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(titlepage)
BY
(contents)
enamels from France. He was a student, and collected the many rare and handsome, leather-bound volumes telling of curious arts, obscure speculations, half-fabulous histories, voyages, and adventures, which still constitute the almost unique value of the Brockhurst library. He might claim to be a man of science, moreover--of that delectable old-world science which has no narrow-minded quarrel with miracle or prodigy, wherein angel and demon mingle freely, lending a hand unchallenged to complicate the operations both of nature and of grace--a science which, even yet, in perfect good faith, busied itself with the mysteries of the Rosy Cross, mixed strange ingredients into a possible Elixir of Life, ran far afield in search for the Philosopher's Stone, gathered herbs for the confection of simples during auspicious phases of the moon, and beheld in comet and meteor awful forewarnings of public calamity or of Divine Wrath.
From all of which it may be premised that when, like the wise king, of
old, in Jerusalem, Denzil Calmady "builded him houses, made him
gardens and orchards, and planted trees in them of all kind of
fruits," when he "made him pools of water to water therewith
the wood that bringe forth trees," when he "gathered silver and
gold, and the treasure of provinces," and got him singers, and
players of musical instruments, and "the delights of the sons of
men,"--he did so that, having tried and sifted all these things,
he might, by the exercise of a ripe and untrammelled judgment, decide what
amongst them is illusory and but a passing show, and what--be it never
so small a remnant--has in it the promise of eternal subsistence, and
therefore of vital worth; and that, having so decided and thus gained an
even mind, he might prepare serenely to take leave of the life he had dared
so largely to live.
Commencing his labours at Brockhurst during the closing years of the
reign of Queen Elizabeth, Denzil Calmady completed them in 1611 with a
royal house-warming. For the space of a week, during the autumn of
that year,--the last autumn, as it unhappily proved, that graceful and
scholarly prince was fated to see,--Henry, Prince of Wales,
condescended to be his guest. He was entertained at Brockhurst--as
contemporary records inform the curious--with "much feastinge
and many joyous masques and gallant pastimes," including "a
great slayinge of deer and divers beastes and fowl in the woods and coverts
thereunto adjacent." It is added, with unconscious irony, that his
host, being a "true lover of all wild creatures, had caused a fine
bear-pit to be digged beyond the outer garden wall to the
west." And that, on the Sunday afternoon of the Prince's visit, there "was held a most mighty baitinge," to witness which "many noble gentlemen of the neighbourhood did visit Brockhurst and lay there two nights."
Later it is reported of Denzil Calmady, who was an excellent
churchman,--suspected even, notwithstanding his little turn for
philosophy, of a greater leaning towards the old Mass-Book than
towards the modern Book of Common Prayer,--that he notably assisted
Laud, then Bishop of St. David's, in respect of certain delicate
diplomacies. Laud proved not ungrateful to his friend; who, in due time,
was honoured with one of King James's newly instituted baronetcies,
not to mention some few score, seedling, Scotch firs, which, taking kindly
to the light, moorland soil, increased and multiplied exceedingly and sowed
themselves broadcast over the face of the surrounding country.
And, save for the vigorous upgrowth of those same fir trees, and for the
fact that bears and bear-pit had long given place to racehorses and
to a great square of stable-buildings in the hollow lying back from
the main road across the park, Brockhurst was substantially the same, in
the year of grace 1842, when this truthful history actually opens, as it
had been when Sir Denzil's workmen set the last tier of bricks of the
last twisted chimney-stack in its place. The grand, simple masses of
the house--Gothic in its main lines, but with much of Renaissance work
in its details--still lent themselves to the same broad effects of
light and shadow, as it crowned the southern and western sloping hillside
amid its red-walled gardens and pepper-pot summerhouses, its
gleaming ponds and watercourses, its hawthorn dotted paddocks, its ancient
avenues of elm, of lime, and oak. The same panellings and tapestries
clothed the walls of its spacious rooms and passages. The same quaint
treasures adorned its fine Italian cabinets. The same air of large and
generous comfort pervaded it. As the child of true lovers is said to bear
through life, in a certain glad beauty of person and of nature, witness to
the glad hour of its conception, so Brockhurst, on through the accumulating
years, still bore witness to the fortunate historic hour in which it was
planned.
Yet, since in all things material and mortal there is always a little
spot of darkness, a germ of canker, at least the echo of a cry of
fear--lest life being too sweet, man should grow proud to the point of
forgetting he is, after all, but a pawn upon the board, but the sport and
plaything of destiny and the vast purposes of God--all was not quite
well with Brockhurst. At a given moment of time, the diabolic element had
of necessity
intruded itself. And, in the chronicles of this delightful dwelling-place, even as in those of Eden itself, the angels are proven not to have had things altogether their own gracious way.
The pierced stone parapet, which runs round three sides of the house and
constitutes architecturally one of its most noteworthy features, is broken
in the centre of the north front by a tall, stepped and sharply pointed,
gable, flanked on either hand by slender, four-sided pinnacles. From
the niche in the said gable, arrayed in sugarloaf hat, full doublet and
trunk hose, his head a trifle bent so that the tip of his pointed beard
rests on the pleatings of his marble ruff, a carpenter's rule in his
right hand, Sir Denzil Calmady gazes meditatively down. Delicate,
coral-like tendrils of the Virginian creeper, which covers the house
walls and strays over the bay-windows of the Long Gallery below,
twine themselves yearly about his ankles and his square-toed shoes.
The swallows yearly attempt to fix their grey, mud nests against the
flutings of the scallop-shell canopy sheltering his bowed head; and
are yearly ejected by cautious gardeners, armed with imposing array of
ladders and conscious of no little inward reluctance to face the dangers of
so aërial a height.
And here, it may not be unfitting to make further mention of that same
little spot of darkness, germ of canker, echo of the cry of fear, that had
come to mar the fair records of Brockhurst. For very certain it was that
among the varying scenes, moving merry or majestic, upon which Sir Denzil
had looked down during the two and a quarter centuries of his sojourn in
the lofty niche of the northern gable, there was one his eyes had never yet
rested upon--one matter, and that a very vital one, to which, had he
applied his carpenter's rule, the measure of it must have proved
persistently and grievously short.
Along the straight walks, across the smooth lawns, and beside the
brilliant flower-borders of the formal gardens, he had seen
generations of babies toddle and stagger, with gurglings of delight, as
they clutched at glancing bird or butterfly far out of reach. He had seen
healthy, clean-limbed, boisterous lads and dainty, little maidens
laugh and play, quarrel, kiss, and be friends again. He had seen ardent
lovers--in glowing June twilights, while the nightingales shouted from
the laurels, or from the coppices in the park below--driven to the
most desperate straits, to visions of cold poison, of horse-pistols,
of immediate enlistment, or the consoling arms of Betty the housemaid, by
the coquetries of some young lady captivating
in powder and patches, or arrayed in the high-waisted, agreeably-revealing costume which our grandmothers judged it not improper to wear in their youth. He had seen husband and wife, too, wandering hand in hand at first, tenderly hopeful and elate. And then, sometimes, as the years lengthened,--growing somewhat sated with the ease of their high estate,--he had seen them hand in hand no longer, waxing cold and indifferent, debating even, at moments, reproachfully whether they might not have invested the capital of their affections to better advantage elsewhere.
All this, and much more, Sir Denzil had seen, and doubtless measured,
for all that he appeared so immovably calm and apart. But that which he had
never yet seen was a man of his name and race, full of years and honours,
come slowly forth from the stately house to sun himself, morning or
evening, in the comfortable shelter of the high, red-brick,
rose-grown, garden walls.--Looking the while, with the pensive
resignation of old age, at the goodly, wide-spreading prospect.
Smiling again over old jokes, warming again over old stories of prowess
with horse and hound, or rod and gun. Feeling the eyes moisten again at the
memory of old loves, and of those far-away first embraces which
seemed to open the gates of paradise and create the world anew; at
remembrances of old hopes too, which proved still-born, and of old
distresses, which often enough proved still-born likewise,--the
whole of these simplified now, sanctified, the tumult of them stilled,
along with the hot, young blood which went to make them, by the kindly
torpor of increasing age and the approaching footsteps of greatly
reconciling Death.
For Sir Denzil's male descendants, one and all,--so says
tradition, so say too the written and printed family records, the fine
monuments in the chancel of Sandyfield church, and more than one tombstone
in the yew-shaded churchyard,--have displayed a disquieting
incapacity for living to the permitted "threescore years and
ten"--let alone fourscore--and dying decently, in ordinary,
commonplace fashion, in their beds. Mention is made of casualties
surprising in number and variety; and not always, it must be owned, to the
moral credit of those who suffered them. It is told how Sir Thomas,
grandson of Sir Denzil, died miserably of gangrene, caused by a tear in the
arm from the antler of a wounded buck. How his nephew Zachary--who
succeeded him--was stabbed, during a drunken brawl, in an
eating-house in the Strand. How the brother of the said Zachary, a
gallant, young soldier, was killed at the battle of Ramillies in 1706.
Duelling, lightning during a summer storm,
even the blue-brown waters of the Brockhurst Lake, in turn claim a victim. Later it is told how a second Sir Denzil, after hard fighting to save his purse, was shot by highwaymen on Bagshot Heath, when riding with a couple of servants--not notably distinguished, as it would appear, for personal valour--from Brockhurst up to town.
Lastly comes Courtney Calmady, who, living in excellent repute until
close upon sixty, seemed destined by Providence to break the evil chain of
the family fate. But he too goes the way of all flesh, suddenly enough,
after a long run with the hounds, owing to the opening of a wound, received
when he was little more than a lad, at the taking of Frenchtown under
General Proctor, during the second American war. So he too died, and they
buried him with much honest mourning, as befitted so kindly and honourable
a gentleman; and his son Richard--of whom more hereafter--reigned
in his stead.
For, though no royal personage had graced the occasion with his
presence, nor had bears suffered martyrdom to promote questionably amiable
mirth, Brockhurst, during the past week, had witnessed a series of
festivities hardly inferior to those which marked Sir Denzil's
historic house-warming. Young Sir Richard Calmady had brought home
his bride, and it was but fitting the whole countryside should see her. So
all and sundry received generous entertainment according to their
degree.--Labourers, tenants, school-children. Weary
old-age from Pennygreen poorhouse, taking its pleasure of cakes and
ale half suspiciously in the broad sunshine. The leading shopkeepers of
Westchurch, and their humbler brethren from Farley Row. All the country
gentry too.--Lord and Lady Fallowfeild and a goodly company from
Whitney Park, Lord Denier and a large contingent from Grimshott Place, the
Cathcarts of Newlands, and many more persons of undoubted
consequence--specially perhaps in their own eyes. Not to mention a
small army of local clergy--who ever display a touching alacrity in
attending festivals, even those of a secular character--with
camp-followers, in the form of wives and families, galore.
And now, at last, all was over,--balls, sports, theatricals,
dinners--the last, in the case of the labourers, with the unlovely
adjunct of an ox roasted whole. Even the final garden-party,
designed to include such persons as it was, socially speaking, a trifle
difficult to place--Image, owner of the big Shotover brewery, for
instance, who was shouldering his way so vigorously towards fortune and a
seat on the bench of magistrates; the younger members of the firm of
Goteway & Fox, solicitors of Westchurch; Goodall, the Methodist miller
from Parson's Holt, and certain sporting yeoman farmers with their
comely womankind--even this final entertainment, with all its small
triumphs and heart-burnings, flutterings of youthful inexperience,
aspirations, condescensions, had gone, like the rest of the week's
junketings, to swell the sum of things accomplished, of all that which is
past and done with and will never come again.
Fully an hour ago, Dr. Knott, under plea of waiting cases, had hitched
his ungainly, thick-set figure into his high gig.
"Plenty of fine folks, eh, Timothy?" he said to the
ferret-faced groom beside him, as he gathered up the reins, and the
brown mare, knowing the hand on her mouth, laid herself out to her work.
"Handsome young couple as anybody need wish to see. Not much business
doing there for me, I fancy, unless it lies in the nursery line."
"Say those Brockhurst folks mostly dies airly though,".
remarked Timothy, with praiseworthy effort at professional
encouragement.
"Eh! so you've heard that story too, have
you?"--and John Knott drew the lash gently across the hollow of
the mare's back.
"This 'ere Sir Richard's the third baronet I've
a-seen, and I bean't so very old neither."
The doctor looked down at the spare little man with a certain snarling
affection, as he said:--"Oh no! I'm not kept awake
o' nights by the fear of losing you, Timothy. Your serviceable old
carcass 'll hang together for a good while yet."--Then his
rough eyebrows drew into a line, and he stared thoughtfully down the long
space of the clean gravel road under the meeting branches of the lime
trees.
The Whitney char à bancs had driven
off but a few minutes later, to the admiration of all beholders; yet not,
it must be admitted, without a measure of inward perturbation on the part
of that noble charioteer, Lord Fallowfeild. Her Ladyship was
constitutionally timid, and he was none too sure of the behaviour of his
leaders in face of the string of very miscellaneous vehicles waiting to
take up. However, the illustrious party happily got off without any
occasion for Lady Fallowfeild's screaming. Then the ardour of
departure became universal, and in broken procession the many carriages,
phætons, gigs, traps, pony-chaises streamed away from
Brockhurst House, north, south, and east, and west.
Lady Calmady had bidden her guests farewell at the side-door
opening on to the terrace, before they passed through the house to the main
entrance in the south front. Last to go, as he had been first to come, was
that worthy person, Thomas Caryll, the rector of Sandyfield. Mild,
white-haired, deficient in chin, he had a natural leaning towards
women in general, and towards those of the upper classes in particular.
Katherine Calmady's radiant youth, her courtesy, her undeniable air
of distinction, and a certain gracious gaiety which belonged to her, had,
combined with unaccustomed indulgence in claret cup, gone far to turn the
good man's head during the afternoon. Regardless of the slightly
flustered remonstrances of his wife and daughters, he lingered, expending
himself in innocently confused compliment, supplemented by prophecies
regarding the blessings destined to descend upon Brockhurst and the mother
parish of Sandyfield in virtue of Lady Calmady's advent.
But at length he also departed. Katherine waited, her eyes full of
laughter, until Mr. Caryll's footsteps died away on the
stone quarries of the great hall within. Then she gently drew the heavy door to, and stepped out on to the centre of the terrace. The grass slopes of the park--dotted with thorn trees and beds of bracken,--the lime avenue running along the ridge of the hill, the ragged edge of the fir forest to the east, and the mass of the house, all these were softened to a vagueness--as the landscape in a dream--by the deepening twilight. An immense repose pervaded the whole scene. It affected Katherine to a certain seriousness. Social excitements and responsibilities, the undoubted success that had attended her maiden essay as hostess during the past week, shrank to trivial proportions. Another order of emotion arose in her. She became sensible of a necessity to take counsel with herself.
She moved slowly along the terrace, paused in the arcaded
garden-hall at the end of it--the carven stone benches and
tables of which showed somewhat ghostly in the dimness--to put off her
bonnet and push back the lace scarf from her shoulders. An increasing
solemnity was upon her. There were things to think of--things deep and
strange. She must needs place them, make an effort, anyhow, to do so. And,
in face of this necessity, came an instinct to rid herself of all small
impeding conventionalities even in the matter of dress. For there was in
Katherine that inherent desire of harmony with her surroundings, that
natural sense of fitness, which--given certain technical
aptitudes--goes to make a great dramatic artist. But, since in her
case such technical aptitudes were either non-existent or wholly
latent, it followed that, save in nice questions of private honour, she was
quite the least self-conscious and self-critical of human
beings. Now, as she passed out under the archway on to the square lawn of
the troco-ground, bare-headed, in her pale dress, a sweet
seriousness filling all her mind, even as the sweet, summer twilight filled
all the valley and veiled the gleaming surface of the Long Water far below,
she felt wholly in sympathy with the aspect and sentiment of the place.
Indeed it appeared to her, just then, that the four months of her marriage,
the five months of her engagement, even the twenty-two years which
made up all the sum of her earthly living, were a prelude merely to the
present hour and to that which lay immediately ahead.
Yet the prelude had, in truth, been a pretty enough piece of music.
Katherine's experience had but few black patches in it as yet.
Furnished with a fair and healthy body, with fine breeding, with a
character in which the pride and grit of her North Country ancestry were
tempered by the poetic instincts and quick
wit which came to her with her mother's Irish blood, Katherine Ormiston started better furnished than most to play the great game that all are bound to play--whether they will or no--with fate. Mrs. Ormiston, still young and beloved, had died in bringing this, her only daughter, into the world; and her husband had looked somewhat coldly upon the poor baby in consequence. There was an almost misanthropic vein in the autocratic land-owner and iron-master. He had three sons already, and therefore found but little use for this woman-child. So, while pluming himself on his clear judgment and unswerving reason, he resented, most unreasonably, her birth, since it took his wife from him. Such is the irony of things, forever touching man on the raw, proving his weakness in that he holds his strongest point! In fact, however, Katherine suffered but slightly from the poor welcome that greeted her advent in the grey, many-towered house upon the Yorkshire coast. For her great-aunt, Mrs. St. Quentin, speedily gathered the small creature into her still beautiful arms, and lavished upon it both tenderness and wealth, along--as it grew to a companionable age--with the wisdom of a mind ripened by wide acquaintance with men and with public affairs. Mrs. St. Quentin--famous in Dublin, London, Paris, as a beauty and a wit--had passed her early womanhood amid the tumult of great events. She had witnessed the horrors of the Terror, the splendid amazements of the First Empire; and could still count among her friends and correspondents, politicians and literary men of no mean standing. A legend obtains that Lord Byron sighed for her--and in vain. For, as Katherine came to know later, this woman had loved once, daringly, finally, yet without scandal--though the name of him whom she loved, and who loved her, was not, it must be owned, St. Quentin. And perhaps it was just this, this hidden and somewhat tragic romance, which kept her so young, so fresh; kept her unworldly, though moving so freely in the world; had given her that exquisite sense of relative values and that knowledge of the heart, which leads, as the divine Plato has testified, to the highest and most reconciling philosophy.
Thus, the delicately brilliant old lady and the radiant young lady lived
together delightfully enough, spending their winters in Paris in a pretty
apartment in the rue de Rennes--shared with one Mademoiselle de
Mirancourt, whose friendship with Mrs. St. Quentin dated from their
schooldays at the convent of the Sacré Coeur. Spring and autumn
found Katherine and her great-aunt in London. While, in summer,
there was always a long visit to Ormiston Castle, looking out from the
cliff-edge
upon the restless North Sea. Lovers came in due course. For over and above its own shapeliness--which surely was reason enough--Katherine's hand was well worth winning from the worldly point of view. She would have money; and Mrs. St. Quentin's influence would count for much in the case of a great-nephew-by-marriage who aspired to a parliamentary or diplomatic career. But the lovers also went, for Katherine asked a great deal--not so much of them, perhaps, as of herself. She had taken an idea, somehow, that marriage, to be in the least satisfactory, must be based on love; and that love, worth the name, is an essentially two-sided business. Indirectly the girl had learnt much on this difficult subject from her great-aunt; and with characteristic directness had agreed with herself to wait till her heart was touched, if she waited a lifetime--though of exactly in what either her heart, or the touching of it, consisted she was deliciously innocent as yet.
And then, in the summer of 1841, Sir Richard Calmady came to Ormiston.
He and her brother Roger had been at Eton together. Katherine remembered
him, years ago, as a well-bred and courteously contemptuous
schoolboy, upon whose superior mind, small female creatures--busy
about dolls, and victims of the athletic restrictions imposed by
petticoats--made but slight impression. Latterly Sir Richard's
name had come to be one to conjure with in racing circles, thanks to the
performances of certain horses bred and trained at the Brockhurst stables;
though some critics, it is true, deplored his tendency to neglect the older
and more legitimate sport of flat-racing in favour of
steeple-chasing. It was said he aspired to rival the long list of
victories achieved by Mr. Elmore's Gaylad and Lottery, and the
successes of Peter Simple the famous grey. This much Katherine had heard of
him from her brother. And, having her naughty turns--as what charming
woman has not?--had set him down as probably a rough sort of person,
notwithstanding his wealth and good connections, a kind of
gentleman-jockey, upon whom it would be easy to take a measure of
pretty revenge for his boyish indifference to her existence. But the
meeting and the young man, alike, turned out quite other than she had
anticipated. For she found a person as well furnished in all polite and
social arts as herself, with no flavour of the stable about him. She had
reckoned on one whose scholarship would carry him no further than a few
stock quotations from Horace, and whose knowledge of art would begin and
end with a portrait of himself presented by the members of a local hunt.
Therefore it was a little surprising--possibly a little mortifying to
her--to
hear him talking over obscure passages in Spenser's Faerie Queene with Mrs. St. Quentin, before the end of the dinner, and nicely apprising the relative merits of the water-colour sketches, by Turner, that hung on either side the drawing-room fireplace.
Nor did Katherine's surprises end here. An unaccountable something
was taking place within her, that opened up a whole new range of emotion.
She, the least moody of young women, had strange fluctuations of temper,
finding herself buoyantly happy one hour, the next pensive, filled with
timidity and self-distrust--not to mention little fits of gusty
anger, and purposeless jealousy which took her, hurting her pride shrewdly.
She grew anxiously solicitous as to her personal appearance. This dress
would not please her nor that. The image of her charming, oval face and
well-set head ceased to satisfy her. Surely a woman's hair
should be either positively blond or black, not this undeterminate brown,
with warm lights in it? She feared her mouth was not small enough, the lips
too full and curved for prettiness. She wished her eyes less given to
change, under their dark lashes, from clear grey-blue to a nameless
colour, like the gloom of the pools of a woodland stream, as her feelings
changed from gladness to distress. She feared her complexion was too
bright, and then not bright enough. And, all the while, a certain shame
possessed her that she should care at all about such trivial matters; for
life had grown suddenly larger and more august. Books she had read, faces
she had watched a hundred times, the vast horizon looking eastward over the
unquiet sea, all these gained a new value and meaning which at once
enthralled and agitated her thought.
Sir Richard Calmady stayed a fortnight at Ormiston. And the two ladies
crossed to Paris earlier, that autumn, than was their custom. Katherine was
not in her usual good health, and Mrs. St. Quentin desired change of air
and scene on her account. She took Mademoiselle de Mirancourt into her
confidence, hinting at causes for her restlessness and wayward, little
humours unacknowledged by the girl herself. Then the two elder women
wrapped Katherine about with an atmosphere of--if
possible--deeper tenderness than before; mingling sentiment with their
gaiety, and gaiety with their sentiment, and the delicate respect which
refrains from question with both.
