Diana Tempest | Page 5

when, as he galloped up the steep winding drive, even as he rode, the flag dropped half-mast high before his eyes, and he knew his father was dead.
They had reached the ascent of the castle, and Colonel Tempest turned from the broad road, and struck into a little path that clambered upwards towards the gardens through the hanging woods. It was a short cut to the house. It was here he had first seen Diana, and he pondered over the fidelity of mind which, after fourteen years, could remember the exact spot. There was the wooden bridge over the stream where she had stood, her white gown reflected in the water below her, the heart of the summer woods enfolding her like the setting of a jewel. The seringa and the laburnum were out. The air was faint with perfume. She stood looking at him with lovely surprised eyes, in her exceeding youth and beauty. Involuntarily his mind turned from that first meeting to the last parting sever years later. The cold, dark London bedroom, the bowed figure in the low chair, the fatigued smell of tepid indiarubber. What a gulf between the radiant young girl and the woman with the white exhausted face! Alas for the many parts a woman may have to play in her time to one and the same man! Colonel Tempest laughed harshly to himself, and his powerful mind reverted to the old refrain, 'What fools men are to marry!'
It had been summer when he had seen her first; but now it was early spring. The woods were very silent. God was making a special revelation in their heart, was turning over one more page of His New Testament. He had walked once again in His garden, and at the touch of His feet, all young sheaths and spears of growing things were stirring and pressing up to do His will. The larch had hastened to hang out his pink tassels. The primroses had been the first among the flowers to receive the Divine message, and were repeating it already in their own language to those that had ears to hear it. The folded buds of the anemones had heard the whisper Ephphatha, and were opening one after another their pure shy eyes. The arched neck of the young bracken was showing among the brown ancestors of last year. The marsh marigolds thronged the water's edge. Every battered dyke and rocky scar was transfigured. God was once again making all things new.
Only a mole, high on its funeral twig, held out tiny human hands, worn with honest toil, to its Maker, in mute protest against a steel death 'that nature never made' for little agriculturists. Death was still in the world apparently, side by side with the resurrection of the flowers. Archie paused to glance contemptuously and shy a stick at the corpse as he passed. It looked as if it had not afforded much sport before it died. Colonel Tempest puffed a little, for the ascent was steep, and he was not so slim as he had once been. He sat down on a circular wooden seat round a yew-tree by the path. He began to dislike the idea of going on. And perhaps, after all, he would be told by the servants that his brother would not see him. Jack was quite capable of making himself disagreeable to the last. Really, on the whole, perhaps the best course would be to go down the hill again. It is always so much easier to go down than to go up; so much pleasanter at the moment to avoid what may be distasteful to a sensitive mind.
'Archie,' said Colonel Tempest.
The boy did not hear him. He was looking intently at a little patch of ground near the garden-seat, which had evidently been carefully laid out by a landscape-gardener of about his own age. Every hair of grass or weed had been scratched up within the irregular wall of fir cones that bounded the enclosure. Gray sand imported from a distance, possibly from the brook, marked winding paths therein, in course of completion. A sunk bucket with a squirt in it indicated an intention, as yet unmatured, to add a fountain to the natural beauties of the site.
'You go in this way, father,' said Archie, grasping the situation with becoming gravity, and pointing out the two oyster-shells that flanked the main entrance, 'then you walk round the lake. Look; he has got a duck ready. Oh, dear! and see, father here is his name. I would have done it all in white stones if it had been me. J-O-H-N. John. Father who is John?'
Colonel Tempest's temper was like a curate's gun. You could never tell when it might not go off, or in what direction. It