears of fate the texture shred,
The close succession cannot be disjoined,
Nor dare we, from our hour, judge that which comes behind."
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
Di had seen her father and Archie off on their journey to Brighton, and,
having arranged to replace her brother in three days' time, was
surprised when a hasty note, the morning after their departure, informed
her that Archie had been recalled to London _on business_, and that she
must go to her father at once.
Mrs. Courtenay was incensed. Archie had shirked before, and now he had
shirked again. But Colonel Tempest remained in far too precarious a
condition for her to refuse to allow her granddaughter to go, as she
would certainly otherwise have done. So Di went off the morning after
the Speaker's party.
She had told Mrs. Courtenay that she had met John there.
"In one way I am glad to have met him," she said firmly, her proud lip
quivering. "Any uncertainty I may have been weak enough to feel is at an
end, and it was time the end should come. For, in spite of all you said,
I had had a lingering idea that if we met----. And now we _have_
met--and he had evidently no wish to see me again."
Mrs. Courtenay looked fixedly at the beautiful pallid face, and wondered
that she had ever wished Di had a heart.
"This pain will pass," she said gently. "You have always believed me,
Di; believe me now. Take courage and wait. You have had an untroubled
life till now. That has passed. Trouble has come. It is part of life. It
will pass too; not the feeling, perhaps, but the suffering."
"Good-bye, my child," she said a little later, kissing the girl's cold
cheek with a tenderness which Di was powerless to return. "Take care of
yourself. Go out every day; the sea air will do you good. And tell your
father I cannot spare you more than a fortnight."
Di would have given anything to show her grandmother that she was
thankful--oh, how thankful in this grey world!--for her sympathy and
love, but she had no words. She kissed Mrs. Courtenay, and went down to
the cab.
Mrs. Courtenay remained motionless until she heard it drive away. Then
she let two tears run down from below her spectacles, and wiped them
away. No more followed them. The old cannot give way like the young.
Mrs. Courtenay had once said that nothing had power to touch her very
nearly; but she was still vulnerable on one point. Her old heart, worn
with so many troubles, ached for her granddaughter.
"Thank God," she said to herself, "that in the next world there will be
neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Perhaps God Almighty sees it's
a mistake."
Di found Colonel Tempest wrapped up in a _duvet_ in an armchair by the
window of his sitting-room, in a state of equal indignation against his
children for deserting him, and against the rain for blurring the
seaview from the window. With his nurse, it is hardly necessary to add,
he was not on speaking terms--a fact which seemed to cause that
patient, apathetic person very little annoyance, she being, as she told
Di, "accustomed to gentlemen."
Di soothed him as best she could, took his tray from the nurse at the
door, so that he might be spared as much as possible the sight of the
most hideous woman in the world, rang for lights, and drew a curtain
before the untactful rain, while he declaimed alternately on the
enormity of Archie's behaviour, and on the callousness of Mrs. Courtenay
in endeavouring to keep his daughter, his only daughter, away from him.
Colonel Tempest and Archie detested Mrs. Courtenay. However much the
father and son might disagree and bicker on most subjects, they could
always sing a little duet together in perfect harmony about her.
Colonel Tempest began a feeble solo on that theme to Di when he had
finished with Archie; but Di visibly froze, and somehow the subject,
often as it was started, always dropped. Di, as Colonel Tempest
frequently informed her, did not care to hear the truth about her
grandmother. If she knew all that _he_ did about her, and what her
behaviour had been to _him_, she would not be so fond of her as she
evidently was.
Earlier in his illness Di had been obliged to exercise patience with her
father, but she needed none now. That is the one small compensation for
deep trouble. It numbs the power of feeling small irritations. It is
when it begins to lift somewhat that the small irritations fit
themselves out with new stings. Di had not reached that stage yet. The
doctor who came daily to see her father looked narrowly at her, and
ordered her to go out-of-doors as much as possible, in wet weather or
fine.
"I sometimes take a little nap after luncheon," said Colonel Tempest
with dignity. "You might go out then, Di."
"Miss Tempest will in any case go out morning and afternoon," said the
doctor with decision.
Colonel Tempest had before had his doubts whether the doctor understood
his case, but now they were confirmed. He wished to change doctors, and
a painful scene ensued between him and Di, in the course of which a hole
was kicked in the _duvet_, and a cup of broth was upset. But it is an
ascertained fact that women are not amenable to reason. Di sewed up the
hole in the _duvet_, rubbed the carpet, and remained, as Colonel Tempest
hysterically informed her, "as obstinate as her mother before her."
On the second morning after her arrival at Brighton she was sitting with
Colonel Tempest, reading the papers to him, when the waiter brought in
the letters. There were none for her, two for her father. One was a
foreign letter with a blue French stamp. She took them to him where he
lay on the sofa.
Colonel Tempest looked at them.
"Nothing from Archie again," he said. "He does not care even to write
and ask whether I am alive or dead."
"Archie is not a good hand at writing," said Di, echoing, for the sake
of saying something, the time-honoured masculine plea for exemption from
the tedium of domestic correspondence.
"This is John's hand," said Colonel Tempest. "A Paris postmark. How
these rich men do rush about!"
Di had actually not known it was John's writing. She had never seen it,
to her knowledge, but nevertheless it appeared to her extraordinary that
she had not at once divined that it was his. She was not anxious to
hear her father's comments on John's letter, or the threadbare remark,
sacred to the poor relation, that when the rich one _was_ sitting down
to draw a cheque he might just as well have written it for double the
amount. He would never have known the difference. The poor relation
always knows exactly how much the rich one can afford to give. So Di
told her father she was going out, and left the room.
It stung her, as she laced her boots, to think that John had probably
sent another cheque to cover their expenses at the hotel, and that the
fried soles and semolina-pudding which she had ordered for luncheon
would be paid for by him. It exasperated her still more to know that
whatever John sent, Colonel Tempest would pronounce to be mean.
Before she had finished lacing her boots, however, the sitting-room door
was opened, and Di heard her father calling wildly to her.
Colonel Tempest was not allowed to move, except with great precaution,
owing to the slow healing of the obstinate internal injury caused by
that unlucky pistol-shot.
She rushed headlong downstairs.
"Father!" she cried, horrified to find him standing on the landing.
"Father, come back at once!" And she put her arms round him, and
supported him back to the sofa.
He was trembling from head to foot. She saw that something had happened,
but he was not in a state to be questioned. She administered what
restoratives she had at hand, and presently the constantly moving lips
got out the words, "Read it;" and Colonel Tempest pointed to a letter on
the floor.
"Read it," repeated Colonel Tempest, lying back on his cushions, and
recovering from his momentary collapse. "Read it."
Di picked up the letter and sat down by the window. She was suddenly too
tired to stand. Her father was talking wildly, but she did not hear him;
was calling to her to read it aloud, but she did not hear him. She saw
only John's strong, small handwriting.
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
accumulation 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 glass 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 God! 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 shore 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.