One keenly bright, October afternoon Richard Calmady called in the rue
de Rennes. It appeared he had come to Paris with the intention of remaining
there for an indefinite period. He called again and yet again, making
himself charming--a touch of
deference tempering his natural suavity--alike to his hostesses and to such of their guests as he happened to meet. It was the fashion of fifty years ago to conduct affairs, even those of the heart, with a dignified absence of precipitation. The weeks passed, while Sir Richard became increasingly welcome in some of the very best houses in Paris.--And Katherine? It must be owned Katherine was not without some heartaches, which she proudly tried to deny to herself and conceal from others. But eventually--it was on the morning after the ball at the British Embassy--the man spoke and the maid answered, and the old order changed, giving place to new, in the daily life of the pretty apartment of the rue de Rennes.
About five months later the marriage took place in London; and Sir
Richard and Lady Calmady started forth on a wedding journey of the
old-fashioned type. They travelled up the Rhine, and posted, all in
the delicious, early summer weather, through Northern Italy, as far as
Florence. They returned by Paris. And there, Mrs. St. Quentin
watching--in almost painful anxiety--to see how it fared with her
recovered darling, was wholly satisfied, and gave thanks. For she perceived
that, in this case at least, marriage was no legal, conventional connection
leaving the heart emptier than it found it--the bartering of precious
freedom for a joyless bondage--an obligation, weary in the present,
and hopeless of alleviation in the future, save by the reaching of that
far-distant, heavenly country, concerning which it is comfortably
assured us "that there they neither marry nor are given in
marriage." For the Katherine who came back to her was at once the
same, and yet another Katherine--one who carried her head more proudly
and stepped as though she was mistress of the whole fair earth, but whose
merry wit had lost its little edge of sarcasm, whose sympathy was quicker
and more instinctive, whose voice had taken fuller and more caressing
tones, and in whose sweet eyes sat a steady content good to see. Then,
suddenly, Mrs. St. Quentin began to feel her age as she had never,
consciously, felt it before; and to be very willing to fold her hands and
recite her Nunc Dimittis. For, in looking on the
faces of the bride and bridegroom, she had looked once again on the face of
Love itself, and had stood within the court of the temple of that Uranian
Venus whose unsullied glory is secure here and hereafter, since to her it
is given to discover to her worshippers the innermost secret of existence,
thereby fencing them forever against the plagues of change, delusion, and
decay. Love began gently to loosen the cords of life, and to draw Lucia St.
Quentin home--home to that dear dwelling-place which, as
we fondly trust--since God Himself is Love--is reserved for all true lovers beyond the grave and Gates of Death. Thus one flower falls as another opens, and to-day, however sweet, is only won across the corpse of yesterday.
And it was some perception of just this--the ceaseless push of
event following on event, the ceaseless push of the yet unborn struggling
to force the doors of life--which moved Katherine to seriousness, as
she stood alone on the smooth expanse of the troco-ground, in the
soft, all-covering twilight, at the close of the day's
hospitality.
On her right the house, and its delicate, twisted chimneys, showed dark
against the fading rose of the western sky. The air, rich with the
fragrance of the red-walled gardens behind her,--with the scent
of jasmine, heliotrope and clove carnations, ladies-lilies and
mignonette,--was stirred, now and again, by wandering winds, cool from
the spaces of the open moors. While, as the last roll of departing wheels
died out along the avenues, the voices of the woodland began to reassert
themselves. Wild-fowl called from the alder-fringed Long
Water. Night-hawks churred as they beat on noiseless wings above the
beds of bramble and bracken. A cock pheasant made a most admired stir and
keckling in seeing his wife and brood to roost on the branches of one of
King James's age-old Scotch firs.
And this sense of nature coming back to claim her own, to make known her
eternal supremacy, now that the fret of man's little pleasuring had
passed, was very grateful to Katherine Calmady. Her soul cried out to be
free, for a time, to contemplate, to fully apprehend and measure, its own
happiness. It needed to stand aside, so that the love given and all given
with that love--even these matters of house and gardens, of
men-servants and maid-servants, of broad acres, all the
poetry, in short, of great possessions--might be seen in perspective.
For Katherine had that necessity--in part intellectual, in part
practical, and common to all who possess the gift for rule--to resist
the confusing importunity of detail, and to grasp intelligently the Whole,
which alone gives to detail coherence and purpose. Her mind was not
one--perhaps unhappily--which is contented to merely play with
bricks, but which demands the plan of the building into which those bricks
should grow. And she wanted, just now, to lay hold of the plan of the fair
building of her own life. And to this end the solitude, the evening quiet,
the restful unrest of the forest and its wild creatures, should surely have
ministered. She moved forward
and sat on the broad, stone balustrade which, topping the buttressed masonry that supports it above the long downward slope of the park, encloses the troco-ground on the south.
The landscape lay drowned in the mystery of the summer night. And
Katherine, looking out into it, tried to think clearly, tried to range the
many new experiences of the last few months and to reckon with them. But
her brain refused to work obediently to her will. She felt strangely
hurried for all the surrounding quiet.
One train of thought, which she had been busy enough by day and honestly
sleepy enough at night to keep at arm's length during this time of
home-coming and entertaining, now invaded and possessed her
mind--filling it at once with a new and overwhelming movement of
tenderness yet, for all her high courage, with a certain fear. She cried
out for a little space of liberty, a little space in which to take breath.
She wanted to pause, here in the fulness of her content. But no pause was
granted her. She was so happy, she asked nothing more. But something more
was forced upon her. And so it happened that, in realising the ceaseless
push of event on event, the ceaseless dying of dear to-day in the
service of unborn to-morrow, her gentle seriousness touched on
regret.
How long she remained lost in such pensive reflections Lady Calmady
could not have said. Suddenly the terrace door slammed. A moment later a
man's footsteps echoed across the flags of the
garden-hall.
"Katherine," Richard Calmady called, somewhat imperatively,
"Katherine, are you there?"
She turned and stood watching him as he came rapidly across the
turf.
"Yes, I am here," she said. "Do you want
me?"
"Do I want you?" he answered curtly. "Don't I
always want you?"
A little sob rose in her throat--she knew not why, for, hearing the
tone of his voice, her sadness was strangely assuaged.
"I could not find you," he went on. "And I got into an
absurd state of panic--sent Roger in one direction, and Julius in
another, to look for you."
"Whereupon Roger, probably, posted down to the stables, and Julius
up to the chapel to search. Where the heart dwells there the feet follow.
Meanwhile, you came straight here and found me yourself."
"I might have known I should do that."
The importunate thought returned upon Katherine, and with it a touch of
her late melancholy.
"Ah! one knows nothing for certain when one is frightened,"
she said. She moved closer to him, holding out her hand.
"Here," she continued, "you are a little too shadowy, too
unsubstantial, in this light, Dick. I would rather make more sure of your
presence."
Richard Calmady laughed very gently. Then the two stood silent, looking
out over the dim valley, hand in hand.--The scent of the gardens was
about them. Moving lights showed through the many windows of the great
house. The water-fowl called sleepily. The churring of the
night-hawks was continuous, soothing as the hum of a
spinning-wheel. Somewhere, away in the Warren, a fox barked. In the
eastern sky, the young moon began to climb above the ragged edge of the
firs.--When they spoke again it was very simply, in broken sentences,
as children speak. The poetry of their relation to one another and the
scene about them were too full of meaning, too lovely, to call for polish
of rhetoric, or pointing by epigram.
"Tell me," Katherine said, "were you satisfied? Did I
entertain your people prettily?"
"Prettily? You entertained them as they had never been entertained
before--like a queen--and they knew it. But why did you stay out
here alone?"
"To think--and to look at Brockhurst."
"Yes, it's worth looking at now," he said. "It
was like a body wanting a soul till you came."
"But you loved it?" Katherine reasoned.
"Oh yes! because I believed the soul would come some day.
Brockhurst, and the horses, and the books, all helped to make the time pass
while I was waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"Why, for you, of course, you dear, silly sweet! Haven't I
always been waiting for you--just precisely and wholly you, nothing
more or less--all through my life, all through all conceivable and
inconceivable lives, since before the world began?"
Katherine's breath came with a fluttering sigh. She let her head
fall back against his shoulder. Her eyes closed involuntarily. She loved
these fond exaggerations--as what woman does not who has had the good
fortune to hear them? They pierced her with a delicious pain.
And--perhaps therefore, perhaps not unwisely--she believed them
true.
"Are you tired?" he asked presently.
Katherine looked up smiling, and shook her head.
"Not too tired to be up early to-morrow morning and come
out with me to see the horses galloped? Sultan will give you no trouble. He
is well-seasoned and merely looks on at things in general with
intelligent interest, goes like a lamb and stands like a rock."
While her husband was speaking Katherine straightened herself up, and
moved a little from him though still holding his hand. Her languor passed,
and her eyes grew large and black.
"I think, perhaps, I had better not go to-morrow,
Dick," she said slowly.
"Ah! you are tired, you poor dear! No wonder, after the
week's work you have had. Another day will do just as well. Only I
want you to come out sometimes in the first blush of the morning, before
the day has had time to grow commonplace, while the gossamers are still
hung with dew, and the mists are in hollows, and the horses are heady from
the fresh air and the light. You will like it all, Kitty. It is rather
inspiring. But it will keep. To-morrow I'll let you rest in
peace."
"Oh no! it is not that," Katherine said quickly.--The
importunate thought was upon her again, clamouring, not only to be
recognised, but fairly owned to and permitted to pass the doors of speech.
And a certain modesty made her shrink from this. To know something in the
secret of your own heart, to tell it, thereby making it a hard, concrete
fact, outside yourself, over which, in a sense, you cease to have control,
are two such very different matters! Katherine trembled on the edge of her
confession; though that to be confessed was, after all, but the natural
crown of her love.
"I think I ought not to ride now--for a time, Dick."
All the blood rushed into her face and throat, and then ebbed, leaving her
very white in the growing darkness.--"You have given me a
child," she said.
For that was the period of elaborate private chronicles, when persons of
intelligence and position still took themselves, their doings, and their
emotions, with most admired seriousness. Natural science, the great
leveller, had hardly stepped in as yet. Therefore it was that already
Julius's diary ran into many stout, manuscript volumes, each in turn
soberly but richly bound, with silver clasp and lock complete, so soon as
its final page was written. Begun when he first went up to Oxford, some
thirteen years earlier, it formed an intimate history of the influences of
the Tractarian Movement upon a scholarly mind and delicately spiritual
nature. At the commencement of his Oxford career he had come into close
relations with some of the leaders of the movement. And the conception of
an historic church, endowed with mystic powers,--conveyed through an
unbroken line of priests from the age of the apostles--the orderly
round of vigil, fast, and festival, the secret, introspective joys of
penance and confession, the fascinations of the strictly religious life as
set before him in eloquent public discourse or persuasive private
conversation,--had combined to kindle an imagination very
insufficiently satisfied by the lean spiritual meats offered it during an
Evangelical childhood and youth. Julius yielded himself up to his
instructors with passionate self-abandon. He took orders, and
remained on at Oxford--being a fellow of his college--working
earnestly for the cause he had so at heart. Eventually he became a member
of the select band of disciples that dwelt, uncomfortably, supported by
visions of reactionary reform at once austere and beneficent, in the range
of disused stable-buildings at Littlemore.
Of the storm and stress of this religious war, its triumphs, its
defeats, its many agitations, Julius's diaries told with a deep, if
chastened, enthusiasm. His was a singularly pure nature, unmoved by the
primitive desires which usually inflame young
blood. Ideas heated him; while the lust of the eye and the pride of life left him almost scornfully cold. He strove earnestly, of course, to bring the flesh into subjection to the spirit; which was, calmly considered, a slight waste of time, since the said flesh showed the least possible inclination towards revolt. The earlier diaries contain pathetic exaggerations of the slightest indiscretion. Innocent and virtuous persons have ever been prone to such little manias of self-accusation! Later, the flesh did assert itself, though in a hardly licentious manner. Oxford fogs and damp, along with plain living and high thinking, acting upon a constitution naturally far from robust, produced a commonplace but most disabling nemesis in the form of colds, coughs, and chronic asthma. Julius did not greatly care. He was in that exalted frame of mind in which martyrdom, even by phthisis or bronchial affections, is immeasurably preferable to no martyrdom at all. Perhaps fortunately his relations, and even his Oxford friends, took a quite other view of the matter, and insisted upon his using all legitimate means to prolong his life.
Julius left Oxford with intense regret. It was the Holy City of the
Tractarian Movement; and at this moment the progress of that Movement was
the one thing worth living for, if live indeed he must. He went forth
bewailing his exile and enforced idleness, as a man bewails the loss of the
love of his youth. For a time he travelled in Italy and in the south of
France. On his return to England he went to stay with his friend and
cousin, Sir Richard Calmady. Brockhurst House had always been extremely
congenial to him. Its suites of handsome rooms, the inlaid, marble
chimneypieces of which reach up to the frieze of the heavily-moulded
ceilings, its wide passages and stairways, their carved balusters and
newel-posts, the treasures of its library--now overflowing the
capacity of the two rooms originally designed for them, and filling ranges
of bookcases between the bay-windows of the Long Gallery which runs
the whole length of the first floor from east to west, the chapel in the
southern wing, its richly furnished altar and the glories of its famous,
stained-glass windows--all these were very grateful to his
taste. While the light, dry, upland air and near neighbourhood of the fir
forest eased the physical discomforts from which, at times, he still
suffered shrewdly.
He found the atmosphere of the place both soothing and steadying. And of
precisely this he stood sorely in need just now. For it must be admitted
that a change had come over the spirit of Julius March's great,
ecclesiastical dream. Absence from Oxford and foreign travel had tended at
once to widen
and modify his thought. He had seen the Tractarian Movement from a distance, in due perspective. He had also seen Catholicism at close quarters. He had realised that the logical consequence of the teaching of the former could be nothing less than unqualified submission to the latter. On his return to England he learned that more than one of his Oxford friends was arriving, reluctantly, at the same conclusion. Then there arose within him the fiercest struggle his gentle nature had ever yet known. He was torn by the desire to go forward, risking all, with those whom he reverenced; yet was restrained by a sense of honour. For there was, in Julius, a strain of obstinate, almost fanatic, loyalty. To the Anglican Church he had pledged himself. Through her ministry he had received illumination. To the work of her awakening he had given all his young enthusiasm. How then could he desert her? Her rites might be maimed. The scandal of schism might tarnish her fair fame. Accusations of sloth and lukewarmness might not unjustly be preferred against her. All this he admitted. And it was very characteristic of the man that, just because he did admit it, he remained within her fold.
Yet the decision was dislocating to all his thought, even as the
struggle had been. It left him bruised. It cruelly shook his
self-confidence. For he was not one of those persons upon whom the
shipwreck of long-cherished hopes and purposes have a stimulating
effect, filling them merely with a buoyant satisfaction at the opportunity
afforded them of beginning all over again! Julius was oppressed by the
sense of a great failure. The diaries of this period are but sorrowful
reading. He believed he should go softly all his days; and, from a certain
point of view, in this he was right.
And it was here that Sir Richard Calmady intervened. He had watched his
cousin's struggle, had accepted its reality, sympathising through
friendship rather than through moral or intellectual agreement. For he was
one of those fortunate mortals who, while possessing a strong sense of God,
have but small necessity to define Him. Many of Julius's keenest
agonies appeared to him subjective, a matter of words and phrases. Yet he
respected them, out of the sincere regard he bore the man who suffered
them. He did more. He tried a practical remedy. Courteously, as one asking
rather than conferring a favour, he invited Julius to remain at Brockhurst,
on a fair stipend, as domestic chaplain and librarian.
"In the fulness of your generosity towards me you are creating a
costly sinecure," Julius had remonstrated.
"Not in the least. I am selfishly trying to secure myself a most
welcome companion, by asking you to undertake a very modest cure of souls
and to catalogue my books, when you might be filling some important post
and qualifying for a bishopric."
Julius had shaken his head sadly enough. "The high places of the
Church are not for me," he said, "neither are her great
adventures."
Thus did Julius March, somewhat broken both in health and spirit, become
a carpet-priest. The trumpet blasts of controversy reached him as
echoes merely, while his days passed in peaceful, if pensive, monotony. He
read prayers morning and evening to the assembled household in the chapel;
reduced the confusion of the library shelves, doing a fair amount of study,
both secular and theological, during the process; rode with his cousin on
fine afternoons to distant farms, by high-banked lanes in the
lowland, or across the open moors; visited the lodges, or the
keepers' and gardeners' cottages within the limits of the park,
on foot. Now and again he took a service, or preached a sermon, for good
Mr. Caryll of Sandyfield, in whose amiable mind instinctive admiration of
those, even distantly, related to persons of wealth and position jostled an
equally instinctive terror of Mr. March's "well-known
Romanising tendencies." And in that there was, surely, a touch of the
irony of fate! Lastly, Julius did his utmost to exercise an influence for
good over the twenty and odd boys at the racing stables--an
unpromising generation at best, the majority of whom, he feared, accepted
his efforts for their moral and spiritual welfare with the same somewhat
brutish philosophy with which they accepted Tom Chifney, the
trainer's rough-and-ready system of discipline, and the
thousand and one vagaries of the fine-limbed, queer-tempered
horses which were at once the glory and torment of their young lives.
Things had gone on thus for rather more than a year, when Richard
Calmady married. Julius was perhaps inclined, beforehand, to underrate the
importance of that event. He was singularly innocent, so far, of the whole
question of woman. He had no sisters. At Oxford he had lived exclusively
among men, while the Tractarian Movement had offered a sufficient outlet to
all his emotion. The severe and exquisite verses of the "Lyra
Apostolica" fitly expressed the passions of his heart. To the Church,
at once his mother and his mistress, he had wholly given his first love. He
had gone so far, indeed, in a rapture of devotion one Easter Day, during
the celebration of
the Holy Eucharist, as to impose upon himself a vow of lifelong celibacy. This he did--let it be added--without either the sanction or knowledge of his spiritual advisers. The vow, therefore, remained unwitnessed and unratified, but he held it inviolable nevertheless. And it lay but lightly upon him, joyfully almost--rather as a ridding of himself of possible perturbations and obsessions, than as an act of most austere self-renunciation. In his ignorance he merely went forward with an increased freedom of spirit. All of which is set down, not without underlying pathos, in the diary of that date.
And that freedom of spirit remained by him, notwithstanding his altered
circumstances. It even served--indirectly, since none knew the fact of
his self-dedication save himself--as a basis of pleasant
intercourse with the women of his own social standing whom he now met. It
served him thus in respect of Lady Calmady, who accepted him as a member of
her new household with charming kindliness, treating him with a gentle
solicitude born of pity for his far from robust health and for the mental
struggles which she understood him to have passed through.
Many persons, it must be owned, described Julius as remarkably ugly. But
he did not strike Katherine thus. His heavy, black hair, beardless face and
sallow skin--rendered dull and colourless, his features thickened,
though not actually scarred, by small-pox which he had had as a
child,--his sensitive mouth, and the questioning expression of his
short-sighted, brown eyes, reminded her of a
fifteenth-century, Florentine portrait that had always challenged
her attention when she passed it in the vestibule of a certain obscure, yet
aristocratic, Parisian hotel, on the left bank--well
understood--of the Seine.
The man of the portrait was narrow-chested, clothed in black. So
was Julius March. He had long-fingered, finely shaped hands. So had
Julius. He gave her the impression of a person endowed with a capacity of
prolonged and silent self-sacrifice. So did Julius. She wondered
about his story. For Julius, at least--little as she or he then
suspected it--the deepest places of the story still lay ahead.
He sought the soothing companionship of books with even heightened
relief one fair morning some three weeks later. For Mrs. St. Quentin and
Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had arrived at Brockhurst the day previously,
and Julius had been sensible of certain perturbations of mind in meeting
these two ladies, one of whom was a devout Catholic by inheritance and
personal conviction, while the other, though nominally a member of his own
communion, was known to temper her religion with a wide, if refined,
philosophy. Conversation had drifted towards serious subjects in the course
of the evening, and Mrs. St. Quentin had admitted, with a playful
deprecation of her dear friend's rigid religious attitude, that no
one creed, no one system, offered an adequate solution of the infinite
mystery and complexity of life--as she knew it. The serene adherence
of one charming and experienced woman to an authority which he had
rejected, the almost equally serene indifference on the part of the other
to the revelation he held as absolute and final, troubled Julius. Small
wonder then, that early, after a solitary breakfast, he retired upon the
society of the odd volumes cluttering the shelves of the Long Gallery, that
he sorted, arranged, catalogued, grateful for that dulling of thought which
mechanical labour brings with it.
But fate was malicious, and elected to make a sport of Julius this
morning. Unexpectedly importunate human drama obtruded itself, the deep
places of the story--such as, in the innocence
of his ascetic refinement, he had never dreamed of--began to reveal themselves.
He had climbed the wide, carpeted steps of the library ladder and seated
himself on the topmost one, at right angles to a topmost shelf the contents
of which he proposed to investigate, duster and notebook in hand. The vast
perspective of the gallery lengthened out before him, cool,
faint-tinted, full of a diffused and silvery light. The
self-coloured, unpainted panelling of the walls and
bookcases--but one shade warmer in tone than that of the stone
mullions and transoms of the lofty windows-gave an indescribable
delicacy of effect to the atmosphere of the room. Through the
many-paned, leaded lights of the eastern bay, the
sunshine--misty, full of dancing notes--streamed in obliquely,
bringing into quaint prominence of light and shadow a very miscellaneous
collection of objects.--A marble Buddha, benign of aspect, his right
hand raised in blessing, seated cross-legged upon the
many-petalled lotus. A pair of cavalier's jack-boots,
standing just below, most truculent and ungainly of foot-gear,
wooden, hinged, leather-covered. A trophy of Polynesian spears,
shields, and canoe paddles. A bronze Antinous, seductive of bearing and
dainty of limb, but roughened by green rust. A collection of old
sporting-prints, softly coloured, covering a bare space of wall,
beneath a moose skull, from the broad flat antlers of which hung a pair of
Canadian snow-shoes. Along the inside wall of the great room, placed
at regular intervals, were consol tables bearing tall, oriental jars and
huge bowls of fine porcelain, filled with potpourri; so that the scent of
dried rose-leaves, bay, verbena, and many spices impregnated the
air. The place was, in short, a museum. Whatever of strange, grotesque, and
curious, Calmadys of past generations had collected in their wanderings, by
land and sea, found lodgment here. It was a home of half-forgotten
histories, of valorous deeds grown dim through the lapse of years; a
harbour of refuge for derelict gods, derelict weapons, derelict volumes,
derelict instruments which had once discoursed sweet enough music, but the
fashion of which had now passed away. The somewhat obsolete sentiment of
the place harmonised with the thin, silvery light and the thin sweetness of
spices and dead roses which pervaded it. It seemed to smile, as with the
pitying tolerance of the benign image of Buddha, upon the heat and flame,
the untempered scarlet and purple of the fleeting procession of individual
lives, that had ministered to its furnishing. For how much vigorous
endeavour, now over and done with, never to be recalled, had indeed gone to
supply the furnishing of that room!
