Diana Tempest, Volume I

by Mary Cholmondeley

Mr. Swayne was a stout, florid-looking man between forty and fifty, with a heavy face like a grimace that some one else had made, who laboured under the delusion, unshared by any of his fellow-creatures, that he was a gentleman. In what class he had been born no one knew. What he was now any one could see for himself. He was generally considered by the men with whom he associated a good fellow for an ally in a disreputable pinch, and a blackguard when the pinch was over. Every one regarded Dandy Swayne with contempt, but for all that "The Snowdrop," as he was playfully called, might be seen in the chambers and at the dinners of men far above him in the social scale, who probably for very good reasons tolerated his presence, and for even better reviled him behind his back. He had a certain shrewdness and knowledge of the seamy side of human nature which stood him in good stead. He was a noted billiard player—a little too noted, perhaps. His short, thick ringed hands did not mind much what they fastened on. He was not troubled by conscientious scruples. The charm of Dandy Swayne's character was that he stuck at nothing. He would go down any sewer provided there was money in it, and money there always was somewhere in everything he took in hand. Dandy Swayne's career had had strange ups and downs. No one knew how he lived. The private fortune on which he was wont to enlarge of course existed only in his own imagination. Sometimes he disappeared entirely for longer or shorter periods—generally after money transactions of a nature that required privacy and foreign travel. But the same Providence which tempers the wind to the shorn lamb watches over the shearer also, and he always reappeared again, sooner or later, with his creased white waistcoat and yesterday's gardenia, and the old swagger that endeared him to his fellow-creatures.

He was up in the world just now, living "in style" in smart chambers strewn with photographs of actresses, and littered with cheap expensive furniture, and plush hangings redolent of smoke and stale scent, among which Colonel Tempest was knocking about in his disordered evening dress.

"I'm sorry for you, Colonel," repeated Mr. Swayne, slowly; "but I wish to —— you'd sit down and not rush up and down like that. It's not a bit of good taking on in that way, though it's —— —— luck all the same."

Mr. Swayne's conversation was devoid of that severe simplicity which society demands; indeed, it was so encrusted and enriched with ornamental gems of expression of a surprising and dubious character, that to present his conversation to the reader without the personal peculiarities of his choice of language is to do him an injustice which, however unavoidable, is much to be regretted. Mr. Swayne's conversation without his oaths might be compared to a bird without its feathers; the body is there, but all individuality and beauty of contour is gone.

Mr. Swayne filled his glass, and pushed the bottle across to his friend, whose flushed face and shaking hand showed that he had had enough already. Colonel Tempest sat down impatiently and filled his glass, too.

"It's the will that did it, I suppose," suggested Mr. Swayne; "that tipped it over."

"Yes," said Colonel Tempest, striking his clenched hand on the table. "My son John he called him in his will; there was no getting over that. He knew it when he put those words in. He knew I should contest the succession, and he hated me so that he perjured himself to keep me out of my own, and stuck to it even on his death-bed. John is no more his son than you are. A little dark Fane, that is what he is. They say he takes after his mother's family; he well may do, —— him!"

Mr. Swayne sympathetically echoed the sentiment in a varied but not less forcible form of speech.

"And my son," continued Colonel Tempest, his fair weak face whitening with passion—"you know my boy; look at him—a Tempest to the backbone, down to his finger-nails. You can't look at him among the pictures in the gallery and not see he is bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. He is as like the Vandyke of Amyas Tempest the cavalier as he can be. It drives me mad to think of him, cut out by a bastard!"

Mr. Swayne appeared to be in a meditative turn of mind. He watched the smoke of his cigar curl upwards from the unshaved crater of his lip into the air.