Colonel Tempest was a trying patient; in one sense he was not a patient at all; melting into querulous tears when denied a sardine on toast for which his soul thirsted, the application of which would infallibly have separated his soul from his body; and bemoaning continually, when consciousness was vouchsafed to him, the neglect of his children and the callousness of his friends. Di bore it with equanimity. It is only true accusations which one feels obliged to contradict. She did not love her father, and his continual appeals to her pity and filial devotion touched her but little. Colonel Tempest confided to his nurse in the night-watches that he was the parent of heartless children, and when Di took her place in the daytime, reviled the nurse's greed, who, whether he was suffering or not, could eat a large meal in the middle of the night.
"I hate nurses," he would say. "Your poor mother had such a horrid nurse when Archie was born. I could not bear her, always making difficulties and restrictions, and locking the door, and then complaining to the doctor because I rattled the lock. I urged your mother to part with her whenever she was not in the room. But she only cried, and said she could not do without her, and that she was kind to her. That was your mother all over. She always sided against me. I must say she knew the value of tears, did your poor mother. She cried herself into hysterics when I rang the front door bell at four in the morning because I had gone out without a latch-key. I suppose she expected me to sit all night on the step. And first the nurse and then the doctor spoke to me about agitating her, and said it was doing her harm; so I just walked straight out of the house, and never set foot in it again for a month till they had both cleared out. They overreached themselves that time."
Archie, who looked in once a day for the space of ten seconds, came in for the largest share of Colonel Tempest's reproaches.
"I don't like sick people," that young gentleman was wont to remark. "Don't understand 'em. No use. Nursing not in my line. Better out of the way."
So, with the consideration of his kind, he was so good as to keep out of it, while Colonel Tempest wept salt tears into his already too salt beef-tea (it was always too salt or not salt enough), and remarked with bitterness that he could have fancied a sardine, and that other people's sons nursed their parents when they were at death's door. Young Grandcourt had never left his father's bedside for three weeks when he had pneumonia; but Archie, it seemed, was different.
"My children are not much comfort to me," he told the doctor as regularly as he put out his tongue.
"John might have come," he said one day to Di. "He got out of it by sending a cheque, but I think he might have taken the trouble just to come and see whether I was alive or dead."
"John is ill himself," said Di.
"John is always ill," said Colonel Tempest, fretfully, with the half-memory of convalescence—"always ailing and coddling himself; and yet he has twice my physique. John grows coarse-looking—very coarse. I fancy he is a large eater. I remember he was ill in the summer. I went to see him. I was always sitting with him; and there did not seem to be much the matter with him. I think he gives way."
"Perhaps it is a family failing," said Di, who was beginning to discover what a continual bottling up and corking down of effervescent irritation is comprised under the name of patience.