--And, after all, is not the most any human creature dare hope for the more or less dusty corner of some such museum shelf at last? The passion of the heart testified to by some battered trinket, the sweat of the brain by some maggot-eaten manuscript, the agony of death, at best, by some round shot turned up by the ploughshare? And how shall anyone dare complain of this, since have not empires before now only been saved from oblivion by a few buried potsherds, and whole races of mankind by childish picture-scratchings on a reindeer bone? Tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse. The individual--his arts, his possessions, his religion, his civilisation --is always as an envelope, merely, to be torn asunder and cast away. Nothing subsists, nothing endures, but life itself, endlessly self-renewed, endlessly one, through all the endless divergencies of its manifestations. And, as Julius March was to find, hide from it, deny it, strive to elude it as we may, the recognition of just that is bound to grip us sooner or later and hold us with a fearful and dominating power from which there is no escape.
Meanwhile, his occupation was tranquil enough, comfortably remote, as it
seemed, from all such profound and disquieting matters. For the top shelf
proved not very prolific of interest. One book after another, examined and
rejected as worthless, was dropped--with a reproachful flutter of
pages and final thud--into the capacious paper-basket standing
on the floor below. Then, at the far end of the said shelf, he came
unexpectedly upon a collection of those quaint chap-books which
commanded so wide a circulation during the eighteenth century.
Julius, with the true bibliophile's interest in all originals,
examined his find carefully. The tattered and dogs-eared, little
volumes, coarsely printed and embellished by a number of rough, square
woodcuts, had, he knew, a distinct value. He soon perceived that they
formed a very representative selection. He glanced at The famous History of
Guy of Warwick; at that of Sir Bevis of Southampton; at Joaks upon Joaks, a
lively work regarding the manners and customs of the aristocracy at the
period of the Restoration; at the record of the amazing adventures of that
lusty serving-wench, Long Meg of Westminster; and at that refreshing
piece of comedy known as Merry Tales concerning the Sayings and Doings of
the Wise Men of Gotham.
Finally, hidden behind the outstanding frame of the bookcase, he
discovered four tiny volumes tied together with a rusty, black ribbon. A
heavy coating of dust lay upon them. A large spider, moreover, darted from
behind them. Dust clung un-
pleasantly to its hairy and ill-favoured person. It was a matter of principle with Julius never to take life; yet instinctively he drew back his hand from the books in disgust.
"Araignée du matin,
chagrin," he said, involuntarily, while he watched the
insect make good its escape over the top of the bookcase.
Then he flicked uneasily at the little parcel with his duster, causing a
cloud of grey atoms to float up and out into the room. Julius was perhaps
absurdly open to impressions. It took him some seconds to recover from his
sense of repulsion and to untie the rusty ribbon around the little books.
They all proved to be ragged and imperfect copies of the same work. The
woodcuts in them were splotched with crude colour. The title page was
printed in assorted type--here a line of Roman capitals, there one in
italics or old English letters. The inscription, consequently, was
difficult to decipher, causing him to hold the tattered page very close to
his short-sighted eyes. It ran thus--
"Setting forth a true and particular account of the dealings of
Sir Thomas Calmady with the Forester's Daughter and the bloudy death
of her Only Child. To which is added her Prophecy and Curse."
Julius had been standing, so as to reach the length of the shelf. Now he
sat down on the top step of the ladder again. A whole rush of memories came
upon him. He remembered vaguely how, long ago, in his childhood, he had
heard legends of this same curse. Staying here at Brockhurst as a
baby-child with his mother, maids had hinted at it, gossiping over
the nursery fire at night; and his mind, irresistibly attracted, even then,
by the supernatural, had been filled at once by desperate curiosity and by
panic fear. He paused, thinking back, singularly moved, as one on the edge
of the satisfaction of long-desired knowledge, yet slightly
contemptuous, both of his own emotion and of the rather vulgar means by
which that knowledge promised to be obtained.
The shafts of sunshine fell more obliquely across the eastern end of the
gallery. Benign Buddha had passed into shadow; while a painting by
Velasquez, standing on an easel near by, caught the light, starting into
arresting reality. It represented a hideous and mis-shapen dwarf,
holding a couple of graceful greyhounds in a leash--an unhappy
creature who had made sport for the household of some Castilian grandee,
and whose gorgeous garments were ingeniously designed to emphasise the
physical degradation of his contorted body. This painting, appearing to
Julius too painful for habitual contemplation, had, at his request, been removed from his study downstairs to its present station. Just now he fancied it looked forth at him queerly insistent. At this distance he could distinguish little more than a flare of scarlet and cloth-of-gold, and the white of the hounds' flanks and bellies, under the strong sunlight. But he knew the picture in all its details; and was oppressed by the remembrance of tragic eyes in a brutal face, eyes that protested dumbly against cruelty inflicted by nature and by mankind alike. He, Julius, was not, so he feared, quite guiltless in this matter. For had there not been a savour of cruelty in his ejection of the portrait of this unhappy being from his peaceful study?
And thinking of this his discomfort augmented. He was assailed by an
unreasoning nervousness of something malign, something sinister, about to
befall or to become known to him.
"Araignée du matin,
chagrin," he repeated involuntarily.
He laid the four little chap-books back hastily behind the
outstanding woodwork of the bookshelf, descended the steps, walked the
length of the gallery, and leaning against one of the stone mullions of the
great, eastern bay-window looked out of the wide-open
casement.
The prospect was, indeed, reassuring enough. The softly-green
square of the troco-ground, the brilliant beds and borders of the
brick-walled gardens, the grey flags of the great terrace --its
row of little orange trees, heavy with flower and fruit, set in blue
painted tubs--lay below him in a blaze of August sunshine. From the
direction of the Long Water in the valley, Richard Calmady rode up, between
the thorn trees and the beds of bracken, across the turf slopes of the
park. It was a joy to see him ride. The rider and horse were one in vigour
and in the repose which comes of vigour--a something classic in the
natural beauty and sympathy of rider and of horse. Half-way up the
slope Richard swerved, turned towards the house, sat looking up, hat in
hand, while Katherine stood at the edge of the terrace looking down,
speaking with him. The warm breeze fluttered her full, muslin skirts, rose
and white, and the white lace of her parasol. The rich tones of her voice
and the ring of her laughter came up to Julius, as he leant against the
stone mullion, along with the droning of innumerable bees, and the cooing
of the pink-footed pigeons--that bowed to one another,
spreading their tails, drooping their wings amorously, upon the broad, grey
string-course running along the house-front just beneath.
Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, a small, neat, grey and
black figure, was beside Katherine, and, now and again, he heard the pretty staccato of her foreign speech. Then Richard Calmady rode onward, turning half round in the saddle, looking up for a moment at the woman he loved. His horse broke into a canter, bearing him swiftly in and out of the shadow of the glistening, domed oaks and ancient, stag-headed, Spanish chestnuts which crowned the ascent, and on down the long, softly-shaded vista of the lime avenue. While Camp, the bull-dog, who had lain panting in the bracken, streaked like a white flash up the hillside in pursuit of his well-beloved master.
And Julius March moved away from the open window with a sigh. Yet what,
after all, of malign or sinister was perceptible, conceivable even, in
respect of this glorious morning and these happy people--unless, as he
reflected, something of pathos is of necessity ever resident in all beauty,
all happiness, the world being sinful, and existence so prolific of pain
and melancholy happenings? So he went back, climbed the library steps
again, and taking the little bundle of chap-books from their dusty
resting-place, set himself, in a somewhat penitential spirit, to
master their contents. If the occupation was distasteful to him, the more
wholesome to pursue it! So, supplying the deficiencies of torn or defaced
pages by reference to another of the copies, he arrived by degrees at a
clear understanding of the whole matter. The story was set forth in rhyming
doggerel. The poet was not blessed with a gift of melody or of style.
Absence of scansion tortured the ear. Coarseness of diction offended the
taste. And yet, as he read on, Julius reluctantly admitted that the cruel
tale gained credibility and moral force from the very homeliness of the
language in which it was chronicled.
Thus Julius learned how, during the closing years of the Commonwealth,
the young royalist gentleman, Sir Thomas Calmady, dwelling in enforced
seclusion at Brockhurst, relieved the tedium of country life by indulgence
in divers amours. He was large-hearted, apparently, and could not
see a comely face without attempting intimate acquaintance with the
possessor of it. Among other damsels distinguished by his attentions was
his head forester's handsome daughter, whom, under reiterated promise
of marriage, he seduced. In due time she bore him a child, ideally
beautiful, according to the poet of the chap-book, blessed with
"red-gold hair and eyes of blue," and many charms of
infantile healthfulness. And yet, notwithstanding the noble looks of her
little son, the forester's
daughter still remained unwed. For just now came the Restoration, and, along with it, a notable change in the outlook of Sir Thomas Calmady and many another lusty, young gallant; since the event in question not only restored Charles the Second to the arms of his devoted subjects, but restored such loyal gentlemen to the by no means too strait-laced society of town and court. Thence, some few years later, Sir Thomas--amiably willing in all things to oblige his royal master--brought home a bride, whose rank and wealth, according to the censorious chap-book, were extensively in excess of her youth and virtue.
Julius lingered a little in contemplation of the quaint woodcut
representing the arrival of this lady at Brockhurst. Clothed in a
bottle-green bodice--very
generously décolletée--her
head adorned by a portentous erection of coronet and feathers, a sanguine
dab of colour on her cheek, she craned a skinny neck out of the window of
the family coach. Apparently she was engaged in directing the movements of
persons--presumably footmen--clad in canary-coloured coats
and armed with long staves. With these last, they treated a female figure,
in blue, to, as it seemed, sadly rough usage. And the context informed
Julius, in jingling verse, how that poor Hagar, the forester's
daughter, conveniently defiant of custom and of common sense, had stoutly
refused to be cast forth into the social wilderness, along with her small
Ishmael and a few pounds sterling as price of her honour and content, until
she had stood face to face with Sarah, the safely church-wed, if
none too reputable, wife. It informed him, further, how the said small
Ishmael--whether alarmed by the violence of my lady's
men-servants, or wanting merely, childlike, to welcome his returning
father--ran to the coach door and clambered on the step; whence,
thanks to a vicious thrust --so declares the
chap-book--from "the painted Jezebel within," he
fell, while the horses plunging forward caused the near hind wheel of the
heavy, lumbering vehicle to pass over his legs, almost severing them from
his body just above the knee.
Thereupon--and here the homely language of the gutter poet rose to
a level of rude eloquence--the outraged mother, holding the mangled
and dying child in her arms, cursed the man who had brought this ruin upon
her--cursed him and, his descendants, to the sixth and seventh
generation, good and bad alike. Declaring, moreover, that as judgment on
his perfidy and lust, no owner of Brockhurst should reach the life limit
set by the Psalmist, and die quiet and
christianly in his bed, until a somewhat portentous event should have taken
place.--Namely, until, as the jingling rhyme set forth:--
"--a fatherless babe to the birth shall have
come,
Of brother or sister shall he have none,
But
red-gold hair and eyes of blue
And a foot that will never know
stocking or shoe.
If he opens his purse to the lamenter's
cry,
Then the woe shall lift and be laid for aye."
Julius March, his spare, black figure crouched together, sat on the top
step of the library ladder musing. His first movement had been one of
refined and contemptuous disgust. Sensuality, and the tragedies engendered
by it, were so wholly foreign to his nature and mental outlook, that it was
difficult to him to reckon with them seriously and admit the very actual
and permanent part which they play, and always have played, in the great
drama of human life. It distressed, it, in a sense, annoyed him that the
legend of Brockhurst, which had caused him elaborate imaginative terrors
during his childhood, should belong to this gross and vulgar order of
history. Yet indubitably--as he reluctantly admitted--each owner
of Brockhurst had, very certainly, found death in the midst of life, and
that according to some rather brutal and bloody pattern. This might, of
course, be judged the result of merest coincidence. Had he leisure and
opportunity to search them out, he could find, no doubt, plausible
explanation of the majority of cases. Only that fact of persistent
violence, persistent accident, did remain. It stared him in the face, so to
speak, defiant of denial. And the deduction, consequent upon it, stared him
in the face likewise. He was constrained to confess that the first clause
of the deeply-wronged mother's prediction had found ample
fulfilment.--Julius paused, shifted his position uneasily, somewhat
fearful of the conclusions of his own reasoning.
For how about the second clause of that same prediction? How about the
advent of that strange Child of Promise, who pre-ordained in his own
flesh to bear the last and heaviest stroke at the hands of retributive
justice, should, rightly bearing it, bring salvation both to himself and to
his race? Behind the coarse and illiterate presentment of the
chap-book, Julius began dimly to apprehend a somewhat majestic moral
and spiritual tragedy, a tragedy of vicarious suffering crowned by
triumphant emancipation. Thus has God, as he reflected with a
self-condemnatory emotion of humility, chosen the base things of the
world and those which are despised--yea, and the things which are not, to bring to nought the things which are!--His heart, hungry of all martyrdom; all saintly doings, went forth to welcome the idea. But then, he asked himself almost awed, in this sceptical, rationalistic age, are such semi-miraculous moral examples still possible? And answered, with strong exultation--as one finding practical justification of a long, though silently, cherished conviction--yes, that even now, nineteen centuries after the death of that divine Saving Victim to whose service he had devoted his life and the joys of his manhood, such nobly sad and strange happenings may still be.
And, even while he thus answered, his eyes were drawn involuntarily to
the portrait of the unsightly dwarf, painted by Velasquez. The broad shaft
of sunlight had crept backward, away from it, leaving the canvas
unobtrusive, no longer harshly evident either in violence of colour or
grotesqueness of form. It had become part of the great whole merely,
modulated to gracious harmony with the divers objects surrounding it, and,
like them, softly overlaid by a diffused and silvery light.
"But this is superb!" she cried gaily. "Your charming
King Richard, Coeur d'Or has given
you a veritable palace to inhabit!"
"Ah yes! King Richard has indeed given me a palace to live in.
But, better still, he has given me his dear heart of gold in which to hide
the life of my heart for ever and a day."
Katherine's words came triumphantly, more as song than as speech.
She caught the elder woman's upraised hand gently and kissed it,
looking her, meanwhile, full in the face.--"I am happy, very,
very happy, best and dearest," she said. "And it is so
delicious to be happy."
"Ah, my child, my beautiful child!" Mademoiselle de
Mirancourt cried.
There were tears in her pretty, patient eyes. For if youth finds age
pathetic with the obvious pathos of spent body, and of tired mind which has
ceased to greatly hope, how far more deeply pathetic does age, from out its
sad and settled wisdom, find poor, gallant youth and all its still unbroken
trust in the beneficence of destiny, its unbroken faith in the enchantments
of earth!
Meanwhile, Julius March--product as he was of an arbitrary system
of thought and training, and by so much divorced from the natural instincts
of youth and age alike, the confident joy of the one, the mature
acquiescence of the other--in overhearing this brief conversation
suffered embarrassment amounting almost to shame. For not only
Katherine's words, but the vital gladness of her voice, the sweet
exuberance of her manner as she bent, in all her spotless bravery of white
and rose, above the elder woman's hand and kissed it, came to him as
a revelation before which he shrank with a certain fearful modesty. Julius
had read of love in the poets, of course. But, in actual fact, he had never
wooed a woman, nor heard from any woman's lips the language of
intimate devotion. The cold embraces of the Church--a church, as he
too often feared, rendered barren by schism and heresy--were the only
embraces he had ever suffered. Things read of and things seen, moreover,
are singularly different in power. And so he trembled now at the mystery of
human love, actual and concrete, here close beside him. He was, indeed,
moved to the point of losing his habitual suavity of demeanour. He rose
hastily and descended the library steps, forgetful of the handful of
chap-books, which fell in tattered and dusty confusion upon the
floor.
Katherine looked round. Until now she had been unobservant of his
presence, innocent of other audience than the old friend, to whom it was
fitting enough to confide dear secrets. For an instant she hesitated,
embarrassed too, her pride touched to annoyance, at having laid bare the
treasures of her heart thus unwittingly. She was tempted to retreat through
the still open door, into the library, and leave the review of the Long
Gallery and its many relics to a more convenient season. But it was not
Katherine's habit to run away, least of all from the consequences of
her own actions. And her sense of justice compelled her to admit that, in
this case, the indiscretion--if indiscretion indeed there
was--lay with her, in not having seen poor Julius; rather than with
him, in having overheard her little outburst. So
she called to him in friendly greeting, and came swiftly towards him down the length of the great room.
And Julius stood waiting for her, leaning against the frame of the
library ladder--a spare, black figure, notably at variance with the
broad glory of sunshine and colour reigning out of doors.
His usually quick instinct of courtesy was in abeyance, shaken, as he
still was, and confused by the revelation that had just come to him. He
looked at Lady Calmady with a new and agitated understanding. She made so
fair a picture that he could only gaze dumbly at it. Tall in fact,
Katherine was rendered taller by the manner--careless of passing
fashion--in which her hair was dressed. The warm, brown mass of it,
rolled up and back from her forehead, showed all the perfect oval of her
face. Tender, lovely, smiling, her blue-brown eyes soft and
lustrous, with a certain wondering serenity in their depths, there was yet
something majestic about Katherine Calmady. No poor or unworthy line marred
the nobility of her face or figure. The dark, arched eyebrows, the
well-chiselled and slightly aquiline nose, the firm chin and throat,
the shapely hands, all denoted harmony and completeness of development, and
promised a reserve of strength, ready to encounter and overcome if danger
were to be met. Years afterwards the remembrance of Katherine as he just
then saw her would return upon Julius, as prophetic of much. Quailing in
spirit, still reluctant, in his asceticism, to comprehend and reckon with
her personality in the fulness of its present manifestation, he answered
her at random and with none of the pause and playful evasiveness usual to
his speech.
"I am very glad we have found you," Katherine said frankly.
"I was afraid, by the fact of your not coming to breakfast, that you
were overtired. We talked late last night. Did we weary you too
much?"
"Existence in itself is vexatiously wearisome at times--at
least to feeble persons, like myself."
Katherine's smile faded. She looked at him with charming
solicitude.
"Ah! you are not well," she declared. "Go out and
enjoy the sunshine. Leave all those stupid books. Go," she repeated,
"order one of the horses. Go and meet Richard. He has gone over to
look at the new lodge. You could ride all the way through the east woods in
the cool.--See, I will put these tidy."
And, as she spoke, Katherine stooped to pick up the
scattered chap-books from the ground. But, in the last few moments, while looking at her, yet further understanding had overtaken Julius March. Not only the mystery of human love, but the mystery of dawning motherhood had come close to him. And he put Lady Calmady aside with a determination of authority somewhat surprising.
"No, no, pardon me! They are dusty, they will soil your hands. You
must not touch those books," he said.
Katherine straightened herself up. Her face was slightly flushed, her
expression full of kindly amusement.
"Dear Julius, you are very imperative. Surely I may make my hands
dirty, once in a way, in a good cause? They will wash, you know, just as
well as your own, after all."
"A thousand. times better. Still, I will ask you not to touch
those books. I have valid reasons. For one, an evil beast in the form of a
spider has dwelt among them. I disturbed it and it fled, looking as though
it had grown old in trespasses and sins. It seemed to me a thing of ill
omen."
He tried to steady himself, to treat the matter lightly. Yet his speech
struck Katherine as hurried and anxious, out of all proportion to the
matter in hand.
"Poor thing--and you killed it? Yet it couldn't help
being ugly, I suppose," she answered, not without a touch of
malice.
Julius was on his knees, his long, thin fingers gathering up the
tattered pages, ranging them into a bundle, tying them together with the
tag of rusty, black ribbon aforesaid. For an unreasoning, fierce desire was
upon him--very alien to his usual gentle attitude of mind--to
shield this beautiful woman from all acquaintance with the foul story set
forth in those little books. To shield her, indeed, from more than merely
that. For a vague presentiment possessed him that she might, in some
mysterious way, be intimately involved in the final development of that
same story which, though august, was so full of suffering, so profoundly
sad. Meanwhile, in his excitement, he replied, less to her gently mocking
question than to the importunities of his own thought.
"No," he said, "I let it go. I begin to fear it is
useless to attempt to take short-cuts to the extinction of what is
evil. It does not cease, but merely changes its form. Unwillingly I have
learned that. No violent death is possible to things evil."
Julius rose to his feet.
"They must go on," he continued, "till, in the
merciful providence of God, their term is reached, till their power is
exhausted, till they have worn themselves out."
Lady Calmady turned and moved thoughtfully towards the far end of the
room, where the sunshine still slanted in through the open casements of the
bay-window, and where the delicate, little, spinster lady stood
awaiting her. Amorous pigeons cooed below on the string-course. Bees
droned sleepily against the glass.
"But," she said, in gentle remonstrance, "that is a
rather terrible doctrine, Julius. Surely it is not quite just; for it would
seem to leave us almost hopelessly at the mercy of the wrong-doing
of others."
"Yes, but are we not, just that--all of us at the mercy of
the wrong-doing of others?--The courageous forever suffering
for the cowardly, the wise for the ignorant and brutish, the just for the
unjust? Is not this, perhaps, the very deepest lesson of our
religion?"
"Oh no, no!" Katherine cried incredulously. "There is
something at once deeper and more comforting than that. Remember, in the
beginning, when God created all things and reviewed His handiwork, He
pronounced it very good."
Julius was recovering his suavity. The little packet of
chap-books rested safely in the pocket of his coat.
"But that was a long time ago," he said, smiling.
They reached the bay-window. Katherine took her old
friend's hand once again and laid it caressingly upon her arm.
"Pardon me for keeping you waiting, dearest," she said.
