Diana Tempest | Page 2

and he had been quite ready
to have anything of that sort done for him. During all those early weeks
of married life, until she caught a heavy cold on her chest, he had
believed existence had been easily and delightfully transformed for him.
He was susceptible. His feelings were always easily touched.
Everything influenced him, for a time; beautiful music, or a pathetic
story for half an hour; his young wife for--nearly six months.
A play usually ends with the wedding, but there is generally an
after-piece, ignored by lovers but expected by an experienced audience.
The after-piece in Colonel Tempest's domestic drama began with tears,
caused, I believe, in the first instance by a difference of opinion as to
who was responsible for the earwigs in his bath sponge. In the white
cottage there were many earwigs. But even after the earwig difficulty
was settled by a move to London, other occasions seemed to crop up
for the shedding of those tears which are known to be the common
resource of women for obtaining their own way when other means fail;
and others, many others, suggested by youth and inexperience and a
devoted love had failed. If they are silent tears, or, worse still, if the
eyelids betray that they have been shed in secret, a man may with
reason become much annoyed at what looks like a tacit reproach.
Colonel Tempest became annoyed. It is the good fortune of shallow
men so thoroughly to understand women, that they can see through
even the noblest of them; though of course that deeper insight into the
hypocrisy practised by the whole sex about their fancied ailments, and
inconveniently wounded feelings for their own petty objects, is
reserved for selfish men alone.
Matters have become very wrong indeed when a caress is not enough to
set all right at once; but things came to that shocking pass between
Colonel and Mrs. Tempest, and went in the course of the next few years
several steps further still, till they reached, on her part, that dreary dead

level of emaciated semi-maternal tenderness which is the only feeling
some husbands allow their wives to entertain permanently for them; the
only kind of love which some men believe a virtuous woman is capable
of.
How he had suffered, he reflected, he who needed love so much! Even
the advent of the child had only drawn them together for a time. He
remembered how deeply touched he had been when it was first laid in
his arms, how drawn towards its mother. But his smoking-room fire
had been neglected during the following week, and he could not find
any large envelopes, and the nurse made absurd restrictions about his
seeing his wife at his own hours, and Di herself was feeble and languid,
and made no attempt to enter into his feelings, or show him any
sympathy, and--
Colonel Tempest sighed as he made this mournful retrospect of his
married life. He had never cared to be much at home, he reflected. His
home had not been made very pleasant to him--the poor meagre home
in a dingy street, the wrong side of Oxford Street, which was all that a
young man in the Guards, with expensive tastes, who had quarrelled
with his elder brother, could afford. The last evening he had spent in
that house came back to him with a feeling of bitter resentment at the
recollection of his wife's unreasonable distress when a tradesman called
after dinner for payment of a long-standing account which she had
understood was settled. It was not a large bill, he remembered
wrathfully, and he had intended to keep his promise of paying it
directly his money came in, but when it came he had needed it, and
more, for his share of the spring fishing he had taken cheap with a
friend. Naturally he would not see the man whose loud voice, asking
repeatedly for him, could be heard in the hall, and who refused to go
away. Colonel Tempest had a dislike to rows with tradespeople. At last
his wife, prostrate and in feeble health, rose languidly from her sofa,
and went down to meet the recriminations of the unfortunate tradesman,
who, after a long interval, retired, slamming the door. Colonel Tempest
heard her slow step come up the stair again, and then, instead of
stopping at the drawing-room door, it had gone toiling upwards to the
room above. He was incensed by so distinct an evidence of temper.

Surely, he said to himself with exasperation, she knew when she
married him that she was marrying a poor man.
She did not return: and at last he blew out the lamp, and, lighting the
candle put ready for him, went upstairs, and opening the door of his