Diana Tempest | Page 4

the little
yellow-haired boy to school, and when Mrs. Courtenay repeated her
offer, he accepted it and Di, with her bassinette and the minute feather
stitched wardrobe that her mother had made for her packed inside her
little tin bath, drove away one day in a four-wheeler straight out of
Colonel Tempest's existence and very soon out of his memory.
His marriage had been the ruin of him, he said to himself, reviewing
the last few years. It had done for him with his brother. He had been a
fool to sacrifice so much for a pretty face, and she had not had a
shilling. He had chucked away all his chances in marrying her. He
might have married anybody but he had never seen a woman before or
since with a turn of the neck and shoulder to equal hers. Poor Di! She
had spoilt his life, no doubt, but she had had her good points, after all.

Poor Di! Perhaps she too had had her dark hours. Perhaps she had
given love to a man capable only of a passing passion. Perhaps she had
sold her woman's birthright for red pottage, and had borne the penalty,
not with an exceeding bitter cry, but in an exceeding bitter silence.
Perhaps she had struggled against the disillusion and desecration of life,
the despair and the self-loathing that go to make up an unhappy
marriage. Perhaps in the deepening shadows of death she had heard her
new-born child cry to her through the darkness, and had yearned over it,
and yet--and yet had been glad to go.
However these things may have been, at any rate, she had a turn of the
neck and shoulder which lived in her husband's memory. Poor Di!
Colonel Tempest shook himself free from a train of reflections which
had led him to a death-bed, and suddenly remembered with a shudder
of repugnance that he was on his way to another at this moment.
His brother had not sent for him. Colonel Tempest was hazarding an
unsolicited visit. He had announced his intention of coming, but he had
received no permission to do so. Nevertheless he had actually screwed
up his weak and vacillating nature to the sticking point of putting
himself and his son into the train when the morning arrived that he had
fixed on for going to Overleigh.
'For the sake of the old name, and for the sake of the boy,' he said to
himself, looking at the delicate regular profile silhouetted against the
window-pane. If Archie had had a pair of wings folded underneath his
little great-coat, he would have made a perfect model for an angel, with
his fair hair and face, and the sweet serious eyes that contemplated,
without any change of expression, his choir book at chapel, or the last
grappling contortions of a cockroach, ingeniously transfixed to the
book-ledge with a pin, to relieve the monotony of the sermon.
'Overleigh! Overleigh! Overleigh!' called out a porter, as the train
stopped. Colonel Tempest started. There already! How long it was
since he had got out at that station ! There was a new station-master,
and the station itself had been altered. He looked at the little red tin
shelter erected on the off-side with an alien eye. It had not been there in

his time. There was no carriage to meet him, although he had
mentioned the train by which he intended to arrive. His heart sank a
little as he took Archie by the hand and set out to walk. The distance
was nothing, for the station had been made specially for the
convenience of the Tempests, and lay within a few hundred yards of the
castle gates. But the omen was a bad one. Would his mission fail?
How unchanged everything was! He seemed to remember every stone
upon the road. There was the turn up to the village, and the low tower
of the church peering through the haze of the April trees. They passed
through the old Italian gates--there was a new woman at the lodge to
open them--and entered the park. Archie drew in his breath. He had
never seen deer at large before. He supposed his uncle must keep a
private zoological gardens on a large scale, and his awe of him
increased.
'Are the lions and the tigers loose too?' he inquired, with grave interest,
but without anxiety, as his eyes followed a little band of fallow-deer
skimming across the turf.
'There are no lions and tigers, Archie,' said his father, tightening his
clasp on the little hand. If Colonel Tempest had ever loved anything, it
was his son.
They had come to a turn in the broad white road which he knew well.
He stopped and looked. High on a rocky crag,