"Julius is in fault. He will argue with me about the date of the
creation, and that takes time. He declares it was so long ago that
everything has had time to grow very old and go very wrong. But, indeed, he
is mistaken. Agree with me, tell him he is mistaken! The world is
deliciously young yet. It was only made a little over twenty-two
years ago. I must know, for I came into it then. And I found it all as new
as I was myself, and a thousand times prettier--quite adorably gay,
adorably fresh."
Katherine's voice sank, grew fuller in tone. She gazed out over
the brilliant garden to the woodland shimmering in the noontide heat. Then
she looked at Julius March, her eyes and lips eloquent with joyous
conviction.
"Indeed, I think, God makes His whole creation over again for each
one of us, it is so beautiful. As in the beginning, so now," she
said; "behold it is very good--ah yes! who can doubt
that--it is very good!"
"Amen. To you may it ever so continue," Julius murmured,
bowing his head.
That evening there was a dinner party at Brockhurst. Lord Denier brought
his handsome second wife. She was a Hellard, and took the
judge faute de mieux, so said the wicked
world,
rather late in life. The Cathcarts of Newlands and their daughter Mary
came; and Roger Ormiston too, who, being off duty, had run down from London
for a few days' partridge shooting, bringing with him his cousin
Colonel St. Quentin--invalided home, to his own immense chagrin, in
the midst of the Afghan war. On the terrace, after dinner, for the night
was warm enough for the whole company to take coffee out of doors, Lady
Calmady--incited thereunto by her brother--had persuaded Mary
Cathcart to sing, accompanying herself on her guitar. The girl's
musical gifts were of no extraordinary order, but her young contralto was
true and sweet. The charm of the hour and the place, moreover, was
calculated to heighten the effect of the Jacobite songs and
old-world love-ditties which she selected.
Roger Ormiston unquestionably found her performance sufficiently moving.
But then the girl's frank manner, her warm, gipsy-like
colouring, and the way in which she could sit a horse, moved him also; had
done so, indeed, ever since he first saw her, as quite a child, some eight
or nine years ago, on one of his earliest visits to Brockhurst, fighting a
half-broken, Welsh pony that refused at a grip by the roadside. The
little maiden, her face pale, for once, from concentration of purpose, had
forced the pony over the grip. Then, slipping out of the saddle, she coaxed
and kissed the rough, unruly, little beast, with tears of apology for the
hard usage to which she had been obliged to subject it. So stout, yet so
tender, a heart, struck Roger as an excellent thing in woman. And now,
listening to the full, rounded notes and thrumming of the guitar strings,
in the evening quiet under the stars, he wished, remorsefully, that he had
never been guilty of any pleasant sins, that his record was cleaner, his
tastes less expensive, that he was a better fellow all round, in short,
than he was, because, then, perhaps--
And Julius March, too, found the singing somewhat agitating, though to
him the personality of the singer was of small account. Another
personality, and a train of feeling evoked by certain new aspects of it,
had pursued him all the day long. Katherine, mindful of her somewhat
outspoken divergence of opinion from his, in the morning, had been
particularly thoughtful of his pleasure and entertainment. At dinner she
directed the conversation upon subjects interesting to him, and had thereby
made him talk more unreservedly than was his wont. Not even the most
saintly of
human beings is wholly indifferent to social success. Julius was conscious of a stirring of the blood, of a subdued excitement. These sensations were pleasurable. But his training had taught him to distrust pleasurable sensations as too often the offspring of very questionable parentage. And, while Mary Cathcart's voice still breathed upon the fragrant night air, he, standing on the outskirts of the listening company, slipped away unperceived.
His study, a long, narrow room occupying, with his bedroom, the ground
floor of the chapel wing of the house, struck chill as he entered it. Above
the range of pigeon-holes and little drawers, forming the back of
the writing-table, two candles burned on either side of a bronze
pietà, which Julius had brought back
with him from Rome. On the broad slab of the table below were the many
quires of foolscap forming the library catalogue, neatly numbered and
lettered; while his diary lay open upon the blotting-pad, ready for
the chronicle of the past day's events. Beside it was the packet of
chap-books, still tied together with their tag of rusty ribbon.
It was Julius March's habit to exchange his coat for a cassock in
the privacy of his study. He did so now, and knotted a black cord about his
waist. Let no one underrate the sustaining power of costume, whether it
take the form of ballet-skirt or monk's frock. Human nature is
but a weak thing at best, and needs outward and visible signs, not only to
support its faith in its deity, but even its faith in its own poor self! Of
persons of sensitive temperament and limited experience, such as Julius,
this is particularly true. Putting off his secular garment, as a rule he
could put off secular thoughts as well. Beneath the severe and scanty folds
of the cassock there was small space for remembrance of the pomp and glory
of this perishing world. At least he hoped so. To-night, importuned
as he had been by scenes and emotions quite other than ecclesiastical,
Julius literally sought refuge in his cassock. It represented "port
after stormy seas,"--home, after travel in lands altogether
foreign.
He took St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei
from
its place in the bookshelves lining one side of the room. There should be
peace to the soul, surely, emancipation from questioning of transitory
things, in reading of the City of God? But, alas, his attention strayed.
That sense of subdued excitement was upon him yet. He thought of the
conversation at dinner, of brilliant speeches he might have made, of the
encouragement of Katherine's smiling eyes and sympathetic speech, of
the scene in the gallery that morning, of Mary Cathcart's
old-time love-ditties.
The City of God was far off. All these were things very near at hand. Notwithstanding the scanty folds of the cassock, they importuned him still.
Pained at his own lack of poise and seriousness, Julius returned the
volume of St. Augustine to its place, and, sitting down at the
writing-table prepared to chronicle the day's events. Perhaps
by putting a statement of them on paper he could rid himself of their all
too potent influence. But his thought was tumultuous, words refused to come
in proper order and sequence; and Julius abhorred that erasures should mar
the symmetry of his pages. Impatiently he pushed the diary from him.
Clearly it, like the City of God, was destined to wait.
The guests had departed. He had heard the distant calling of voices in
friendly farewell, the rumble of departing wheels. The night was very soft
and mild. He would go out and walk the grey flags of the terrace, till this
unworthy restlessness gave place to reason and calm.
Passing along the narrow passage, he opened the door on to the
garden-hall. And there paused. The hall itself, and the inner side
of the carven arches of the arcade, were in dense shadow. Beyond stretched
the terrace bathed in moonlight, which glittered on the polished leaves of
the little orange trees, on the leaded panes of the many windows, and
strangely transmuted the colours of the range of pot-flowers massed
beneath them along the base of the house. It was a fairy world upon which
Julius looked forth. Nor did it need suitable inhabitants. Pacing slowly
down the centre of the terrace came Richard and Katherine Calmady, hand in
hand. Tall, graceful, strong in the perfection of their youth and of their
great devotion, amid that ethereal brightness, they seemed as two heroic
figures--immortal, fairy lovers moving through the lovely wonder of
that fairyland. As they drew near, Katherine stopped, leant--with a
superb abandon--back against her husband, resting her hand on his
shoulder, drew his arm around her waist for support, drew his face down to
her upturned face until their lips met, while the moonlight played upon the
jewels on her bare arms and neck and gleamed softly on the surface of her
white, satin dress.
To true lovers the longest kiss is all too sadly short--a thing
brief almost in proportion to its sweetness. But to Julius March, watching
from the blackness of the doorway, it seemed a whole eternity before
Richard Calmady raised his head. Then Julius turned and fled down the
passage and back into the chill study, where the candles burned on either
side the image of the Virgin Mother cradling the dead Christ upon her
knee.
Gentle persons, breaking from the lines of self-restraint, run to
a curious violence in emotion. All day long, shrink from it, ignore it, as
he might, a moral storm had been brewing. Now it broke. Not from those two
lovers did Julius turn thus in amazement and terror; but from just that
from which it is impossible for anyone to turn in actual fact--namely
from himself. He was appalled by the narrowness of his own past outlook;
appalled by the splendour of that heritage which, by his own act, he had
forfeited. The cassock ceased, indeed, to be a refuge, the welcome livery
of home and rest. It had become a prison-suit, a badge of slavery,
against which his whole being rebelled. For the moment--happily
violence is shortlived, only for a very little while do even the gentlest
persons "see red"--asceticism appeared to him as a
blasphemy against the order of nature and of nature's God. His vow of
perpetual chastity, made with so passionate an enthusiasm, for the moment
appeared to him an act of absolutely monstrous vanity and
self-conceit. In his stupid ignorance he had tried to be wiser than
his Maker, preferring the ordinances of man to the glad and merciful
purposes of God. In so doing had he not, only too possibly, committed the
unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost?
Poor Julius, his thought had indeed run almost humorously mad! Yet it
was characteristic of the man that the breaking of his self-imposed
bonds never occurred to him. Made in ignorance, unwitnessed though his vow
might be, it remained inviolable. He never, even in this most heated hour
of his trial, doubted that.
Stretching out his arms, he clenched his hands in anguish of spirit. The
sacerdotal pride, the subjective joys of self-consecration, the
mental luxury of feeling himself different from others, singled out, set
apart,--all the Pharisee, in short, in Julius March,--was sick to
death. He had supposed he was living to God--and now it appeared to
him he had lived only to himself. He had trusted God too little, had come
near reckoning the great natural laws--which, after all, must be of
God's ordering-common and unclean. Katherine was right. The
eternal purpose is joy, not sorrow; youth and health, not age and decay;
thankful acceptance, not fastidious rejection and fear.
Katherine--yes, Katherine--and there the young man's wild
tirade stopped--
He flung himself down in front of the writing-table, leaning his.
elbows on it, pressing his face upon his folded arms. For in good truth,
what did it all amount to? Not outraged laws of nature, not sins against
the Holy Ghost; but just simply this,
that the common fate had overtaken him. He loved a woman, and in so loving had, at last, found himself.
The most vital experiences are beyond language. When Julius looked up,
his eyes rested upon the bronze pietà,
age-old witness to the sanctity of motherhood and of suffering
alike. His face was wet with tears. He was faint and weak; yet a certain
calm had come to him. He no longer quarrelled--though his attitude
towards them was greatly changed--either with his priestly calling or
his rashly made vow. Not as sources of pride did he now regard them; but as
searching discipline to be borne humbly and faithfully, to the
honour--as he prayed-both of earthly and heavenly love. He
loved Katherine, but he loved her husband, and that with the fulness of a
loyal and equal friendship. And so no taint was upon his love, of this he
felt assured. Indeed, he asked nothing better than that things might
continue as they were at Brockhurst; and that he might continue to warm his
hands a little--only a little--in the dear sunshine of Richard
and Katherine Calmady's perfect love.
As Julius rose, his knees gave under him. He rested both hands heavily
on the table, looked down, saw the unsightly packet of dirty
chap-books. Again, and almost with a cry, he prayed that things
might continue as they were at Brockhurst.
"Give peace in my time, O Lord!" he said. Then he wrapped up
the little bundle carefully, sealed and labelled it, and locked it away in
one of the table-drawers.
Thus, kneeling before the image of the stricken Mother and the dead
Christ, did Julius March behold the Vision of the New Life. But the page of
his diary, on which surely a matter of so great importance should have been
duly chronicled, remains to this day a blank.
There was nothing more to be done. Dr. Knott had gone out of the red
drawing-room on the ground floor into the tapestry-hung
dining-room next door, which struck cold as the small hours drew on
towards the dawn. And Julius March, after reciting the prayer in which the
Anglican Church
commends the souls of her departing children to the merciful keeping of the God who gave them, had followed him. The doctor was acutely distressed. He hated to lose a patient. He also hated to feel emotion. It made him angry. Moreover, he was intolerant of the presence of the clergy and of their ministrations in sick-rooms. He greeted poor Julius rather snarlingly.
"So your work's through as well as mine," he said.
"No disrespect to your cloth, Mr. March, but I'm not altogether
sorry. I daresay I'm a bit of a heathen; but I can't help
fancying the dying know more of death, and the way to meet it, than any of
us can teach them."
A group of men-servants stood about the open door, at the farther
end of the room, with Iles, the steward, and Mr. Tom Chifney, the trainer
from the racing-stables. The latter advanced a little and, clearing
his throat, inquired huskily:--
"No hope at all, doctor?"
"Hope?" he returned impatiently.--The lamp on the great
bare dining-table burned low, and John Knott's wide mouth,
conical skull and thick, ungainly person looked ogreish, almost brutal in
the uncertain light.--"There never was a grain of hope from the
first, except in Sir Richard's fine constitution. He is as sound as
only a clean-living man of thirty can be,--I wish there were a
few more like him, though your beastly diseases do put money into my
pocket,--that offered us a bare chance, and we were bound to act on
that chance"--his loose lips worked into a bitterly humorous
smile--"and torture him. Well, I've seen a good many men
under the knife before now, and I tell you I never saw one who bore himself
better. Men and horses alike, it's breeding that tells when it comes
to the push. You know that, eh, Chifney?"
In the red drawing-room, where the drama of this sad night
centred, Roger Ormiston had dropped into a chair by the fireside, his head
sunk on his chest and his hands thrust into his pockets. He was very tired,
very miserable. A shocking thing had happened, and, in some degree, he held
himself responsible for that happening. For was it not he who had been so
besotted with the Clown, and keen about its training? Therefore the young
man cursed himself, after the manner of his kind; and cursed his luck too,
in that, if this thing was to happen, it had not happened to him instead of
to Richard Calmady.
Mrs. Denny, the housekeeper, had retired to a straight-backed
chair stationed against the wall. She sat there, waiting till the next call
should come for her skilful nursing, upright, her hands
folded upon her silk apron, her attitude a model of discreet and self-respecting repose. Mrs. Denny knew her place, and had a considerable capacity for letting other persons know theirs. She ruled the large household with unruffled calm. But, to-night, even her powers of self-control were heavily taxed; and though she carried her head high, she could not help tears coursing slowly down her cheeks, and falling sadly to the detriment of the goffered frills of her white, lawn cross-over.
And Richard Calmady, meanwhile, lay still and very fairly peaceful upon
the narrow, camp bed in the middle of the room. He had lain there, save
during one hour,--the memory of which haunted Katherine with hideous
and sickening persistence,--ever since Tom Chifney, the
head-lad from the stables and a couple of grooms, had carried him
in, on a hurdle, from the steeplechase course four days ago.
The crimson-covered chairs and sofas, and other furniture of the
large square room, had been pushed back against the walls in a sort of
orderly confusion, leaving a broad passage-way between the doors at
either end, and a wide vacant space round the bed. At the head of this
stood a high, double-shelved what-not, bearing medicine
bottles, cups, basins, rolled bandages, dressings of rag and lint, a
spirit-lamp over which simmered a vessel containing vinegar, and a
couple of shaded candles in a tall, branched, silver candlestick. The light
from these fell, in intersecting circles, upon the white bed, upon the
man's brown, close-curled hair, upon his handsome
face--drawn and sharpened by suffering--and its rather ghastly
three days' growth of beard.
It fell, too, upon Katherine, as she sat facing her husband, the side of
her large easy-chair drawn up parallel to the side of the bed.
Silently, unlooked for, as a thief in the night, the end of
Katherine's fair world had come. There had been no time for
forethought or preparation. At one step she had been called upon to pass
from the triumph to the terror of mortal life. But she was a valiant
creature, and her natural courage was reinforced by the greatness of her
love. She met the blow standing, her brain clear, her mind strong to help.
Only once had she faltered--during the hideous hour when she waited,
pacing the dining-room in the dusk, four evenings back. For, after
consultation with Dr. Jewsbury and Mr. Thorns of Westchurch, John Knott had
told her--with a gentleness and delicacy a little surprising in so
hard-bitten a man--that, owing to the shattered
condition of the bone, amputation of the right leg was imperative. He added that, only too probably, the left would have eventually to go too. They must operate, he said, and operate immediately. Katherine had pleaded to be present; but Dr. Knott was obdurate.
"My dear lady, you don't know what you ask," he said.
"As you love him, let him be. If you are there it will just double
the strain. He'd suffer for you as well as himself. Believe me he
will be far best alone."
It must be remembered that in 1842 anæsthetics had not robbed the
operating-room of half its horrors. The victim went to execution
wide-awake, with no mercy of deadened senses and dulled brain. And
so Katherine had paced the dining-room, hearing at intervals,
through the closed doors, the short peremptory tones of the surgeons,
fearing she heard more and worse sounds than those. They were hurting him,
sorely, sorely, dismembering and disfiguring the dear, living body which
she loved. A tempest of unutterable woe swept over her. Breaking fiercely
away from her brother and Denny--who strove to comfort her--she
beat her poor, lovely head against the wall. But that, so far, had been her
one moment of weakness. Since then she had fought steadily, with a certain
lofty cheerfulness, for the life she so desired to save. The horror of the
second operation had been spared her; but only because it might but too
probably hasten, rather than retard, the approaching footsteps of death.
Mortification had set in, in the bruised and mangled limb
forty-eight hours ago. And now the scent of death was in the air.
The awful presence drew very near. Yet only when doctor and priest alike
rose and went, when her brother moved away, and even the faithful
housekeeper stepped back from the bedside, did Katherine's mind
really grasp the truth. Her well-beloved lay dying; and human
tenderness, human skill, be they never so great, ceased to avail.
She was worn by the long vigil. Her face was colourless. Yet perhaps
Katherine's beauty had never been more rare and sweet than as she sat
there, leaning a little forward in the eagerness of her watchfulness. The
dark circles about her eyes made them look very large and sombre. The
corners of her mouth turned down and her under-lip quivered now and
then, giving her expression a childlike piteousness of appeal. There was no
trace of disorder in her appearance. Her white dressing-gown and all
its pretty ribbons and laces were spotlessly fresh. Her hair was carefully
dressed as usual--high at the back, showing the nape of her neck, her
little ears, and the noble poise
of her head. Katherine was not one of those women who appear to imagine that slovenliness is the proper exponent of sorrow.
Still, for all her high courage, as the truth came home to her, her
spirit began to falter for the second time. It is comparatively easy to
endure while there is something to be done; but it is almost intolerable,
specially to the young when life is strong in them, merely to sit by and
wait. Katherine's overwrought nerves began to play cruel tricks upon
her, carrying her back in imagination to that other hideous hour of
waiting, in the dining-room, four evenings ago. Again she seemed to
hear the short, peremptory tones of the surgeons, and those worse
things--the stifled groan of one in the extremity of physical anguish,
and the grate of a saw. These maddened her with pity, almost with rage. She
feared that now, as then, she might lose her self-mastery and do
some wild and desperate thing. She tried to keep her attention fixed on the
quick, irregular rise and fall of the linen sheet expressing the broad,
full curve of the young man's chest, as he lay flat on his back, his
eyes closed, but whether in sleep or in unconsciousness she did not know.
As long as the sheet rose and fell he was alive at all events, still with
her. But she was too exhausted for any sustained effort of will. And her
glance wandered back to, and followed with agonised comprehension, the
formless, motionless elevation and depression of that same sheet towards
the foot of the bed.
The air of the room seemed to grow more oppressive, the silence to
deepen, and with it the terrible tension of her mind increased. Suddenly
she started to her feet. The logs burning in the grate had fallen together
with a crash, sending a rush of ruddy flame and an innumerable army of
hurrying sparks up the wide chimney. All the mouldings of the
ceiling--all the crossing bars and sinuous lines of the
richly-worked pattern, all the depending bosses and roses of it, all
the foliations of the deep cornice--sprang into bold relief, outlined,
splashed, and stained with living scarlet. And this universal redness of
carpet, curtains, furniture, and now of ceiling, even of
white-draped bed, suggested to Katherine's distracted fancy
another thing--unseen, yet known during her other hour of
waiting--namely blood.
Roused by the crash of the falling logs and the rustle of
Katherine's garments as she sprang up, Richard Calmady opened his
eyes. For a few seconds his glance wavered in vague distress and
perplexity. Then, as fuller consciousness returned of how it all was with
him, with a slight lifting of the eyebrows his glance steadied upon
Katherine and he smiled.
"Ah! my poor Kitty," he whispered, "it takes a long
time, doesn't it, this business of dying?"
Katherine's evil fancies vanished. As soon as the demand for
action came she grew calm and sane. The ceiling and sheets were white again
and her mind was clear.
"Are you easy, my dearest?" she asked. "In less
pain?"
"No," he said, "no, I'm not in pain. But
everything seems to sink away from me, and I float right out. It's
all dream and mist--except--except just now your face."
Katherine's lips quivered too much for speech. She moved swiftly
across to the what-not at the head of the bed. If he did not suffer,
there could be no selfishness, surely, in trying to keep death at bay for a
little space yet? But, alas, with what grotesquely paltry and inadequate
weapons are all--even the most gallant--reduced to fighting death
at the last! Here, on the one hand, a half wine glass of champagne in a
china feeding-cup, with a teapot-like spout to it, or a few
spoonfuls of jelly, backed by the passion of a woman's heart. And, on
the other hand, ranged against this pitiful display of absurdly limited
resources,--as the hosts of the Philistines against the little army of
Israel,--resistless laws of nature, incalculably far-reaching
forces, physical and spiritual, the interminable progression of cause and
effect!
Denny joined Lady Calmady at the table. The two women held brief
consultation. Then the housekeeper went round to the farther side of the
bed, and slipping her arm under the pillows gently raised Richard's
head and shoulders, while Katherine, kneeling beside him, held the spout of
the feeding-cup to his lips.
"Must I? I don't think I can manage it," he said,
drawing away slightly and closing his eyes.
But Katherine persisted.
"Oh! try to drink it," she pleaded, "never mind how
little--only try. Help me to keep you here just as long as I
can."
The young man's glance steadied on to her once again, and his eyes
and lips smiled the same faint, wholly gracious smile.
"All right, my beloved," he said. "A little higher,
Denny, please."
Not without painful effort and a choking contraction of the throat, he
swallowed a few drops. But the greater part of the draught spilt out
sideways, and would have dribbled down on to the pillows had not Katherine
held her handkerchief to his mouth.
Ormiston, who had been standing at the foot of the bed in the hope of
rendering some assistance, ground his teeth together
with a half-audible imprecation, and went slowly over to the fireplace again. He had supposed himself as miserable as he well could be before. But this incident of the feeding-cup was the climax, somehow. It struck him as an intolerable humiliation and outrage that Richard Calmady, splendid fellow as he was, gifted, high-bred gentleman, should, of all men, come to this sorry pass! He was filled with impotent fury. And was it this pass, indeed, he asked himself, to which every human creature must needs come one day? Would he, Roger Ormiston, one day, find himself thus weak and broken, his body--now so lively a source of various enjoyment--degraded into a pest-house, a mere dwelling-place of suffering and corruption? The young man gripped the high, narrow mantelshelf with both hands and pressed his forehead down between them. He really had not the nerve to watch what was going forward over there any longer. It was too painful. It knocked all the manhood out of him. But for very shame, before those two calm, devoted women, he would have broken down and wept.
