Diana Tempest Volume I Part 16

Perhaps Colonel Tempest had become entangled in the money difficulty at the very time his--John's--life hung in the balance, when he took for granted he was about to inherit all. The speculation was heartless, perhaps, but pardonable. John saw no reason why Colonel Tempest should not have counted on his death. For ten days it had been more than probable; and now he might live to a hundred. Perhaps the probability of his reaching old age was slenderer than he supposed.

He lay a little while longer and then rang the bell near his hand, and directed his servant to bring him a locked feminine elegancy from a side-table which, until he could replace his burnt possessions, had evidently been lent him by his aunt to use as a despatch-box. He got out a cheque-book, and with clumsy fingers filled in and signed a cheque.

Then he lay back panting and exhausted. The will was strong in him, but the suffering body was desperately weak.

When Colonel Tempest returned, John held the cheque towards him in silence with a feeble smile.

Colonel Tempest took it without speaking. His lips shook. He was more moved than he had been for years.

"G.o.d bless you, John," he said at last. "You are a good fellow, and I don't deserve it from you."

"Good-bye," said John, in a more natural tone of voice than he had yet used towards him. "If you are at the polo match on Thursday, will you look in and tell me how it has gone? It would be a kindness to me. I know Archie and Hemsworth are playing." Colonel Tempest murmured something unintelligible, and went out.

He did not go back at once to his rooms in Brook Street. Almost involuntarily his steps turned towards the Park. The world was changed for him. The weary ceaseless beat of the horses' hoofs on the wood pavement had a cheerful exhilarating ring. All the people looked glad.

There was a confused rejoicing in the rustle of the trees, in the flying voices of the children playing and rolling in the gra.s.s. He wandered down towards the Serpentine. Dogs were rus.h.i.+ng in and out of the water.

An elastic c.o.c.keared retriever, undepressed by its doubtful ancestry, was leaping and waving a wet tail at its master, giving the short sharp barks of youth and a light heart. An aristocratic pug in a belled collar was delicately sniffing the evening breeze across the water, watching the antics of the lower orders with protruding eyes like pieces of toffy rounded and glazed by suction. An equally aristocratic black poodle--Lindo out for a stroll with the valet--with more social tendencies, was hurrying up and down on the extreme verge, beckoning rapidly with its short tufted tail to the athletes in the water. The ducks bobbed on the ripples. The children sprawled and shouted and clambered. The low sun had laid a dancing, glancing pathway across the water. How glad it all was, how exceeding glad! Colonel Tempest patted one of the children on the head and felt benevolent.

As he turned away at last and sauntered homewards, he pa.s.sed a little knot of people gathered round a gesticulating open-air preacher. Two girls, arm in arm, just in front of him, were lounging near, talking earnestly together.

"Sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee," bawled the strident fanatic voice.

"I shall have mine trimmed with tulle, and a flower on the crown," said one of the girls.

Colonel Tempest walked slowly on. Yes, yes; that was it. _Sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee._ He had always dreaded that worse thing, and now that fear was all over. He translated the cry of the preacher into a message to himself, his first personal transaction with the Almighty. He felt awed. It was like a voice from another world.

Religion was becoming a reality to him at last. There are still persons for whom the Law and the Prophets are not enough--who require that one should rise from the dead to galvanize their superst.i.tion into momentary activity. Sin no more. No--never any more. He had done with sin. He would make a fresh start from to-day, and life would become easy and unembarra.s.sed and enjoyable once again; no more nightmares and wakeful nights and nervous haunting terrors. They were all finished and put away. The tears came into his eyes. He regretted that he had not enjoyed these comfortable feelings earlier in life. The load was lifted from his heart, and the removal of the pain was like a solemn joy.

CHAPTER XII.

"On entre, on crie, C'est la vie.

On crie, on sort, C'est la mort."

On the paths of self-interest the gra.s.s is seldom allowed to grow under the feet. Colonel Tempest hurried. It would be tedious to follow the various steps feverishly taken which led to his finally unearthing the home address of Mr. Swayne. He procured it at last, not without expense, from an impoverished client of that gentleman who had lately been in correspondence with him. Mr. Swayne had always shown a decided reticence with regard to the locality of his domestic roof. Colonel Tempest was of course in possession of several addresses where letters would find him, but his experience of such addresses had been that, unless strictly connected with pecuniary advantage to Mr. Swayne, the letters did not seem to reach their destination. But now, even when Colonel Tempest wrote to say he would pay up, no answer came. Swayne did not rise even to that bait. Colonel Tempest, who was aware that Mr. Swayne's faith in human nature had in the course of his career sustained several severe shocks, came to the conclusion that Mr. Swayne did not attach importance to his statement--that indeed he regarded it only as a "blind" in order to obtain another interview.

It was on a burning day in June that Colonel Tempest set forth to search out his tempter at Rosemont Villa, Iron Ferry, in the manufacturing town of Bilgewater. The dirty smudged address was in his pocket-book, as was also the notice of his banker that ten thousand pounds had been placed to his credit a few days before.

The London train took him to Worcester, and from thence the local line, after meandering through a desert of grime and chimneys, and after innumerable stoppages at one hideous n.i.g.g.e.r station after another, finally deposited him on the platform of Bilgewater Junction. Colonel Tempest got out and looked about him. It was not a rural scene. Heaps of refuse and slag lay upon the blistered land thick as the good resolutions that pave a certain road. Low cottages crowded each other in knots near the high smoking factories. Black wheels turned slowly against the grey of the sky, which whitened upwards towards the ghost of the midsummer sun high in heaven. We are told that the sun s.h.i.+nes equally on the just and on the unjust; but that was said before the first factory was built. At Bilgewater it is no longer so.

