Diana Tempest

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Diana Tempest by Mary Cholmondeley
Chapter 1
'La pire des mesalliances est celle du coeur.'
Colonel Tempest and his miniature ten-year-old replica of himself had made themselves as comfortable as circumstances would permit in opposite corners of the smoking carriage. It was a chilly morning in April, and the boy had wrapped himself in his travelling rug, and turned up his little collar, and drawn his soft little travelling cap over his eyes in exact, though unconscious, imitation of his father. Colonel Tempest looked at him now and then with paternal complacency. It is certainly a satisfaction to see ourselves repeated in our children. We feel that the type will not be lost. Each new edition of ourselves lessens a natural fear lest a work of value and importance should lapse out of print.
Colonel Tempest at forty was still very handsome, and must, as a young man, have possessed great beauty before the character had had time to assert itself in the face--before selfishness had learned to look out of the clear gray eyes, and a weak self-indulgence and irresolution had loosened the well-cut lips.
Colonel Tempest, as a rule, took life very easily. If he had fits of uncontrolled passion now and then, they were quickly over. If his feelings were touched, that was quickly over too. But today his face was clouded. He had tried the usual antidotes for an impending attack of what he would have called 'the blues,' by which he meant any species of reflection calculated to give him that passing annoyance which was the deepest form of emotion of which he was capable. But Punch and the Sporting Times, and even the comic French paper which Archie might not look at, were powerless to distract him to-day. At last he tossed the latter out of the window to corrupt the morals of trespassers on the line, and, as it was, after all, less trouble to yield than to resist settled himself in his corner, and gave way to a series of gloomy and anxious reflections.
He was bent on a mission of importance to his old home, to see his brother, who was dying. His mind always recoiled instinctively from the thought of death, and turned quickly to something else. It was fourteen years since he had been at Overleigh, fourteen years since that event had taken place which had left a deadly enmity of silence and estrangement between his brother and himself ever since. And it had all been about a woman. It seemed extraordinary to Colonel Tempest, as he looked back, that a quarrel which had led to such serious consequences--which had, as he remembered, spoilt his own life--should have come from so slight a cause. It was like losing the sight of an eye because a fly had committed trespass in it. A man's mental rank may generally be determined by his estimate of woman. If he stands low he considers her--Heaven help her!--such an one as himself. If he climbs high he takes his ideal of her along with him, and, to keep it safe, places it above himself.
Colonel Tempest pursued the reflections suggested by an untaxed intellect of average calibre which he believed to be profound. A mere girl! How men threw up everything for women! What fools men were when they were young! After all, when he came to think of it, there had been some excuse for him. (There generally was.) How beautiful she had been with her pale exquisite face, and her innocent eyes, and a certain shy dignity and pride of bearing peculiar to herself! Yes, any other man would have done the same in his place. The latter argument had had great weight with Colonel Tempest through life. He could not help it if she were engaged to his brother. It was as much her fault as his own if they fell in love with each other. She was seventeen and he was seven-and-twenty, but it is always the woman who 'has the greater sin.'
He remembered, with something like complacency, the violent love-making of the fortnight that followed, her shy adoration of her beautiful eager lover. Then came the scruples, the flight, the white cottage by the Thames, the marriage at the local registrar's office. What a fool he had been, he reflected, and how he had worshipped her at first, before he had been disappointed in her; disappointed in her as the boy is in the butterfly when he has it safe--and crushed--in his hand. She might have made anything of him, he reflected. But somehow there had been a hitch in her character. She had not taken him the right way. She had been unable to effect a radical change in him, to convert weakness and irresolution into strength and decision; and he had been quite ready