Presently Richard's voice reached him, feeble yet
uncomplaining.
"I am so sorry, but you see it's no use, Kitty. The
machinery won't work. Let me lie flat again, Denny, please.
That's better, thanks."
Then after a few moments of laboured breathing, he
added:--
"You mustn't trouble any more, it only disappoints you. We
have just got to submit to fact, my beloved. I've taken my last
fence."
Ormiston's shoulders heaved convulsively as he leaned his forehead
against the cold, marble edge of the chimneypiece. His
brother-in-law's words brought the whole dreadful
picture up before him. Oh! that cursed slip and fall, that struggling,
plunging, frenzied horse!--And how the horse had plunged and
struggled, good God! It seemed as though Chifney, the grooms, all of them,
would never get hold of it or draw Richard out from beneath the pounding
hoofs. And then Ormiston went over his own share in the business again,
lamenting, blaming himself. Yet what more natural, after all, than that he
should have set his affections on the Clown? Chifney believed in the horse
too--a five-year-old brother of Touchstone, resembling,
in his black-brown skin and intelligent, white-reach face,
that celebrated horse, and inheriting--less enviable
distinction--the high shoulders and withers of his sire Camel. If the
Clown did not make a name, Captain Ormiston had sworn, by all the gods of
sport, he would never judge a horse again. And, Heaven help
us, was this the ghastly way the Clown's name was to be made, then?
The room grew very quiet again, save for a strange gurgling, rattling
sound Richard Calmady made, at times, in breathing. Mrs. Denny had retired
beyond the circle of firelight. And Katherine, having drawn her chair a
little farther forward so that the foot of the bed might be out of sight,
sat holding her husband's hand, softly caressing his wrist and palm
with her finger-tips. Soon the slow movement of her fingers ceased,
while she felt, in quick fear, for the fluttering, intermittent pulse.
Richard's breathing had become more difficult. He moved his head
restlessly and plucked at the sheet with his right hand. It was a little
more than flesh and blood could bear.
Katherine called to him softly under her
breath:--"Richard, Dick, my darling!"
"All right, I'm coming."
He opened his eyes wide, as in sudden terror.
"Oh! I say, though, what's happened? Where am I?"
Katherine leant down, kissed his hand, caressed it.
"Here, my dearest," she said, "at home, at Brockhurst,
with me."
"Ah yes!" he said, "of course, I remember, I'm
dying." He waited a little space, and then, turning his head on the
pillow so as to have a better view of her, spoke
again:--"I was floating right out--the
under-tow had got me--it was sucking me down into the deep sea
of mist and dreams. I was so nearly gone--and you brought me
back."
"But I wanted you so--I wanted you so," Katherine
cried, smitten with sudden contrition. "I could not help it. Do you
mind?"
"You silly sweet, could I ever mind coming back to you?" he
asked wistfully. "Don't you suppose I would much rather stay
here at Brockhurst, at home, with you--than sink away into the
unknown?"
"Ah! my dear," she said, swaying herself to and fro in the
misery of tearless grief.
"And yet I have no call to complain," he went on. "I
have had thirty years of life and health. It is not a small thing to have
seen the sun, and to have rejoiced in one's youth. And I have had
you"--his face hardened and his breath came
short--"you, most enchanting of women."
"My dear! my dear!" Katherine cried, again bowing her
head.
"God has been so good to me here that--I hope it is not
presumptuous--I can't be much afraid of what is to follow. The
best argument for what will be, is what has been. Don't you think so?"
"But you go and I stay," she said. "If I could only go
too, go with you."
Richard Calmady raised himself in the bed, looked hard at her, spoke as
a man in the fulness of his strength.
"Do you mean that? Would you come with me if you could--come
through the deep sea of mist and dreams, to whatever lies
beyond?"
For all answer Katherine bent lower, her face suddenly radiant,
notwithstanding its pallor. Sorrow was still so new a companion to her that
she would dare the most desperate adventures to rid herself of its hateful
presence. Her reason and moral sense were in abeyance, only her poor heart
spoke. She laid hold of her husband's hands and clasped them about
her throat.
"Let us go together, take me," she prayed. "I love
you, I will not be left. Closer, Dick, closer!"
"Thank God, I am strong enough even yet!" he said fiercely,
while his jaw set, and his grasp tightened somewhat dangerously upon her
throat. Katherine looked into his eyes and laughed. The blood was tingling
through her veins.
"Ah! dear love," she panted, "if you knew how
delicious it is to be a little hurt!"
But her ecstasy was shortlived, as ecstasy usually is. Richard Calmady
unclasped his hands and dropped back against the pillows, putting her away
from him with a certain authority.
"My beloved one, do not tempt me," he said. "We must
remember the child. The devil of jealousy is very great, even when one
lies, as I do now, more than half dead."--He turned his head
away, and his voice shook. "Ten years hence, twenty years hence, you
will be as beautiful--more so, very likely--than ever. Other men
will see you, and I"--
"You will be just what you were and always have been to me,"
Katherine interrupted. "I love you, and shall love."
She answered bravely, taking his hand again and caressing it, while he
looked round and smiled at her. But she grew curiously cold. She shivered,
and had a difficulty in controlling her speech. Her new companion, Sorrow,
refused to be tricked and to leave her, and the breath of sorrow is as
sharp as a wind blowing over ice.
"You have made me perfectly content," Richard Calmady said
presently. "There is nothing I would have changed. No hour of
day--or night--ah, my God! my God!--which I could
ask to have otherwise." He paused, fighting a sob which rose in his throat. "Still you are quite young"--
"So much the worse for me," Katherine said.
"Oh! I don't know about that," he put in quietly.
"Anyhow, remember that you are free, absolutely and unconditionally
free. I hold a man a cur who, in dying, tries to bind the woman he
loves."
Katherine shivered. Despair had possession of her.
"Why reason about it?" she asked. "Don't you see
that to be bound is the only comfort I shall have left?"
"My poor darling," Richard Calmady almost groaned.
His own helplessness to help her cut him to the quick. Wealth, and an
inherent graciousness of disposition, had always made it so simple to be of
service and of comfort to those about him. It was so natural to rule, to
decide, to alleviate, to give little trouble to others and take a good deal
of trouble on their behalf, that his present and final incapacity in any
measure to shield even Katherine, the woman he worshipped, amazed him. Not
pain, not bodily disfigurement,--though he recoiled, as every sane
being must, from these,--not death itself, tried his spirit so
bitterly as his own uselessness. All the pleasant, kindly activities of
common intercourse were over. He was removed alike from good deeds and from
bad. He had ceased to have part or lot in the affairs of living men. The
desolation of impotence was upon him.
For a little time he lay very still, looking up at the firelight playing
upon the mouldings of the ceiling, trying to reconcile himself to this. His
mind was clear, yet, except when actually speaking, he found it difficult
to keep his attention fixed. Images, sensations, began to chase each other
across his mental field of vision; and his thought, though definite as to
detail, grew increasingly broken and incoherent, small matters in unseemly
fashion jostling great. He wondered concerning those first steps of the
disembodied spirit, when it has crossed the threshold of death; and then,
incontinently, he passed to certain time-honored jokes and
impertinent follies at Eton, over which he, and Roger, and Major St.
Quentin, had laughed a hundred times. They amused him greatly even yet. But
he could not linger with them. He was troubled about the attics of the new
lodge, now in building at the entrance to the east woods. The windows were
too small, and he disliked that blind, north gable. There were letters to
be answered too. Lord Fallowfeild wanted to know about something--he
could not remember what--Fallowfeild's inquiries had a habit of
being vague. And
through all these things--serious or trivial--a terrible yearning over Katherine and her baby--the new, little, human life which was his own life, and which yet he would never know or see. And through all these things also, the perpetual, heavy ache of those severed nerves and muscles, flitting pains in the limb of which, though it was gone, he had not ceased to be aware.--He dozed off, and mortal weakness closed down on him, floating him out and out into vague spaces. And then suddenly, once more, he felt a horse under him and gripped it with his knees. He was riding, riding, whole and vigorous, with the summer wind in his face, across vast, flowering pastures towards a great light on the far horizon, which streamed forth, as he knew, from the throne of Almighty God.
Choking, with the harsh rattle in his throat, he awoke to the actual and
immediate--to the familiar, square room and its crimson furnishings,
to Katherine's sweet, pale face and the touch of her caressing
fingers, to someone standing beside her, whom he did not immediately
recognise. It was Roger--Roger worn with watching, grown curiously
older. But a certain exhilaration, born of that strange ride, remained by
Richard Calmady. Both ache of body and distress of mind had abated. He felt
a lightness of spirit, an eagerness, as of one setting forth on a promised
journey, who--not unlovingly, yet with something of haste--makes
his dispositions before he starts.
"Look here, darling," he said, "you'll let the
stables go on just as usual. Chifney will take over the whole management of
them. You can trust him implicitly. And--that is you, Roger,
isn't it?--you'll keep an eye on things, won't you,
so that Kitty shall have no bother? I should like to know nothing was
changed at the stables. They've been a great hobby of mine, and
if--if the baby is a boy, he may take after me and care for them. Make
him ride straight, Roger. And teach him to love sport for its own sake,
dear old man, as a gentleman should, not for the money that may come out of
it."
He waited, struggling for breath, then his hand closed on
Katherine's.
"I must go," he said. "You'll call the boy after
me, Kitty, won't you? I want there to be another Richard Calmady. My
life has been very happy, so, please God, the name will bring
luck."
A spasm took him, and he tried convulsively to push off the sheet.
Katherine was down on her knees, her right arm under his head, while with
her left hand she stripped the bedclothes away from his chest and bared his
throat.
"Denny, Denny!" she cried, "come--tell
me--is this death?"
And Ormiston, impelled by an impulse he could hardly have explained,
crossed the room, dragged back the heavy curtains, and flung one of the
casements wide open.
The soft light of autumn dawn flowed in through the great mullioned
window, quenching the redness of fire and candles, spreading, dim and
ghostly, over the white dress and bowed head of the woman, over the narrow
bed and the form of the maimed and dying man. The freshness of the morning
air, laden with the soothing murmur of the fir forest swaying in the breath
of a mild, westerly breeze; laden too with the moist fragrance of the
moorland,--of dewy grass, of withered bracken and fallen
leaves,--flowed in also, cleansing the tainted atmosphere of the room.
While, from the springy turf of the green ride--which runs eastward,
parallel to the lime avenue--came the thud and suck of hoofs, and the
voices of the stable boys, as they rode the long string of dancing,
snorting racehorses out to the training ground for their morning
exercise.
Richard Calmady opened his eyes wide.
"Ah, it's daylight!" he cried, in accents of
joyfulness. "I am glad. Kiss me, my beloved, kiss me.--You
dear--yes, once more. I have had such a queer night. I dreamt I had
been fearfully knocked about somehow, and was crippled, and in pain. It is
good to wake, and find you, and know I'm all right after all. God
keep you, my dearest, you and the boy. I am longing to see him--but
not just now--let Denny bring him later. And tell them to send Chifney
word I shall not be out to see the gallops this morning. I really believe
those dreams half frightened me. I feel so absurdly used up. And
then--Kitty, where are you?--put your arms round me and
I'll go to sleep again."
He smiled at her quite naturally and stroked her cheek.
"My sweet, your face is all wet and cold!" he said.
"Make Richard a good boy. After all that is what matters
most--Julius will help you--Ah! look at the
sunrise--why--why"--
An extraordinary change passed over him. To Katherine it seemed like the
upward leap of a livid flame. Then his head fell back and his jaw
dropped.
But Brockhurst she would never see again. The way was too great for her.
And so it came about that when Lady Calmady's child was born, towards
the end of the following March, no more staid and responsible
woman-creature of her family was at hand to support her than that
lively, young lady, her brother, William Ormiston's wife.
Meanwhile, the parish of Sandyfield rejoiced. Thomas Caryll, the rector,
had caused the church bells to be rung immediately on receipt of the good
news; while he selected, as text for his Sunday-morning sermon,
those words, usually reserved to another and somewhat greater
advent--"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is
given." Good Mr. Caryll was innocent of the remotest intention of
profanity. But his outlook was circumscribed, his desire to please
abnormally large, and his sense of relative values slight. While that Lady
Calmady should give birth to a son and heir was, after all, a matter of no
small moment--locally considered at all events.
Brockhurst House rejoiced also, yet it did so not without a measure of
fear. For there had been twenty-four hours of acute anxiety
regarding Katherine Calmady. And even now, on the evening of the second
day, although Dr. Knott declared himself satisfied both as to her condition
and that of the baby, an air of mystery surrounded the large, state
bedroom--where she lay, white and languid, slowly feeling her way back
to the ordinary conditions of existence--and the nursery next door.
Mrs. Denny, who had taken possession by right divine of long and devoted
service, not only did not encourage, but positively repulsed visitors. Her
ladyship must not be disturbed. She, the nurse, the baby, in turn, were
sleeping. According to Denny the god of sleep reigned supreme in those
stately, white-panelled chambers, looking away, across the valley
and the long lines of the elm avenue, to the faint blue of the chalk downs
rising against the southern sky.
John Knott had driven over, for the second time that day, in the windy
March sunset. He fell in very readily with Mrs. Ormiston's suggestion
that he should remain to dinner. That young lady's spirits were
sensibly on the rise. It is true that she had wept copiously at intervals
while her sister-in-law's life appeared to be in
danger--keeping at the same time as far from the sick-room as
the ample limits of Brockhurst House allowed, and wishing herself a
thousand and one times safe back in Paris, where her devoted and obedient
husband occupied a subordinate post at the English Embassy. But Mrs.
Ormiston's tears were as easily stanched as set flowing. And now, in
her capacity of hostess, with three gentlemen--or rather "two
and a half, for you can't," as she remarked, "count a
brother-in-law for a whole one"--as audience, she
felt remarkably cheerful. She had been over to Newlands during the
afternoon, and insisted on Mary Cathcart returning with her. Mrs. Ormiston
was a Desmolyns. The Cathcarts are distantly connected with that family.
And,
when the girl had protested that this was hardly a suitable moment for a visit to Brockhurst, Charlotte Ormiston had replied, with that hint of a brogue which gave her ready speech its almost rollicking character:--
"But, my dear child, propriety demands it. I depart myself
to-morrow. And, now that we're recovering our tone, I
daren't be left with such a houseful of men on my hands any longer.
While we were tearing our hair over poor Kitty's possible demise, and
agonising as to the uncertain sex of the baby, it did not matter. But now
even that dear creature, Saint Julius, is beginning to pick up, and looks
less as if his diet was mouldy peas and his favourite plaything a
cat-o'-nine-tails. Scourge?--Yes, of
course, but it's all the same in the application of the instrument,
you know. And then in your secret soul, Mary dear," she added, not
unkindly, "there's no denying it's far from obnoxious to
you to spend a trifle of time in the society of Roger."
Mrs. Ormiston carried her point. It may be stated, in passing, that this
sprightly, young matron was brilliantly pretty, though her facial angle
might be deemed too acute, leaving somewhat to be desired in the matter of
forehead and of chin. She was plump, graceful, and neat waisted. Her skin
was exquisitely white and fine, and a charming colour flushed her cheeks
under excitement. Her hair was always untidy, her hairpins displaying
abnormal activity in respect of escape and independent action. Her eyes
were round and very prominent, suggestive of highly-polished, brown
agates. She was not the least shy or averse to attracting attention. She
laughed much, and practised, as prelude to her laughter, an impudently,
coquettish, little stare.--And that, finally, as he sat on her right
at dinner, her rattling talk and lightness of calibre generally struck John
Knott as rather cynically inadequate to the demands made by her present
position. Not that he underrated her good-nature or was insensible
to her personal attractions. But the doctor was in search of an able
coadjutor just then, blessed with a steady brain and a tongue skilled in
tender diplomacies. For there were trying things to be said and done, and
he needed a woman of a fine spirit to do and say them aright.
"Head like an eft," he said to himself, as course followed
course and, while bandying compliments with her, he watched and listened.
"As soon set a harlequin to lead a forlorn hope. Well it's to
be trusted her husband's some use for her--that's more
than I have anyhow, so the sooner we see her off the premises the better.
Suppose I shall have to fall back on Ormiston. Bit of a rake, I expect,
though in looks he is so
curiously like that beautiful, innocent, young thing upstairs. Wonder how he'll take it? No mistake, it's a facer!"
Dr. Knott settled himself back squarely in his chair and pushed his
cheese-plate away from him, while his shaggy eyebrows drew together
as he fixed his eyes on the young man at the head of the table.
"A facer!" he repeated to himself. "Yes, the ancients
knew what they were about in these awkward matters. The modern conscience
is disastrously anæmic."
Although it looks on the terrace, the dining-room at Brockhurst
is among the least cheerful of the living rooms. The tapestry with which it
is hung--representing French hunting scenes, each panel set in a broad
border pattern of birds, fruits and leaves, interspersed with classic urns
and medallions--is worked in neutral tints of brown, blue, and grey.
The chimney-piece, reaching the whole height of the wall, is of
liver-coloured marble. At the period in question, it was still the
fashion to dine at the modestly early hour of six; and, the spring evenings
being long, the curtains had been left undrawn, so that the dying daylight
without and the lamplight within contended rather mournfully for mastery,
while a wild, south-easterly wind, breaking in gusts against the
house front, sobbed at the casements and made a loose pane, here and there,
click and rattle.
And it was in the midst of a notably heavy gust, when dessert had been
served and the servants had left the room, that Captain Ormiston leaned
across the table and addressed his sister-in-law.
The young soldier had been somewhat gloomy and silent during dinner. He
was vaguely anxious about Lady Calmady. The news of Mrs. St. Quentin was
critical, and he cherished a very true affection for his great-aunt.
Had she not been his confidante ever since his first term at Eton? Had she
not, moreover, helped him on several occasions when creditors displayed an
incomprehensibly foolish pertinacity regarding payment for goods supplied?
He was burdened too by a prospective sense of his own uncommon
righteousness. For, during the past five months while he had been on leave
at Brockhurst, assisting Katherine to master the details of the very
various business of the estate, Ormiston had revised his position and
decided on heroic measures of reform. He would rid himself of debt,
forswear expensive London habits, and those many pleasant iniquities which
every great city offers liberally to such handsome, fine gentlemen as
himself. He actually proposed, just so soon as Katherine could conveniently
spare him, to decline from the splendid inactivity of the Guards, upon
the hard work of some line regiment under orders for foreign service. Ormiston was quite affected by contemplation of his own good resolutions. He appeared to himself in a really pathetic light. He would like to have told Mary Cathcart all about it and have claimed her sympathy and admiration. But then, she was just precisely the person he could not tell, until the said resolutions had, in a degree at all events, passed into accomplished fact! For--as not infrequently happens--it was not so much a case of being off with the old love before being on with the new, as of being off with the intermediate loves, before being on with the old one again. To announce his estimable future, was, by implication at all events, to confess a not wholly estimable past. And so Roger Ormiston, sitting that night at dinner beside the object of his best and most honest affections, proved but poor company; and roused himself, not without effort, to say to his sister-in-law:--
"It's about time to perform the ceremony of the evening,
isn't it, Charlotte, and drink that small boy's
health?"
"By all manner of means. I'm all for the observance of
ancient forms and ceremonies. You can never be sure how much mayn't
lie at the bottom of them, and it's best to be on the safe side of
the unseen powers. You'll agree to that now, Mr. March, won't
you?"--She took a grape skin from between her neat teeth and
flicked it out on to her plate.--"So, for myself," she
went on, "I curtsey nine times to the new moon, though the repeated
genuflexion is perniciously likely to give me the backache; touch my hat in
passing to the magpies; wish when I behold a piebald; and bless my
neighbour devoutly if he sneezes."
At the commencement of this harangue she met her
brother-in-law's rather depreciative scrutiny with her
bold little stare--in his present mood Ormiston found her vivacity
tedious, though he was usually willing enough to laugh at her
extravagancies--then she whipped Julius in with a side glance, and
concluded with her round eyes set on Dr. Knott's rough-hewn
and weather-beaten countenance.
"I'm afraid you are disgracefully superstitious, Mrs.
Ormiston," the latter remarked.
She was a feather-headed chatterbox, he reflected, but her
chatter served to occupy the time. And the doctor was by no means anxious
the time should pass too rapidly. He felt slightly
self-contemptuous; but in good truth he would be glad to put away
some few glasses of sound port before administering the aforementioned
facer to Captain Ormiston.
"Superstitious?" she returned. "Well, I trust my
superstition is not chronic, but nicely intermittent like all the rest of
my many virtues. Charity begins at home, you know, and I would not like to
keep any of the poor, dear creatures on guard too long for fear of tiring
them out. But I give every one of them a turn, Dr. Knott, I assure
you."
"And that's more than most of us do," he said, smiling
rather savagely. "The majority of my acquaintance have a handsome
power of self-restraint in the practice of virtue."
"And I'm the happy exception! Well, now, that's an
altogether pretty speech," Mrs. Ormiston cried, laughing. "But
to return to the matter in hand, to this hero of a baby--I dote on
babies, Dr. Knott. I've one of my own of six months old, and
she's a charming child I assure you."
"I don't doubt that for an instant, having the honour of
knowing her mother. Couldn't be otherwise than charming if she
tried," the doctor said, reaching out his hand again to the
decanter.
Mrs. Ormiston treated him to her little stare, and then looked round the
table, putting up one plump, bare arm as she pushed in a couple of
hairpins.
"Ah! but she's a real jewel of a child," she said
audaciously. "She's the comfort of my social existence. For she
doesn't resemble me in the least, and therefore my reputation's
everlastingly safe, thanks to her. Why, before the calumniating thought has
had time to arise in your mind, one look in that child's face will
dissipate it, she's so entirely the image of her father."
There was a momentary silence, but for the sobbing of the gale and
rattling of the casements. Then Captain Ormiston broke into a rather loud
laugh. Even if they sail near the wind, you must stand by the women of your
family.
"Come, that will do, I think; Charlotte," he said.
"You won't beat that triumphant bull in a hurry."
"But, my dear boy, so she is. Even at her present tender age,
she's the living picture of your brother William."
"Oh, poor William!" Roger said hastily.
He turned to Mary Cathcart. The girl had blushed up to the roots of her
crisp, black hair. She did not clearly understand the other woman's
speech, nor did she wish to do so. She was admirably pure-minded.