Colonel Tempest inquired his way to Iron Ferry, and, vaguely surprised at Mr. Swayne's choice of locality for his country residence, set out along the baked wrinkles of the black high-road, winding between wastes of cottages, some inhabited and showing dreary signs of life, some empty and decrepit, some fallen down dead. The heat was intense. The steam and the smoke rose together into the air like some evil sacrifice. The pulses of the factories throbbed feverishly as he pa.s.sed. The steam curled upwards from the surface of the livid pools and ca.n.a.ls at their base. The very water seemed to sweat.

Colonel Tempest reached Iron Ferry, being guided thither by the spire of the little tin church, which pointed unheeded towards the low steel sky, shut down over the battered convulsed country like a coffin lid over one who has died in torment.

At Iron Ferry, which had a bridge and a wharf and a ca.n.a.l, and was everything except a ferry, he inquired again concerning Rosemont Villa, and was presently picking his way across a little patch of common towards a string of what had once been red brick houses, but which had long since embraced the universal colour of their surroundings. They were rather better looking houses if a sort of shabby gentility can be called anything except the worst. They were semi-detached. From out of one of them the strains were issuing faintly and continuously of the inevitable accordion, which for some occult reason is always found to consort with poverty and oyster-sh.e.l.ls.

At the open door of another a girl was standing tearing pieces with her teeth out of a chunk of something she held in her hand. She was surrounded by a meagre family of poultry who fought and pecked and trod each other down with almost human eagerness for the occasional morsels she threw to them. Something in her appearance and in the way she seemed to enjoy the greed and mutual revilings of her little dependents reminded Colonel Tempest--he hardly knew why--of Mr. Swayne.

Another glance made the supposition a certainty. There were the small boot-b.u.t.tons of eyes, the heavy mottled expressionless face, which Colonel Tempest had until now considered to be the exclusive property of Mr. Swayne. This slouching, tawdry down-at-heel arrow was no doubt one of that gentleman's quiverful.

Mr. Swayne had always worn such very unmarried waistcoats and b.u.t.ton holes that it was a shock to Colonel Tempest to regard him as a domestic character.

"Is Mr. Swayne at home?" he asked, amid the cackling and flouncing of the poultry.

The "arrow," her cheek "bulged with the unchewed piece," looked at him doubtfully for a moment, and then called over her shoulder--

"Mother!"

The voice as of a female who had never been held in subjection answered shrilly from within--"Well?"

"Here's a gent as wants to see father."

There was a sound of some heavy vessel being set down, and a woman, large and swarthy, came to the door. She might have been good-looking once. She might perhaps have been "a fine figure of a woman" in the days when Swayne wooed and won her, and no doubt her savings, for his own.

But possibly the society of Mr. Swayne may not in the long run have exerted an enn.o.bling or even a soothing influence upon her. Her complexion was a fiery red, and her whole appearance bespoke a temperament to which the artificial stimulus of alcohol, though evidently unnecessary, was evidently not denied.

"Swayne's sick," she said, eyeing Colonel Tempest with distrust. "He can't see no one, and if he could, there's not a s.h.i.+lling in the house if you was to sc.r.a.pe the walls with a knife--so that's all about it.

It's no manner of use coming pestering here for money."

"I don't want money," said Colonel Tempest. "I want to pay, not to be paid."

The woman shook her head incredulously, and put out her under lip, uttering the mystic word, "Walker!" It did not seem to bear upon the subject, but somebody, probably the accordion next door, laughed.

"I must see him!" said Colonel Tempest, vehemently. "I've had dealings with him which I want to settle and have done with. It's my own interest to pay up. He would see me directly if he knew I was here."

The woman hesitated.

"Swayne is uncommon sick," she said, slowly. "If it's business I doubt he could scarce fettle at it now."

"Do you mean he is not sober?"

"He's sober enough, poor fellow," said Mrs. Swayne, with momentary sympathy; "but he's mortal bad. He hasn't done n.o.bbut but dithered with a bit of toast since Tuesday, and taking it out of hisself all the time with flouncing and swearing like a brute beast."

"Is he--do you mean to say he is _dying_?" demanded Colonel Tempest in sudden panic.

"Doctor says he won't hang on above a day or two," said the girl nonchalantly. "Doctor says his works is clean wore out."

"Let me go to him at once," said Colonel Tempest. "It is of great importance; I must see him at once."

The women stared at each other undecidedly, and the girl nudged her mother.

"Lor, mother, what does it signify? If the gentleman 'ull make it worth while, show him up."

Colonel Tempest hastily produced a sovereign, and in a few minutes was stumbling up the rickety stairs behind Mrs. Swayne. She pushed open a half-closed door, and noisily pulled back a bit of curtain which shaded the light--what poor dim light there was--from the bed, knocking over as she did so a tallow candle in the window-sill bent double by the heat.

Colonel Tempest had followed her into the room and into an atmosphere resembling that of the monkey-house at the Zoo, stiffened with brandy.

"Oh, good gracious!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, as Mrs. Swayne drew back the curtain. "Oh dear, Mrs. Swayne! I ought to have been prepared. I had no idea---- What's the matter with him? What is he writing on the wall?"