Diana Tempest | Page 6

went off now with an explosion. It had been at full cock all the morning.
'Who is John?' he repeated, fiercely kicking the letters on the ground to right and left. 'You may well ask that. John is a confounded interloper. He has no right here. Damn John!'
Archie was following the parental boot with anxious eyes. The tin duck was dinted in on one side, and bulged out on the other in a manner painful to behold. It would certainly never swim again. The turn of the squirt might come any moment. But when his father began to say 'damn,' Arch had always found it better not to interfere.
'Come along, Archie,' said Colonel Tempe furiously, 'don't stand fooling there;' and he began to mount the path with redoubled energy. All thought of turning back was forgotten.
Archie looked back ruefully at the devastated pleasure-grounds. The fir-cone boundary was knocked over at one corner. All privacy was lost; anything might get in now, and the duck, if she recovered, could get out. It was much to be regretted.
'Poor damn John!' said Archie, slipping his hand into that of the grown-up child whom he had for a father.
'Poor John!' echoed Colonel Tempest, his temper evaporating a little, 'I only wish it were poor John, and not poor Archie. That was your garden, Archie--do you hear, my boy ?--yours, not his. And you shall have it, too, if I can get it for you.'
'I don't want it now,' said Archie gravely; 'you've spoilt it.'
Chapter 2
'And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul.'--
Job xxi. 25.
A profound knowledge of human nature enunciated the decree, 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house,' and relegated the neighbour's wife to a back seat among the servants and live stock.
The intense love of a house, passing the love even of prohibited women, is a passion which those who 'nightly pitch their moving tents' in villas and hired dwellings, and look upon heaven as their home, can hardly imagine, and frequently regard with the amused contempt of ignorance. But where pride is a leading power the affections will be generally found immediately in its wake. In these days it is the fashion, especially of the vulgar-minded well-born, to decry birth as being of no account. Those who do so apparently fail to perceive that, by the very fact of decrying it, they proclaim their own innate lack of appreciation of those very advantages of refinement, manners, and a certain distinction and freemasonry of feeling, which birth has evidently withheld from them personally, but which, nevertheless, birth alone can bestow. The strong hereditary pride of race which is as natural a result of time and fixed habitat as the forest oak--which is bred in the bone and comes out in the flesh from generation to generation--is accompanied, as a rule, by a passionate love, not of houses, but of the house, the home, the eyrie, the one sacred spot from which the race sprang.
Among the Tempests, devotion to Overleigh had been an hereditary instinct from time immemorial. Other possessions, gifts of royalty, or dowers of heiresses, came and went. Overleigh remained from generation to generation. Scapegrace Tempests squandered the family fortune, and mortgaged the family properties, but others rose up in their place who, whatever else was lost, kept fast hold on Overleigh. The old castle on the crag had passed through many vicissitudes. It had been originally built in Edward II.'s time, and the remains of fortification, and the immense thickness of the outer wall showed how fierce had been the inroads of Scot and Borderer which such strength was needed to repel. The massive arched doorway through which yelling hordes of the Tempests and their retainers swooped down, with black lion on pennant flying, upon the enemy, was walled up in the time of the Tudors, and the vaulted basement with its acutely pointed chamfered arches became the dungeons of the later portion of the building--the cellars of the present day.
Overleigh had entertained royalty royally in its time, and had sheltered royalty more royally still. Cromwell's cannon had not prevailed against it. It had been partially burnt, it had been partially rebuilt. There it still stood, a glory and a princely possession on the lands that had been meted in the Doomsday Book to a certain Norman knight, Ivo de Tempete, the founder of an iron race. And in the nineteenth century a Tempest held it still. Tempest had become a great name. Gradually wealth had gathered round Overleigh, as the lichen had gathered round its gray stones. There were coal-mines now among the marsh-lands of William the Conqueror's favourite, harbours and towns along the sea-coast. Tempest of Overleigh was a power, a name that might be felt, that had been felt. The name ranked high among the great commoners