But, like all truly pure-minded persons, she carried a touchstone
that made her recoil, directly and instinctively, from that which was of
doubtful quality. The twinkle in Dr. Knott's grey eyes, as he sipped
his port, still more the tone of Roger Ormiston's laugh, she did
understand some-
how. And this last jarred upon her cruelly. It opened the flood-gates of doubt which Mary--like so many another woman in respect of the man she loves--had striven very valiantly to keep shut. All manner of hints as to his indiscretions, all manner of half-told tales as to his debts, his extravagance, which rumour had conveyed to her unwilling ears, seemed suddenly to gather weight and probability, viewed in the moral light--so to speak--of that laugh. Great loves mature and deepen under the action of sorrow and the necessity to forgive; yet it is a shrewdly bitter moment, when the heart of either man or woman first admits that the god of its idolatry has, after all, feet of but very common clay. Her head erect, her eyes moist, Mary turned to Julius March and asked him of the welfare of a certain labourer's family that had lately migrated from Newlands to Sandyfield. But Ormiston's voice broke in upon the inquiries with a determination to claim her attention.
"Miss Cathcart," he said, "forgive my interrupting
you. I can tell you more about the Spratleys than March can. They're
all right. Iles has taken the man on as carter at the home-farm, and
given the eldest boy a job with the woodmen. I told him to do what he could
for them as you said you were interested in them. And now, please, I want
you to drink my small nephew's health."
The girl pushed forward her wine glass without speaking, and, as he
filled it, Ormiston added in a lower tone:--
"He, at all events, unlike some of his relations, is guiltless of
foolish words or foolish actions. I don't pretend to share
Charlotte's superstitions, but some people's good wishes are
very well worth having."
Unwillingly Mary Cathcart raised her eyes. Her head was still carried a
little high and her cheeks were still glowing. Her god might not be of pure
gold throughout--such gods rarely are, unfortunately--yet she was
aware she still found him a very worshipful kind of deity.
"Very well worth having," he repeated. "And so I
should like that poor, little chap to have your good wishes, Miss Cathcart.
Wish him all manner of nice things, for his mother's sake as well as
his own. There's been a pretty bad run of luck here lately, and
it's time it changed. Wish him better fortune than his forefathers.
I'm not superstitious, as I say, but Richard Calmady's death
scared one a little. Five minutes beforehand it seemed so utterly
improbable. And then one began to wonder if there could be any truth in the
old legend. And that was ugly, you know."
Dr. Knott glanced at the speaker sharply.--"Oh! that occurred
to you, did it?" he said.
"Bless me! why, it occurred to everybody!" Ormiston answered
impatiently. "Some idiot raked the story up, and it was canvassed
from one end of the county to the other last autumn till it made me fairly
sick."
"Poor boy!" cried Mrs. Ormiston. "And what is this
wonderful story that so nauseates him, Dr. Knott?"
"I'm afraid I can't tell you," the doctor
answered slowly. A nervous movement on the part of Julius March had
attracted his attention. "I have never managed to get hold of the
story as a whole, but I should like to do so uncommonly."
Julius pushed back his chair, and groped hurriedly for the
dinner-napkin which had slipped to the ground from his knees. The
subject of the conversation agitated him. The untidy, little
chap-books, tied together with the tag of rusty ribbon, had lain
undisturbed in the drawer of his library table ever since the--to
him--very memorable evening, when, kneeling before the image of the
stricken Mother and the dead Christ, he had found the man's heart
under the priest's cassock and awakened to newness of life. Much had
happened since then; and Julius had ranged himself, accepting,
open-eyed, the sorrows and alleviations of the fate he had created
for himself. But to-night he was tired. The mental and emotional
strain of the last few days had been considerable. Moreover, John
Knott's presence always affected him. The two men stood, indeed, at
opposing poles of thought--the one spiritual and ideal, the other
material and realistic. And, though he struggled against the influence, the
doctor's rather brutal common sense and large knowledge of physical
causes, gained a painful ascendency over his mind at close quarters. Knott,
it must be owned, was slightly merciless to his clerical acquaintances. He
loved to bait them, to impale them on the horns of some moral or
theological dilemma. And it was partly with this purpose of harrying and
worrying that he continued now:--
"Yes, Mrs. Ormiston, I should like to hear the story just as much
as you would. And--it strikes me, if he pleased, Mr. March could tell
it to us. Suppose you ask him to!"
Promptly the young lady fell upon Julius, regardless of Ormiston's
hardly concealed displeasure.
"Oh! you bad man, what are you doing," she cried,
"trying to conceal thrilling family legends from the nearest
relatives? Tell us all about it, if you know, as Dr. Knott declares you do.
I dote on terrifying stories--don't you, Mary?--that send
the
cold shivers all down my back. And if they deal with the history of my nearest and dearest, why, there's an added charm to them. Now, Mr. March, we're all attention. Stand and deliver, and make it all just as bad as you can."
"I am afraid I am not an
effective improvisatore," he replied.
"And the subject, if you will pardon my saying so, seems to me too
intimate for mirth. A curse is supposed to rest on this place. The owners
of Brockhurst die young and by violent means."
"We know that already, and look to you to tell us something more,
Mr. March," Dr. Knott said dryly.
Julius was slightly nettled at the elder man's tone and manner. He
answered with an accentuation of his usual refinement of enunciation and
suavity of manner.
"There is a term to the curse--a saviour who, according to
the old prediction, has the power, should he also have the will, to remove
it altogether."
"Oh, really, is that so? And when does this saviour put in an
appearance?" the doctor asked again.
"That is not revealed."
Julius would very gladly have said nothing further. But Dr.
Knott's expression was curiously intent and compelling as he sat
fingering the stem of his wine glass. All the ideality of Julius's
nature rose in revolt against the half-sneering rationalism he
seemed to read in that expression. Mrs. Ormiston, who had an hereditary
racial appreciation of anything approaching a fight, turned her round eyes
first on one speaker and then on the other provokingly, inciting them to
more declared hostilities, while she bit her lips in the effort to avoid
spoiling sport by untimely laughter or speech.
"But unhappily," Julius proceeded, yielding under protest to
these opposing forces, "the saviour comes in so questionable a shape,
that I fear, whenever the appointed time may be, his appearance will only
be welcomed by the discerning few."
"That's a pity," Dr. Knott said. He paused a minute,
passed his hand across his mouth.--"Still, if we are to believe
the Bible, and other so-called sacred histories, it's been the
way of saviours from the beginning to try the faith of ordinary mortals by
presenting themselves under rather queer disguises."--He paused
again, drawing in his wide lips, moistening them with his tongue.
"But since you evidently know all about it, Mr. March, may I make
bold to inquire in what special form of fancy dress the saviour in question
is reported as likely to present himself?"
"He comes as a child of the house," Julius answered, with
dignity. "A child who in person--if I understand the wording of the prophecy aright--is half angel, half monster."
John Knott opened his mouth as though to give passage to some very
forcible exclamation. Thought better of it and brought his jaws together
with a kind of grind. His heavy figure seemed to hunch itself up as in the
recoil from a blow.
"Curious," he said quietly. Yet Julius, looking at him,
could have fancied that his weather-beaten face went a trifle
pale.
But Mrs. Ormiston, in the interests of a possible fight, had contained
herself just as long as was possible. Now she clapped her hands, and broke
into a little scream of laughter.
"That's just the most magnificently romantic thing I ever
heard!" she cried. "Come now, this requires further
investigation. What's our baby like, Dr. Knott? I've seen
nothing but an indistinguishable mass of shawls and flannels. Have we, by
chance, got an angelic monstrosity upstairs without being aware of
it?"
"Charlotte!" Roger Ormiston called out sternly. The young
man looked positively dangerous. "This conversation has gone quite
far enough. I agree with March, it may all be stuff and nonsense, not worth
a second thought, still it isn't a thing to joke about."
"Very well, dear boy, be soothed then," she returned, making
a little grimace and putting her head on one side coquettishly.
"I'll be as solemn as nine owls. But you must excuse a
momentary excitement. It's all news to me, you know. I'd no
notion Katherine had married into such a remarkable family. I'm bound
to learn a little more. Do you believe it's possible at all, Dr.
Knott, now tell me?"
"The fulfilment of prophecy is rather a wide and burning question
to embark on," he said. "With Captain Ormiston's leave, I
think we'd better go back to the point we started from and drink the
little gentleman's health. I have my patient to see again, and it is
getting rather late."
The lady addressed, laughed, held up her glass, and stared round the
table with a fine air of bravado, looking remarkably pretty.
"Fire away, Roger, dear fellow," she said.
"We're loaded, and ready."
Thus admonished, Ormiston raised his glass too. But his temper was not
of the sweetest, just then, he spoke forcedly.
"Here's to the boy," he said; "good luck, and
good health,
and," he added hastily, "please God he'll be a comfort to his mother."
"Amen," Julius said softly.
Dr. Knott contemplated the contents of his glass, for a moment, whether
critically or absently it would have been difficult to decide. But all the
harshness had gone out of his face, and his loose lips worked into a smile
pathetic in quality.
"To the baby.--And I venture to add a clause to your
invocation of that heartless jade, Dame Fortune. May he never lack good
courage and good friends. He will need both."
Julius March set down his wine untasted. He had received a very
disagreeable impression.
"Come, come, it appears to me, we are paying these honours in a
most lugubrious spirit," Mrs. Ormiston broke in. "I wish the
baby a long life and a merry one, in defiance of all prophecies and
traditions belonging to his paternal ancestry. Go on, Mr. March,
you're shamefully neglecting your duty. No heel taps."
She threw back her head, showing the whole of her white throat, drained
her glass and then flung it over her shoulder. It fell on the black,
polished boards, beyond the edge of the carpet, shivered into a hundred
pieces, that lay glittering, like scattered diamonds in the lamplight. For
the day had died altogether. Fleets of dark, straggling cloud chased each
other across spaces of pallid sky, against the earthward edge of which
dusky tree-tops strained and writhed in the force of the tearing
gale.
Mrs. Ormiston rose, laughing, from her place at table.
"That's the correct form," she said, "it ensures
the fulfilment of the wish. You ought all to have cast away your glasses
regardless of expense. Come, Mary, we will remove ourselves. Mind and bid
me good-bye before you go, Dr. Knott, and report on Lady Calmady.
It's probably the last time you'll have the felicity of seeing
me. I'm off at cock-crow to-morrow morning."
progressed. He wished his sister-in-law would be more correct in speech and behaviour. Then he held the conversation had been in bad taste. The doctor should have abstained from pressing Julius with questions. He assured himself, again, that the story was not worth a moment's serious consideration; yet he resented its discussion. Such discussion seemed to him to tread hard on the heels of impertinence to his sister, to her husband's memory, and to this boy, born to so excellent a position and so great wealth. And the worst of it was that, like a fool, he had started the subject himself!
"The wind's rising," he remarked at last.
"You'll have a rough drive home, Knott."
"It won't be the first one. And my beauty's of the
kind which takes a lot of spoiling."
The answer did not please the young man. He sauntered across the room
and dropped into his chair, with a slightly insolent demeanour.
"All the same, don't let me detain you," he said,
"if you prefer seeing Lady Calmady at once and getting
off."
"You don't detain me," Dr. Knott answered.
"I'm afraid it's just the other way about and that I must
detain you, Captain Ormiston, and that on rather unpleasant
business."
Julius March had risen to his feet. "You--you have no fresh
cause for anxiety about Lady Calmady?" he said hurriedly.
The doctor glanced up at the tall, spare, black figure and dark,
sensitive face with a half-sneering, half-pitying smile.
"Oh no, no!" he replied; "Lady Calmady's going
on splendidly. And it is to guard, just as far as we can, against cause for
anxiety later, that I want to speak to Captain Ormiston now. We've
got to be prepared for certain contingencies. Don't you go, Mr.
March. You may as well hear what I've to say. It will interest you
particularly, I fancy, after one or two things you have told us
to-night!"
"Sit down, Julius, please."--Ormiston would have liked
to maintain that same insolence of demeanour, but it gave before an
apprehension of serious issues. He looked hard at the doctor, cudgelling
his brains as to what the latter's enigmatic speech might
mean--divined, put the idea away as inadmissible, returned to it, then
said angrily:--"There's nothing wrong with the
child, of course?"
Dr. Knott turned his chair sideways to the table and shaded his face
with his thick, square hand.
"Well, that depends on what you call wrong," he slowly
replied.
"It's not ill?" Ormiston said.
"The baby's as well as you or I--better, in fact, than
I am, for I am confoundedly touched up with gout. Bear that in mind,
Captain Ormiston--that the child is well, I mean, not that I am gouty.
I want you to definitely remember that, you and Mr. March."
"Well, then, what on earth is the matter?" Ormiston asked
sharply. "You don't mean to imply it is injured in any way,
deformed?"
Dr. Knott let his hand drop on the table. He nodded his head. Ormiston
perceived, and it moved him strangely, that the doctor's eyes were
wet.
"Not deformed," he answered. "Technically you can
hardly call it that, but maimed."
"Badly?"
"Well, that's a matter of opinion. You or I should think it
bad enough, I fancy, if we found ourselves in the same boat." He
settled himself back in his chair.--"You had better understand
it quite clearly," he continued, "at least as clearly as I can
put it to you. There comes a point where I cannot explain the facts but
only state them. You have heard of spontaneous amputation?"
Across Ormiston's mind came the remembrance of a litter of puppies
he had seen in the sanctum of the veterinary surgeon of his regiment. A
lump rose in his throat.
"Yes, go on," he said.
"It is a thing that does not happen once in most men's
experience. I have only seen one case before in all my practice and that
was nothing very serious. This is an extraordinary example. I need not
remind you of Sir Richard Calmady's accident and the subsequent
operation?"
"Of course not--go on," Ormiston repeated.
"In both cases the leg is gone from here," the doctor
continued, laying the edge of his palm across the thigh immediately above
the knee. "The foot is there--that is the amazing part of
it--and, as far as I can see, is well formed and of the normal size,
but so embedded in the stump that I cannot discover whether the
ankle-joint and bones of the lower leg exist in a contracted form or
not."
Ormiston poured himself out a glass of port. His hand shook so that the
lip of the decanter chattered against the lip of the glass. He gulped down
the wine and, getting up, walked the length of the room and back again.
"God in heaven," he murmured, "how horrible! Poor
Kitty, how utterly horrible!--Poor Kitty."
For the baby, in his own fine completeness, he had as yet no feeling but
one of repulsion.
"Can nothing be done, Knott?" he asked at last.
"Obviously nothing."
"And it will live?"
"Oh! bless you, yes! It'll live fast enough if I know a
healthy infant when I see one. And I ought to know 'em by now.
I've brought them into the world by dozens for my sins."
"Will it be able to walk?"
"Umph--well--shuffle," the doctor answered,
smiling savagely to keep back the tears.
The young man leaned his elbows on the table, and rested his head on his
hands. All this shocked him inexpressibly--shocked him almost to the
point of physical illness. Strong as he was he could have fainted, just
then, had he yielded by ever so little. And this was the boy whom they had
so longed for then! The child on whom they had set such fond hopes, who was
to be the pride of his young mother, and restore the so rudely shaken
balance of her life! This was the boy who should go to Eton, and into some
crack regiment, who should ride straight, who was heir to great
possessions!
"The saviour has come, you see, Mr. March, in as
thorough-paced a disguise as ever saviour did yet," John Knott
said cynically.
"He had better never have come at all!" Ormiston put in
fiercely, from behind his hands.
"Yes--very likely--I believe I agree," the doctor
answered. "Only it remains that he has come, is feeding, growing,
stretching, and bellowing too, like a young bull-calf, when anything
doesn't suit him. He is here, very much here, I tell you. And so we
have just got to consider how to make the best of him, both for his own
sake and for Lady Calmady's. And you must understand he is a
splendid, little animal, clean skinned and strong, as you would expect,
being the child of two such fine young people. He is beautiful,--I am
old fashioned enough, perhaps scientific enough, to put a good deal of
faith in that notion,--beautiful as a child only can be who is born of
the passion of true lovers."
He paused, looking somewhat mockingly at Julius.
"Yes, love is an incalculably great, natural force," he
continued. "It comes uncommonly near working miracles at times,
unconscious and rather deplorable miracles. In this case it has worked
strangely against itself--at once for irreparable injury and for
perfection. For the child is perfect, is superb, but for the one
thing."
"Does my sister know?" Ormiston asked hoarsely.
"Not yet; and, as long as we can keep the truth from her she had
better not know. We must get her a little stronger, if we can, first. That
woman, Mrs. Denny, is worth her weight in gold, and her weight's not
inconsiderable. She has her wits about her, and has contrived to meet all
difficulties so far."
Ormiston sat in the same dejected attitude.
"But my sister is bound to know before long."
"Of course. When she is a bit better she'll want to have the
baby to play with, dress and undress it and see what the queer little being
is made of. It's a way young mothers have, and a very pretty way too.
If we keep the child from her she will grow suspicious, and take means to
find out for herself, and that won't do. It must not be. I
won't be responsible for the consequences. So as soon as she asks a
definite question, she must have a definite answer."
The young man looked up quickly.
"And who is to give the answer?" he said.
"Well, it rests chiefly with you to decide that. Clearly she ought
not to hear this thing from a servant. It is too serious. It needs to be
well told--the whole kept at a high level, if you understand me. Give
Lady Calmady a great part and she will play it nobly. Let this come upon
her from a mean, wet-nurse, hospital-ward sort of level, and
it may break her. What we have to do is to keep up her pluck. Remember we
are only at the beginning of this business yet. In all probability there
are many years ahead. Therefore this announcement must come to Lady Calmady
from an educated person, from an equal, from somebody who can see all round
it. Mrs. Ormiston tells me she leaves here to-morrow
morning?"
"Mrs. Ormiston is out of the question anyhow," Roger
exclaimed rather bitterly.
Here Julius March, who had so far been silent, spoke, and, in speaking,
showed what manner of spirit he was of. The doctor agitated him, treated
him, moreover, with scant courtesy. But Julius put this aside. He could
afford to forget himself in his desire for any possible mitigation of the
blow which must fall on Katherine Calmady. And, listening to his talk, he
had, in the last quarter of an hour, gained conviction not only of this
man's ability, but of his humanity, of his possession of the peculiar
gentleness which so often, mercifully, goes along with unusual strength. As
the coarse-looking hand could soothe, touching delicately, so the
hard intellect and rough tongue could,
he believed, modulate themselves to very consoling and inspiring tenderness of thought and speech.
"We have you, Dr. Knott," he said. "No one, I think,
could better break this terrible sorrow to Lady Calmady, than
yourself."
"Thank you--you are generous, Mr. March," the other
answered cordially; adding to himself:--"Got to revise my
opinion of the black coat. Didn't quite deserve that after the way
you've badgered him, eh, John Knott?"
He shrugged his big shoulders a little shamefacedly.
"Of course, I'd do my best," he continued. "But
you see ten to one I shan't be here at the moment. As it is, I have
neglected lingering sicknesses and sudden deaths, hysterical girls, croupy
children, broken legs, and all the other pretty little amusements of a
rather large practice, waiting for me. Suppose I happen to be twenty miles
away on the far side of Westchurch, or seeing after some of Lady
Fallowfeild's numerous progeny engaged in teething or measles? Lady
Calmady might be kept waiting, and we cannot afford to have her kept
waiting in this crisis."
"I wish to God my aunt, Mrs. St. Quentin, was here!"'
Ormiston exclaimed. "But she is not, and won't be,
alas!"
"Well, then, who remains?"
As the doctor spoke he pressed his fingers against the edge of the
table, leaned forward, and looked keenly at Ormiston. He was extremely ugly
just then, ugly as the weather-worn gargoyle on some mediæval
church tower, but his eyes were curiously compelling.
"Good heavens! you don't mean that I've got to tell
her?" Ormiston cried.
He rose hurriedly, thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked a
little unsteadily across to the window, crunching the shining pieces of
Mrs. Ormiston's sacrificial wine glass under foot. Outside the night
was very wild. In the colourless sky stars reeled among the fleets of
racing cloud. The wind hissed up the grass slopes and shouted among the
great trees crowning the ridge of the hill. The prospect was not calculated
to encourage. Ormiston turned his back on it. But hardly more encouraging
was the sombre, grey-blue-walled room. The vision of all that
often returned to him afterwards in very different scenes--the tall
lamps, the two men, so strangely dissimilar in appearance and temperament,
sitting on either side the dinner-table with its fine linen and
silver, wines and fruits, waiting. silently for him to speak.
"I can't tell her," he said, "I can't.
Damn it all, I tell you,
Knott, I daren't. Think what it will be to her! Think of being told that about your own child!"--Ormiston lost control of himself. He spoke violently. "I'm so awfully fond of her and proud of her," he went on. "She's behaved so splendidly ever since Richard's death, laid hold of all the business, never spared herself, been so able and so just. And now the baby coming, and being a boy, seemed to be a sort of let up, a reward to her for all her goodness. To tell her this horrible thing will be like doing her some hideous wrong. If her heart has to be broken, in common charity don't ask me to break it."
There was a pause. He came back to the table and stood behind Julius
March's chair.
"It's asking me to be hangman to my own sister," he
said.
"Yes, I know it is a confoundedly nasty piece of work. And
it's rough on you, very rough. Only, you see, this hanging has to be
put through--there's the nuisance. And it is just a question
whether your hand won't be the lightest after all."
Again silence obtained, but for the rush and sob of the gale against the
great house.
"What do you say, Julius?" Ormiston demanded at last.
"I suppose our only thought is for Katherine--for Lady
Calmady?" he said. "And in that case I agree with Dr.
Knott."
Roger took another turn to the window, stood there awhile struggling
with his natural desire to escape from so painful an embassy.
"Very well, if you are not here, Knott, I undertake to tell
her," he said at last. "Please God, she mayn't turn
against me altogether for bringing her such news. I'll be on hand for
the next few days, and--you must explain to Denny that I am to be sent
for whenever I am wanted. That's all--I suppose we may as well
go now, mayn't we?"
