FIFTEEN years is a long time. What companies of trite reflections crowd the mind as it looks back across the marshes and the fens, and the highlands and the lowlands, and the weary desert places, to some point that catches the eye in the middle distance! We stood there once. Perhaps we go back in memory—all the way back—to that little town and spire in the green country, and pray once again in the cool vision-haunted church, and peer up once again at the window in the narrow street where Love lived and looked out, where patience and affection dwell together now. They were always friends, those two.
Or perhaps we look back to a parting of the ways which did not seem to be a parting at the time, and recall a "Good-bye" that was lightly uttered because it was only thought to be Au revoir. We see now, from where we stand, the point where the paths diverged.
Fifteen years!
They have not passed very smoothly over the head of Colonel Tempest. Whenever he looked back across the breezy uplands of his well-spent life, his eye avoided and yet was inevitably attracted with a loathing allurement to one dark spot in the middle distance, where——
Fifteen years ago or yesterday was it?
The old nightmare, with the shuddering horror of yesterday mingled with the heavy pressure of years, might come back at any moment—was always coming back.
That sultry night in June!
Everything was disjointed and fragmentary in his memory the morning after it; he could not see the whole. He had a confused recollection of an intense passionate hatred that was like a physical pain, and of Swayne's voice saying, "What's a little boy?" And then there were slips of paper. Swayne said a bet was a bet. He, Colonel Tempest, had had something to do with those slips of paper—What?—One had fallen on the floor, and Swayne had blotted it carefully. There was Swayne's voice again, "Your handwriting ain't up to much, Colonel." He had written something then. What was it? His own name? Memory failed. Who was that devil in the room, with Swayne's face and blurred watch-chain—two watch-chains—and the thick busy hands? And then it was night, and he was in the streets again in the hot darkness, among the blinking lamps and stars that looked like eyes, and Swayne was seeing him home. And there was a horror over everything; horror leant over him at night, horror woke him in the morning and pursued him throughout the day, and the next day, and the next. What had he done? He tried to piece together the broken fragments that his groping memory could glean; but nothing came of it—at least, nothing he could believe. But Swayne knew. On the third day he could bear it no longer, and he went to find him; but Swayne had disappeared. Colonel Tempest went up to his chambers on the pretence of a letter—of something; he knew not what. They were swept and garnished in readiness for new arrivals, for if one choice spirit disappears, a good landlady knows what to expect.
Colonel Tempest looked once round the room, and then sat feebly down. It was as if for days he had been staring at a blank sheet, and now a dark slide had been suddenly taken from the magic lantern. The picture was before him in all its tawdry distinctness. He knew what he had done.
Colonel Tempest was not a radically bad man. Who is? But there was in him a kind of weakness of fibre which consists in being subservient to the impulse of the moment. The effects of a feeble yielding to impulse are sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those of the most deliberate and thorough-paced sin.