Julius knelt at the faldstool, without the altar rails of the chapel,
till the light showed faintly through the grisaille of the
stained-glass windows and outlined the spires and carven canopies of
the stalls. At first his prayers were definite, petitions for mercy and
grace to be outpoured on the fair, young mother and her, seemingly, so
cruelly afflicted child; on himself, too, that he might be permitted to
stay here, and serve her through the difficult future. If she had been
sacred before, Katherine was doubly sacred to him now. He bowed himself, in
reverential awe, before the thought of her martyrdom. How
would her proud and naturally joyous spirit bear the bitter pains of it? Would it make, eventually, for evil or for good? And then--the ascetic within him asserting itself, notwithstanding the widening of outlook produced by the awakening of his heart--he was overtaken by a great horror of that which we call matter; by a revolt against the body, and those torments and shames, mental, moral, and physical, which the body brings along with it. Surely the dualists were right? It was unregenerate, a thing, if made by God, yet wholly fallen away from grace and given over to evil, this fleshly envelope wherein the human soul is seated, and which, even in the womb, may be infected by disease or rendered hideous by mutilation? Then, as the languor of his long vigil overcame him, he passed into an ecstatic contemplation of the state of that same soul after death, clothed with a garment of incorruptible and enduring beauty, dwelling in clear, luminous spaces, worshipping among the ranks of the redeemed, beholding its Lord God face to face.
John Knott, meanwhile, after driving home beneath the reeling stars,
through the roar of the forest and shriek of the wind across the open
moors, found an urgent summons awaiting him. He spent the remainder of that
night, not in dreams of paradise and of spirits redeemed from the thraldom
of the flesh, but in increasing the population of this astonishing planet,
by assisting to deliver a scrofulous, half-witted, shrieking
servant-girl of twins--illegitimate--in the fusty
atmosphere of a cottage garret, right up under the rat-eaten
thatch.
adjoining nursery, and, sometimes, the lusty protestations of her baby when--as John Knott had put it--"things didn't suit him." She felt a little jealous of the comely, young wet-nurse, a little desirous to be more intimately acquainted with this small, new Richard Calmady, on whom all her hopes for the future were set. But, immediately, she was very submissive to the restrictions laid by Denny and the doctor upon her intercourse with the child. She only stood on the threshold of motherhood as yet. While the inevitable exhaustion, following on the excitement of her spring and summer of joy, her autumn of bitter sorrow, and her winter of hard work, asserted itself now that she had time and opportunity for rest.
The hangings and coverlet of the great, ebony, half-tester bed
were lined with rose silk, and worked, with many coloured worsteds on a
white ground, in the elaborate Persian pattern so popular among industrious
ladies of leisure in the reign of good Queen Anne. It may be questioned
whether the parable, wrought out with such patience of innumerable
stitches, was closely comprehensible or sympathetic to the said ladies;
since a particularly wide interval, both of philosophy and practice, would
seem to divide the temper of the early eighteenth century from that of the
mystic East. Still the parable was there, plain to whoso could read it; and
not--perhaps rather pathetically--without its modern
application.
The Powers of Evil, in the form of a Leopard, pursue the soul of man,
symbolised by a Hart, through the Forest of This Life. In the midst of that
same forest stands an airy, domed pavilion, in which--if so be it have
strength and fleetness to reach it--the panting, hunted creature may,
for a time, find security and repose. Above this resting-place the
trees of the forest interlace their spreading branches, loaded with amazing
leaves and fruit; while companies of rainbow-hued birds, standing
very upright upon nothing in particular, entertain themselves by holding
singularly indigestible looking cherries and mulberries in their yellow
beaks.
And so, Katherine, resting in dreamy quiet within the shade of the
embroidered curtains, was even as the Hart pasturing in temporary security
before the quaint pavilion. The mark of her bereavement was upon her
sensibly still--would be so until the end. Often in the night, when
Denny had at last left her, she would wake suddenly and stretch her arms
out across the vacant space of the wide bed, calling softly to the beloved
one who could give no answer, and then, recollecting, would sob herself
again to sleep. Often, too, as Ormiston's step sounded
through the Chapel-Room when he came to pay her those short, frequent visits, bringing the clean freshness of the outer air along with him, Katherine would look up in a wondering gladness, cheating herself for an instant with unreasoning delight--look up, only to know her sorrow, and feel the knife turn in the wound. Nevertheless these days made, in the main, for peace and healing. On more than one occasion she petitioned that Julius March should come and read to her, choosing, as the book he should read from, Spenser's Faerie Queene. He obeyed, in manner calm, in spirit deeply moved. Katherine spoke little. But her charm was great, as she lay, her eyes changeful in colour as a moorland stream, listening to those intricate stanzas, in which the large hope, the pride of honourable deeds, the virtue, the patriotism, the masculine fearlessness, the ideality, the fantastic imagination, of the English Renaissance so nobly finds voice. They comforted her mind, set by instinct and training to welcome all splendid adventures of romance, of nature, and of faith. They carried her back, in dear remembrance, to the perplexing and enchanting discoveries which Richard Calmady's visit to Ormiston Castle--the many-towered, grey house looking eastward across the unquiet sea--had brought to her. And specially did they recall to her that first evening--even yet she grew hot as she thought of it--when the supposed gentleman-jockey, whom she had purposed treating with gay and reducing indifference, proved not only fine scholar and fine gentleman, but absolute and indisputable master of her heart.
Dr. Knott came to see her, too, almost daily--rough,
tender-hearted, humorous, dependable, never losing sight, in his
intercourse with her, of the matter in hand, of the thing which immediately
is.
Thus did these three men, each according to his nature and capacity,
strive to guard the poor Hart, pasturing before the quaint pavilion,
set--for its passing refreshment--in the midst of the Forest of
This Life, and to keep, just so long as was possible, the pursuing Leopard
at bay. Nevertheless the Leopard gained, despite of their faithful
guardianship--which was inevitable, the case standing as it did.
For one bright afternoon, about three o'clock, Mrs. Denny arrived
in the gun-room, where Ormiston sat smoking, while talking over with
Julius the turf-cutting claims of certain squatters on Spendle
Flats--arrived, not to summon the latter to further readings of the
great Elizabethan poet, but to say to the former:--
"Will you please come at once, sir? Her ladyship is sitting
up. She is a little difficult about the baby--only, you know, sir, if I can say it with all respect, in her pretty, teasing way. But I am afraid she must be told."
And Roger rose and went--sick at heart. He would rather have faced
an enemy's battery, vomiting out shot and shell, than gone up the
broad, stately staircase, and by the silent, sunny passage-ways, to
that fragrant, white-panelled room.
On the stands and tables were bowls full of clear-coloured,
spring flowers--early primrose, jonquil, and narcissus. A
wood-fire burned upon the blue-and-white tiled hearth.
And on the sofa, drawn up at right angles to it, Katherine sat, wrapped in
a grey, silk dressing-gown bordered with soft, white fur. She
flushed slightly as her brother came in, and spoke to him with an air of
playful apology.
"I really don't know why you should have been dragged up
here, just now, dear old man! It is some fancy of Denny's. I'm
afraid in the excess of her devotion she makes me rather a nuisance to you.
And now, not contented with fussing about me, she has taken to being
absurdly mysterious about the baby"--
She stopped abruptly. Something in the young man's expression and
bearing impressed her, causing her to stretch out her hands to him in swift
fear and entreaty.
"Oh, Roger!" she cried, "Roger--what is
it?"
And he told her, repeating, with but a few omissions, the statement made
to him by the doctor ten days ago. He dared not look at her while he spoke,
lest seeing her should unnerve him altogether.
Katherine was very still. She made no outcry. Yet her very stillness
seemed to him the more ominous, and the horror of the recital grew upon
him. His voice sounded to him unnaturally loud and harsh in the surrounding
quiet. Once her silken draperies gave a shuddering rustle--that was
all.
At last it was over. At last he dared to look at her. The colour and
youthful roundness had gone out of her face. It was grey as her dress,
fixed and rigid as a marble mask. Ormiston was overcome with a consuming
pity for her and with a violence of self-hatred. Hangman, and to his
own sister--in truth, it seemed to him to have come to that! He knelt
down in front of her, laying hold of both her knees.
"Kitty, can you ever forgive me for telling you this?" he
asked hoarsely.
Even in this extremity Katherine's inherent sweetness asserted
itself. She would have smiled, but her frozen lips refused. Her eyelids quivered a little and closed.
"I have nothing to forgive you, dear," she said.
"Indeed, it is good of you to tell me, since--since so it
is."
She put her hands upon his shoulders, gripping them fast, and bowed her
head. The little flames crackled, dancing among the pine logs, and the silk
of her dress rustled as her bosom rose and fell.
"It won't make you ill again?" Roger asked
anxiously.
Katherine shook her head.
"Oh no!" she said, "I have no more time for illness.
This is a thing to cure, as a cautery cures--to burn away all idleness
and self-indulgent, sick-room fancies. See, I am strong, I am
well."
She stood up, her hands slipping down from Ormiston's shoulders
and steadying themselves on his hands as he too rose. Her face was still
ashen, but purpose and decision had come into her eyes.
"Do this for me," she said, almost imperiously. "Go to
Denny, tell her to bring me the baby. She is to leave him with me. And tell
her, as she loves both him and me,--as she values her place here at
Brockhurst,--she is not to speak."
As he looked at her Ormiston turned cold. She was terrible just
then.
"Katherine," he said quickly, "what on earth are you
going to do?"
"No harm to my baby in any case--you need not be alarmed. I
am quite to be trusted. Only I cannot be reasoned with or opposed, still
less condoled with or comforted, yet. I want my baby, and I must have him,
here, alone, the doors shut--locked if I please."--Her lips
gave, the corners of her mouth drooped. And watching her Ormiston swore a
little under his breath.--"We have something to say to each
other, the baby and I," she went on, "which no one else may
hear. So do what I ask you, Roger. And come back--I may want
you--in about an hour, if I do not send for you before."
Alone with her child, Lady Calmady moved slowly across and bolted both
the nursery and the Chapel-Room doors. Then she drew a low stool up
in front of the fire and sat down, laying the infant upon her lap. It was a
delicious, dimpled creature, with a quantity of silky, golden-brown
hair, that curled in a tiny crest along the top of its head. It was but
half awake yet, the rounded cheeks pink with the comfort of food and
slumber. And as the beautiful, young mother, bending that set, ashen
face of hers above it, laid the child upon her knees, it stretched, clenching soft, baby fists and rubbing them into its blue eyes.
Katherine unwrapped the shawls, and took off one small garment after
another--delicate gossamer-like things of fine flannel, lawn
and lace, such as women's fingers linger over in the making with
tender joy. Once her resolution failed her. She wrapped the
half-dressed child in its white shawls again, rose from her place
and walked over to the sunny window, carrying it in the hollow of her
arm--it staring up, meanwhile, with the strange wonder of baby eyes,
and cooing, as though holding communication with gracious presences
haunting the moulded ceiling above. Katherine gazed at it for a few
seconds. But the little creature's serene content, its absolute
unconsciousness of its own evil fortune, pained her too greatly. She went
back, sat down on the stool again, and completed the task she had set
herself.
Then, the baby lying stark naked on her lap, she studied the fair,
little face, the pencilled eyebrows and fringed eyelids--dark like her
own,--the firm, rounded arms, the rosy-palmed hands, their
dainty fingers and finger-nails, the well-proportioned and
well-nourished body, without smallest mark or blemish upon it,
sound, wholesome, and complete. All these she studied long and carefully,
while the dancing glow of the firelight played over the child's
delicate flesh, and it extended its little arms in the pleasant warmth,
holding them up, as in act of adoration, towards those gracious unseen
presences, still, apparently, hovering above the flood of instreaming
sunshine against the ceiling overhead. Lastly she turned her eyes, with
almost dreadful courage, upon the mutilated, malformed limbs, upon the
feet--set right up where the knee should have been, thus dwarfing the
child by a fourth of his height. She observed them, handled, felt them.
And, as she did so, her mother-love, which, until now, had been but
a part and consequence--since the child was his gift, the crown and
outcome of their passion, his and hers--of the great love she bore her
husband, became distinct from that, an emotion by itself, heretofore
unimagined, pervasive of all her being. It had none of the sweet
self-abandon, the dear enchantments, the harmonising sense of safety
and repose, which that earlier passion had. This was altogether different
in character, and made quite other demands on mind and heart. For it was
fierce, watchful, anxious, violent with primitive instinct; the roots of it
planted far back in that unthinkable remoteness of time, when the fertile
womb of the great Earth Mother began to bring forth the first blind, simple
forms of
those countless generations of living creatures which, slowly differentiating themselves, slowly developing, have peopled this planet from that immeasurable past to the present hour. Love between man and woman must be forever young, even as Eros, Cupid, Krishna, are forever youthful gods. But mother-love is of necessity mature, majestic, ancient, from the stamp of primal experience which is upon it.
And so, at this juncture, realising that which her motherhood meant, her
immaturity, her girlhood, fell away from Katherine Calmady. Her life and
the purpose of it moved forward on another plane.
She bent down and solemnly kissed the unlovely, shortened limbs, not
once or twice but many times, yielding herself up with an almost voluptuous
intensity to her own emotion. She clasped her hands about her knees, so
that the child might be enclosed, over-shadowed, embraced on all
sides, by the living defences of its mother's love. Alone there, with
no witnesses, she brooded over it, crooned to it, caressed it with an
insatiable hunger of tenderness.
"And yet, my poor pretty, if we had both died, you and I, ten days
ago," she murmured, "how far better! For what will you say to
me when you grow older--to me who have brought you, without any asking
or will of yours, into a world in which you must always be at so cruel a
disadvantage? How will you bear it all when you come to face it for
yourself, and I can no longer shield you and hide you away as I can do now?
Will you have fortitude to endure, or will you become sour, vindictive,
misanthropic, envious? Will you curse the hour of your birth?"
Katherine bowed her proud head still lower.
"Ah! don't do that, my darling," she prayed in piteous
entreaty, "don't do that. For I will share all your trouble, do
share it even now, beforehand, foreseeing it, while you still lie smiling
unknowing of your own distress. I shall live through it many times, by day
and night, while you live through it only once. And so you must be
forbearing towards me, my dear one, when you come"--
She broke off abruptly, her hands fell at her sides, and she sat rigidly
upright, her lips parted, staring blankly at the dancing flames.
In repeating Dr. Knott's statement Ormiston had purposely
abstained from all mention of Richard Calmady's accident and its
tragic sequel. He could not bring himself to speak to Katherine of that.
Until now, dominated by the rush of her
emotion, she had only recognised the bare terrible fact of the baby's crippled condition, without attempting to account for it. But, now, suddenly the truth presented itself to her. She understood that she was herself, in a sense, accountable--that the greatness of her love for the father had maimed the child.
As she realised the profound irony of the position, a blackness of
misery fell upon Katherine. And then, since she was of a strong, undaunted
spirit, an immense anger possessed her, a revolt against nature which could
work such wanton injury, and against God, who, being all-powerful,
could sit by and permit it so to work. All the foundations of faith and
reverence were, for the time being, shaken to the very base.
She gathered the naked baby up against her bosom, rocking herself to and
fro in a paroxysm of rebellious grief.
"God is unjust!" she cried aloud. "He takes pleasure
in fooling us. God is unjust!"
only to an unusually powerful character. And there was now just such underlying energy in Katherine's expression. Her eyes were dark, as a clear, midnight sky is dark, her beautiful lips compressed, but with concentration of purpose not with weakness of sorrow. The force of her motherhood had awakened in Katherine a latent, titanic element. Like "Prometheus Bound," chained to the rock, torn, her spirit remained unquelled. For good or evil--as the event should prove--she defied the gods.
And something of all this--though he would have worded it very
differently in the vernacular of passing fashion--Ormiston perceived.
She was unbroken by that which had occurred, and for this he was thankful.
But she was another woman to her who had greeted him in pretty apology an
hour ago. Yet, even recognising this, her first words produced in him a
shock of surprise.
"Is that horse, the Clown, still at the stables?" she
asked.
Ormiston thrust his hands into his pockets, and, sitting on the edge of
the sofa with his knees apart, stared down at the carpet. The mention of
the Clown always cut him, and raised in him a remorseful anger.--Yes
she was like his father, going straight to the point, he thought. And, in
this case, the point was acutely painful to him personally.
Ormiston's moral courage had been severely taxed, and he had a fair
share of the selfishness common to man. It was all very well, but he wished
to goodness she had chosen some other subject than this. Yet he must
answer.
"Yes," he said; "Willy Taylor has been leading the
gallops for the two-year-olds on him for the last
month."--He paused. "What about the Clown?"
"Only that I should be glad if you would tell Chifney he must find
some other horse to lead the gallops."
Ormiston turned his head. "I see--you wish the horse
sold," he said, over his shoulder.
Katherine looked down at the sleeping baby, its round head, crowned by
that delicious crest of silky hair, cuddled in against her breast. Then she
looked in her brother's eyes full and steadily.
"No," she answered. "I don't want it sold. I
want it shot--by you, here, to-night."
"By Jove!" the young man exclaimed, rising hastily and
standing in front of her.
Katherine gazed up at him, and held the child a little closer to her
breast.
"I have been alone with my baby. Don't you suppose I see how
it has come about?" she asked.
"Oh, damn it all!" Ormiston cried. "I prayed at least
you might be spared thinking of that."
He flung himself down on the sofa again--while the baby clenching
its tiny fist, stretched and murmured in its sleep--and bowed himself
together, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.
"I'm at the bottom of it. It's all my fault," he
said. "I am haunted by the thought of that day and night, for, if
ever one man loved another, I loved Richard. And yet if I hadn't been
so cursedly keen about the horse all this might never have happened. Oh! if
you only knew how often I've wished myself dead since that ghastly
morning. You must hate me, Kitty. You've cause enough. Yet how the
deuce could I foresee what would come about?"
For the moment Katherine's expression softened. She laid her left
hand very gently on his bowed head.
"I could never hate you, dear old man," she said. "You
are innocent of Richard's death. But this last thing is
different."--Her voice became fuller and deeper in tone.
"And whether I am equally innocent of his child's
disfigurement, God only knows--if there is a God, which perhaps, just
now, I had better doubt, lest I should blaspheme too loudly, hoping my
bitter words may reach His hearing."
Yet further disturbed in the completeness of its comfort, as it would
seem, by the seriousness of her voice, the baby's mouth puckered. It
began to fret. Katherine rose and stood rocking it, soothing it--a
queenly, young figure in her clinging grey and white draperies, which the
instreaming sunshine touched, as she moved, to a delicate warmth of
colour.
"Hush, my pretty lamb," she crooned--and then softly
yet fiercely to Ormiston:--"You understand, I wish it. The
Clown is to be shot."
"Very well," he answered.
"Sleep--what troubles you, my precious," she went on.
"I want it done, now, at once.--Hush, baby, hush.--The sun
shall not go down upon my wrath, because my wrath shall be somewhat
appeased before the sunset."
Katherine swayed with a rhythmic motion, holding the baby a little away
from her in her outstretched arms.
"Tell Chifney to bring the horse up to the square lawn, here,
right in front of the house.--Hush, my kitty sweet.--He is to
bring the horse himself. None of the stable boys or helpers are
to come. It is not to be an entertainment, but an execution. I wish it done quietly."
"Very well," Ormiston repeated. He hesitated, strong protest
rising to his lips, which he could not quite bring himself to utter.
Katherine, the courage and tragedy of her anger, dominated him as she moved
to and fro in the sunshine soothing her child.
"You know it's a valuable horse?" he remarked, at
last, tentatively.
"So much the better. You do not suppose I should care to take that
which costs me nothing? I am quite willing to pay.--Sleep, my pet,
so--is that better?--I do not propose to defraud--hush, baby
darling, hush--Richard's son of any part of his inheritance.
Tell Chifney to name a price for the Clown, an outside price. He shall have
a cheque to-morrow, which he is to enter with the rest of the stable
accounts.--Now go, please. We understand each other clearly, and it is
growing late.--Poor honey love, what vexes you?--You will shoot
the Clown, here, before sunset. And, Roger, it must lie where it falls
to-night. Let some of the men come early to-morrow, with a
float. It is to go to the kennels."
Ormiston got up, shaking his shoulders as though to rid himself of some
encumbering weight. He crossed to the fire-place and kicked the logs
together.
"I don't half like it," he said. "I tell you I
don't. It seems such a cold-blooded butchery. I can't
tell if it's wrong or right. It seems merciless. And it is so unlike
you, Kitty, to be merciless."
He turned to her as he spoke, and Katherine--her head erect, her
eyes full of the sombre fire of her profound alienation and
revolt--drew her hand slowly down over the fine lawn and lace of the
baby's long, white robe, and held it flat against the soles of the
child's hidden feet.
"Look at this," she said. "Remember, too, that the
delight of my life has gone from me, and that I am young yet. The years
will be many--and Richard is dead. Has much mercy been shown to me, do
you think?"
And the young man seeing her, knowing the absolute sincerity of her
speech, felt a lump rise in his throat. After all, when you have acted
hangman to your own sister, as he reasoned, it is but a small matter to act
slaughterman to a horse.
"Very well," he answered, huskily enough. "It shall be
as you wish, Kitty. Only go back to the sofa, and stay there, please. If I
think you are watching, I can't be quite sure of
myself. Something may go wrong, and we don't want a scene which will make talk. This is a business which should be got through as quickly and decently as possible."
The sun was but five minutes high and no longer brightened the southern
house-front, though it spread a ruddy splendour over the western
range of gables, and lingered about the stacks of slender, twisted
chimneys, and cast long, slanting shadows across the lawns and carriage
drives, before Lady Calmady's waiting drew to a close. From the near
trees of the elm avenue, and from the wood overhanging the pond below the
terraced kitchen-gardens, came the singing of blackbirds and
thrushes--whether raised as evening hymn in praise of their Creator,
or as love-song each to his mate, who shall say? Possibly as both,
since in simple minds--and that assuredly is matter for
thankfulness--earthly and heavenly affections are bounded by no harsh
dividing line. The chorus of song found its way in at the windows of
Katherine's room--fresh as the spring flowers which filled it,
innocent of hatred and wrong as the face of the now placid baby, his soft
cheeks flushed with slumber, as he nestled in against his mother's
bosom.
Indeed a long time had passed. Twice Denny had looked in and, seeing
that quiet reigned, had noiselessly withdrawn. For Katherine, still
physically weak, drained, moreover, by the greatness of her recent emotion,
her senses lulled to rest by the warm contact and even breathing of the
child, had sunk away into a dreamless sleep.
The questioning neigh of a stallion, a scuffle of horse hoofs, footsteps
approaching round the corner of the house, passing across the broad,
gravelled, carriage sweep and on to the turf, aroused her. And these sounds
were so natural, full of vigorous outdoor life and the wholesome gladness
of it, that for a moment she came near repentance of her purpose. But then
feeling, as he rested on her arm, her baby's shortened, malformed
limbs, and thinking of her well-beloved dying, maimed and spent, in
the fulness of his manhood, her face took on that ashen pallor again and
all relenting left her. There was a satisfaction of wild justice in the act
about to be consummated. And Katherine raised herself from the pink,
brocade cushions and sat erect, her lips parted in stern excitement, her
forehead contracted in the effort to hear, her eyes fixed on the wide,
carven, ebony bed and its embroidered hangings. The poor Hart had, indeed,
ceased to pasture in reposeful security before the quaint pavilion,
set--for its passing refreshment--in the midst of the Forest of
This Life. Now it fled, desperate, by crooked, tangled ways, over
rocks, through briars, while Care, the Leopard, followed hard behind.
First Roger Ormiston's voice reached her in brief direction, and
the trainer's in equally brief reply. The horse neighed again--a
sound strident and virile, the challenge of a creature of perfect muscle,
hot desire, and proud, quick-coursing blood. Afterwards, an
instant's pause, and Chifney's voice
again--"So-ho--my beauty--take it
easy--steady there, steady, good lad"--and the slap of his
open hand on the horse's shoulder straightening it carefully into
place. While, behind and below all this, in sweet incongruous undertone of
uncontrollable joy, arose the carolling of the blackbirds and thrushes
praising, according to their humble powers, God, life, and love.
Finally, as climax of the drama, the sharp report of a pistol, ringing
out in shattering disturbance of the peace of the fair spring evening,
followed by a dead silence, the birds all scared and dumb--a silence
so dead, that Katherine Calmady held her breath, almost awed by it, while
the hissing and crackling of the little flames upon the hearth seemed to
obtrude as an indecent clamour. This lasted a few seconds. Then the noise
of a plunging struggle and the muffled thud of something falling heavily
upon the turf.
Dr. Knott had been up all night. But his patient, Lord Denier's
second coachman, would pull through right enough, so he started on his
homeward journey in a complacent frame of mind. He reckoned it would save
him a couple of miles, let alone the long hill from Farley Row up to
Spendle Flats, if on his way back from Grimshott he went by Brockhurst
House. It is stretching a point, he admitted, to drive under even your
neighbour's back windows at five o'clock in the morning. But
the doctor being himself unusually amiable, was inclined to accredit others
with a like share of good temper. Moreover, the natural man in him cried
increasingly loudly for food and bed.
John Knott was not given to sentimental rhapsodies over the beauties of
nature. Like other beauties she had her dirty enough moods, he thought.
Still, in his own half-snarling fashion, he dearly loved this forest
country in which he had been born and bred, while he was too keen a
sportsman to be unobservant of any aspect of wind and weather, any movement
of bird or beast. With the collar of his long, drab driving-coat
turned up about his ears, and the stem of a well-coloured,
meerschaum pipe between his teeth, he sat huddled together in the high,
swinging gig, with Timothy, the weasel-faced, old groom, by his
side, while the pageant of the opening day unfolded itself
before his somewhat critical gaze. He noted that it would be fine, though windy. In the valley, over the Long Water, spread beds of close, white mist. The blue of the upper sky was crossed by curved winrows of flaky, opalescent cloud. In the east, above the dusky rim of the fir woods on the edge of the high-lying tableland, stretched a blinding blaze of rose-saffron, shading through amber into pale primrose-colour above. The massive house-front, and the walls fencing the three sides of the square enclosure before it, with the sexagonal, pepper-pot summer-houses at either corner, looked pale and unsubstantial in that diffused, unearthly light. At the head of the elm avenue, passing through the high, wrought-iron gates and along the carriage drive which skirts the said enclosure,--the great, square grass plot on the right hand, the red wall of the kitchen-gardens on the left,--Dr. Knott had the reins nearly jerked out of his hand. The mare started and swerved, grazing the off wheel against the brickwork, and stopped, her head in the air, her ears pricked, her nostrils dilated showing the red.
"Hullo, old girl, what's up? Seen a ghost?" he said,
drawing the whip quietly across the hollow of her back.
But the mare only braced herself more stiffly, refusing to move, while
she trembled and broke into a sudden sweat. The doctor was interested and
looked about him. He would first find out the cause of her queer behaviour,
and give her a good dressing down afterwards if she deserved it.
The smooth, slightly up-sloping lawn was powdered with
innumerable dewdrops. In the centre of it, neck outstretched, the fine legs
doubled awkwardly together, the hind quarters and barrel rising, as it lay
on its side, in an unshapely lump, grey from the drenching dew, was a dead
horse. Along the top of the farther wall a smart and audacious party of
jackdaws had stationed themselves, with much ruffling of grey, neck
feathers, impudent squeakings and chatter. While a pair of carrion crows
hopped slowly and heavily about the carcass, flapping up with a stroke or
two of their broad wings in sudden suspicion, then settling down again
nearer than before.
"Go to her head, Timothy, and get her by as quietly as you can.
I'll be after you in a minute, but I'm bound to see what the
dickens they've been up to here."
As he spoke Dr. Knott hitched himself down from off the gig. He was
cramped with sitting, and moved forward awkwardly, his footsteps leaving a
track of dark irregular patches upon the damp grass. As he approached, the
jackdaws flung themselves gleefully upward from the wall, the sun glinting
on their glossy
plumage as they circled and sailed away across the park. But the crow, who had just begun work in earnest, stood his ground notwithstanding the warning croak of his more timid mate. He grasped the horse's skull with his claws, and tore away greedily at the fine skin about the eye-socket with his strong, black beak.
"How's this, my fine gentleman, in too much of a hurry this
morning to wait for the flavour to get into your meat?" John Knott
said, as the bird rose sullenly at last. "Got a small hungry family
at home, I suppose, crying 'give, give.' Well, that's
taught better men than you, before now, not to be too nice, but to snatch
at pretty well anything they can get."
He came close and stood looking meditatively down at the dead
racehorse--recognised its long, white-reach face, the colour
and make of it, while his loose lips worked with a contemptuous yet pitying
smile.
"So that's the way my lady's taken it, has she?"
he said presently. "On the whole I don't know that I'm
sorry. In some cases much benefit unquestionably is derivable from letting
blood. This shows she doesn't mean to go under, if I know her, and
that's a mercy, for that poor, little beggar, the baby's
sake."
He turned and contemplated the stately facade of the house. The ranges
of windows, blind with closed shutters and drawn curtains, in the early
sunshine gave off their many panes a broad dazzle of white light.
"Poor, little beggar," he repeated, "with his forty
thousand a year and all the rest of it. Such a race to run and yet so badly
handicapped!"
He stooped down, examined the horse, found the mark of the bullet.
"Contradictory beings, though, these dear women," he went
on. "So fanciful and delicate, so sensitive you're afraid to
lay a finger on them. So unselfish, too, some of them, they seem too good
for this old rough and tumble of a world. And yet touch 'em home, and
they'll show an unscrupulous savagery of which we coarse brutes of
men should be more than half ashamed. God Almighty made a little more than
He bargained for when He made woman. She must have surprised Him pretty
shrewdly, one would think, now and then since the days of the apple and the
snake."
He moved away up the carriage drive, following Timothy, the sweating,
straining mare, and swinging gig. The carrion crow flapped back, with a
croak, and dropped on the horse's skull
again. Hearing that bodeful sound the doctor paused a moment, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and looked round at the bird and its ugly work set as foreground to that pure glory of the sunrises and the vast and noble landscape, misty valley, dewy grassland, far-ranging hillside crowned with wood.
"The old story," he muttered, "always repeating
itself! And it strikes one as rather a wasteful, clumsy contrivance, at
times. Life forever feeding on death--death forever breeding
life."
Thus ended the Clown, own brother to Touchstone, racehorse of merry name
and mournful memory, paying the penalty of wholly involuntary
transgressions. From which ending another era dated at Brockhurst, the most
notable events of which it is the purpose of the ensuing pages duly to set
forth.
Julius March would, how gladly, have been among the martyrs! But the lot
fell otherwise. And--always admitting the harshness of the limitations
he had imposed on himself--the martyrdom of those he held dearest,
did, in fact, work to secure him a measure of content that had otherwise
been unattainable. The twelve years following the birth of Lady
Calmady's child were the most fruitful of his life. He filled a post
no other person could have filled; one which, while satisfying his
religious sense and priestly ideal of detachment, appeased the cravings of
his heart and developed the practical man in him. The contemplative and
introspective attitude was balanced by an active and objective one. For he
continued to live under his dear lady's roof, seeing her daily and
serving her in many matters. He watched her, admiring her clear yet
charitable judgment and her prudence in business. He bowed in reverence
before her perfect singleness of purpose. He was almost appalled
apprehending, now and then, the secret abysses of her womanhood, the
immensity of her self-devotion, the swing of her nature from quick,
sensitive shrinking to almost impious
pride. Man is the outcome of the eternal common sense; woman that of some moment of divine folly. Meanwhile the ways of true love are many, and Julius March, thus watching his dear lady, discovered, as other elect souls have discovered before him, that the way of chastity and silence, notwithstanding its very constant heartache, is by no means among the least sweet. The entries in his diaries of this period are intermittent, concise, and brief--naturally enough, since the central figure of Julius's mental picture had ceased, happily for him, to be Julius himself.
And, not only Katherine's sorrows, but the unselfish action of
another woman, went to make Julius March's position at Brockhurst
tenable. A few days after Ormiston's momentous interview with his
sister, news came of Mrs. St. Quentin's death. She had passed hence
peacefully in her sleep. Knowledge of the facts of poor, little Dickie
Calmady's ill-fortune had been spared her. For it would be
more satisfactory--so Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had remarked, not
without a shade of irony--that if Lucia St. Quentin must learn the sad
fact at all, she should learn it where le bon
Dieu Himself would be at hand to explain matters, and so, in a
degree, set them right.
Early in April Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had gathered together her most
precious possessions and closed the pretty apartment in the rue de Rennes.
It had been a happy halting-place on the journey of life. It was
haunted by well-beloved ghosts. It cost her not a little to bid it,
the neighbouring church of the St. Germain des Près, where she had
so long worshipped, and her little coterie of
intimate friends, farewell. Yet she set forth, taking with her Henriette,
the hard-featured, old, Breton maid, and Monsieur
Pouf, the grey, Persian cat,--he protesting plaintively from
within a large, Manilla basket,--and thus accompanied, made pilgrimage
to Brockhurst. And when Katherine, all the lost joys of her girlhood
assailing her at sight of her lifelong friend, had broken down for once,
and, laying her beautiful head on the elder woman's shoulder, had
sobbed out a question as to when this visit must end, Marie de Mirancourt
had answered:--
"That, most dear one, is precisely as you shall see fit to decide.
It need not end till I myself end, if you so please."
And when Katherine, greatly comforted yet fearing to be
over-greedy of comfort, had reasoned with her, reminding her of the
difference of climate, the different habits of living in that gay, little,
Paris home and this great, English country-house; reminding her,
further, of her so often and fondly expressed desire to
retire from the world while yet in the complete possession of her powers and prepare for the inevitable close within the calm and sacred precincts of the convent--the other replied almost gaily:--
"Ah, my child! I have still a naughty little spirit of experiment
in me which defies the barbarities of your climate. While as to the
convent, it has beckoned so long--let it beckon still! It called first
when my fiancé died,--God rest
his
soul,--worn out by the hardships he endured in the war of La
Vendée, and I put from me, forever, all thought of marriage. But
then my mother, an emigrant here in London, claimed all my care. It called
me again when she departed, dear saintly being. But then there were my
brother's sons--orphaned by the guillotine--to place. And
when I had established them honourably, our beloved Lucia turned to me,
with her many enchantments and exquisite tragedy of the heart. And, now, in
my old age I come to you--whom I receive from her as a welcome
legacy--to remain just so long as I am not a burden to you. Second
childhood and first should understand one another. We will play delightful
games together, the dear baby and I. So let the convent beckon. For the
convent is perhaps, after all, but an impatient grasping at the rest of
paradise, before that rest is fairly earned. I have a good hope that, after
all, we give ourselves most acceptably to God in thus giving ourselves to
His human creatures."
Thus did Marie de Mirancourt, for love's sake, condemn herself to
exile, thereby rendering possible--among other
things--Julius's continued residence at Brockhurst. For Captain
Ormiston had held true to his resolve of scorning the delights of idleness,
the smiles of ladies more fair and kind than wise, and all those other
pleasant iniquities to which idleness inclines the young and
full-blooded, of bidding farewell to London and Windsor, and
proceeding to "live laborious days" in some far country. He had
offered to remain indefinitely with Katherine if she needed him. But she
refused. Let him be faithful to the noble profession of arms and make a
name for himself therein.
"Brockhurst has ceased to be a place for a soldier," she
said. "Leave it to women and priests!" And then, repenting of
the bitterness of her speech, she added:--"Really there is
not more work than I can manage, with Julius to help me at times. Iles is a
good servant if a little tediously pompous, and Chifney must see to the
stables."--Lady Calmady paused, and her face grew hard. But for
her husband's dying request, she would have sold every horse in the
stud, razed the great square
of buildings to the ground and made the site of it a dunghill.--"Work is a drug to deaden thought. So it is a kindness to let me have plenty of it, dear old man. And I fear, even when the labour of each day is done, and Dickie is safe asleep,--poor darling,--I shall still have more than enough of time for thought, for asking those questions to which there seems no answer, and for desires, vain as they are persistent, that things were somehow, anyhow, other than they are!"
Therefore it came about that a singular quiet settled down on
Brockhurst--a quiet of waiting, of pause, rather than of
accomplishment. But Julius March, for reasons aforesaid, and Mademoiselle
de Mirancourt, in virtue of her unclouded faith in the teachings of her
Church,--which assures its members of the beneficent purpose working
behind all the sad seeming of this world,--alike rejoiced in that. A
change of occupations and of interests came naturally with the change of
the seasons, with the time to sow and reap, to plant saplings, to fell
timber, to fence, to cut copsing, to build or rebuild, to receive rents or
remit them, to listen to many appeals, to readjust differences, to feed
game or to shoot it, to bestow charity of meat and fuel, to haul ice in
winter to the ice-house from the lake. But beyond all this there was
little of going or coming at Brockhurst. The magnates of the countryside
called at decent intervals, and at decent intervals Lady Calmady returned
their civilities. But having ceased to entertain, she refused to receive
entertainment. She shut herself away in somewhat jealous seclusion, defiant
of possibly curious glances and pitying tongues. Before long her
neighbours, therefore, came to raise their eyebrows a little in speaking of
her, and to utter discreet regrets that Lady Calmady, though handsome and
charming when you met her, was so very eccentric,
adding:--"Of course everyone knows there is something very
uncomfortable about the little boy!" Then would follow confidences as
to the disastrous results of popish influences and Romanising tendencies,
and an openly expressed conviction--more especially on the part of
ladies blessed with daughters of marriageable age--that it would have
been so very much better for many people if the late Sir Richard Calmady
had looked nearer home for a bride.
But these comments did not affect Katherine. In point of fact they
rarely reached her ears. Alone among her neighbours, Mary Cathcart, of the
crisp, black hair and gipsy-like complexion, was still admitted to
some intimacy of intercourse. And the girl was far too loyal either to
bring in gossip or to carry it out. Brockhurst held the romance of her
heart. And, notwithstand-
ing the earnest wooing--as the years went on--of more than one very eligible gentleman, Brockhurst continued to hold it.
Meanwhile the somewhat quaint fixed star around which this whole system
of planets, large and small, very really revolved, shone forth upon them
all with a cheerful enough light. For Dickie by no means belied the promise
of his babyhood. He was a beautiful and healthy little boy, with a charming
brilliance of colouring, warm and solid in tone. He had his mother's
changeful eyes, though the blue of them was brighter than hers had now come
to be. He had her dark eyebrows and eyelashes too, and her finely curved
lips. While he bore likeness to his father in the straight,
square-tipped nose and the close-fitting cap of bright, brown
hair with golden stains in it, growing low in short curling locks on the
broad forehead and the nape of the neck--expressing the shape of the
head very definitely, and giving it something of antique nobility and
grace.
And the little lad's appearance afforded, in these pleasant early
days at all events, fair index to his temperament. He was
gay-natured, affectionate, intelligent, full of a lively yet
courteous curiosity, easily moved to laughter, almost inconveniently
fearless and experimental; while his occasional thunderbursts of passion
cleared off quickly into sunshine and blue sky again. For as yet the burden
of deformity rested upon him very lightly. He associated hardly at all with
other children, and so had but scant occasion to measure his poor powers of
locomotion against their normal ones. Lady Fallowfeild it is true, in
obedience to suggestions on the part of her kindly lord and master, offered
tentatively to import a carriage-load--little Ludovic Quayle
was just the same age as Dickie--from the Whitney nurseries to spend
the day at Brockhurst.
"Good fellow, Calmady. I liked Calmady," Lord Fallowfeild
had said to her. His conversation, it may be observed, was nothing if not
interjectional.--"Pretty woman, Lady Calmady--terrible
thing for her being left as she is. Always shall regret Calmady. Very sorry
for her. Always have been sorry for a pretty woman in trouble. Ought to see
something of her, my dear. The two estates join, and, as I always have
said, it's a duty to support your own class. Can't expect the
masses to respect you unless you show them you're prepared to stand
by your own class. Just take some of the children over to see Lady Calmady.
Pretty children, do her good to see them. Rode uncommonly straight did
Calmady. Terribly upsetting thing his funeral. Never shall forget it.
Always did like Calmady--good fellow, Calmady. Nasty thing his
death."
But Katherine's pen was fertile in excuses to avoid the invasion
from Whitney. Lady Fallowfeild's small brains and large domestic
complacency were too trying to her. And that noble lady, it must be owned,
was secretly not a little glad to have her advances thus firmly, though
gently, repulsed. For she was alarmed at Lady Calmady's reported
acquaintance with foreign lands and with books; added to which her simple
mind harboured much grisly though vague terror concerning the Roman Church.
Picture all her brood of little Quayles incontinently converted into little
monks and nuns with shaven heads! How such sudden conversion could be
accomplished Lady Fallowfeild did not presume to explain. It sufficed her
that "everybody always said Papists were so dreadfully clever and
unscrupulous you never could tell what they might not do next."
Once, when Dickie was about six years old, Colonel St. Quentin brought
his young wife and two little girls to stay at Brockhurst. Katherine had a
great regard for her cousin, yet the visit was never repeated. On the flat
poor Dick could manage fairly well, his strangely shod feet travelling
laboriously along in effort after rapidity; his hands hastily outstretched
now and again to lay hold of door-jamb or table-edge, since
his balance was none of the securest. But in that delightfully varied
journey from the nursery, by way of his mother's bedroom, the
Chapel-Room next door, the broad stair-head,--with its
carven balusters, shiny oak flooring, and fine landscapes by Claude and
Hobbema,--the state drawing-room and libraries, to that America
of his childish dreams, that country of magnificent distances and large
possibility of discovery, the Long Gallery, he was speedily distanced by
the three-year-old Betty, let alone her
six-year-old sister Honoria, a tall, slim, little maiden,
daintily high-bred of face and fleet of foot as a hind. This was bad
enough. But the stairways afforded yet more afflicting experiences. The
descent of even the widest and shallowest flights presented matter of
insuperable difficulty, while the ascent was only to be achieved by
recourse to all-fours, against the ignominy of which mode of
progression Dickie's soul revolted. And so the little boy concluded
that he did not care much about little girls. And confided to his devoted
play-fellow Clara--Mrs. Denny's niece and sometime second
still-room maid, now promoted, on account of her many engaging
qualities, to be Dickie's special
attendant--that:--
"They went so quick, they always left him behind, and it was not
nice to be left behind, and it was very rude of them to do it; didn't
Clara think so?"
the birds dwelling in the oak groves along Tiber valley; of the mystic
stigmata, marking as with nail-prints his hands and feet, and of
that indomitable love towards all creatures, which found, alike in the sun
in heaven and the heavy-laden ass, brothers and friends. Or she
would tell him of that man of mighty strength and stature, St. Christopher,
who, in the stormy darkness,--yielding to its reiterated
entreaties,--set forth to bear the little child across the
wind-swept ford. How he staggered, in midstream, amazed and
terrified under the awful weight of that, apparently so light, burden; to
learn, on struggling ashore at last, that he had borne upon his shoulder no
mortal infant, but the whole world and the eternal maker of it, Christ
Himself.
sojourning places of our race--tell him of the cow Audhumla, alone in
the vast plain at the very beginning of things, licking the stones crusted
over with hoar frost and salt, till, on the third day, there sprung from
them a warrior named Bur, the father of Bör, the father of Odin, who
is the father of all the gods. She would tell him of wicked Loki too, the
deceiver and cunning plotter against the peace of heaven. And of his three
evil children--here Dickie would, for what reason he knew not, always
feel his mother hold him more closely, while her voice took a deeper
tone--Fenrir the wolf, who, when Thor sought to bind him, bit off the
brave god's right hand; and Jörmungand the Midgard serpent, who,
tail in mouth, circles the world; and Hela, the pale queen, who reigns in
Niflheim over the dim kingdoms of the dead. And of Baldur the
bright-shining god, joy of Asgard, slain in error by Höder his
blind twin-brother, for whom all things on earth--save
one--weep, and will weep, till in the last days he comes again. And of
All-Father Odin himself, plucking out his right eye and bartering it
for a draught of wisdom-giving water from Mirmir's magic well.
Again, she would tell him of the End--which it must be owned
frightened Dickie a little, so that he would stroke her cheek, and say
softly:-- "But, mummy, you really are sure, aren't
you, it won't happen for a good while yet?"--Of
Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, of the Fimbul winter, and
cheerless sun and hurrying, blood-red moon, and all the direful
signs which must needs go before the last great battle between good and
evil.
Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he learned
even more than he taught, under this fire of cross-examination. He
had never come intimately in contact with a child's mind before; and
Dickie's daring speculations and suggestions opened up very
surprising vistas at times. The boy was a born adventurer, a gaily
audacious sceptic moreover, notwithstanding his large swallow for romance,
until his own morsel of reason and sense of dramatic fitness were
satisfied.
ness and languor which troubled Lady Calmady. The boy was
sweet-tempered enough, had his hours, indeed, of overflowing fun and
high spirits. Still he was restless and tired easily of each occupation in
turn. He developed a disquieting relish for solitude. And took to
camping-out on one of the broad window-seats of the Long
Gallery, in company with volumes of Captain Cook's and
Hakluyt's voyages, old-time histories of sport and natural
history; not to mention Robinson Crusoe and the merry if but doubtfully
decent pages of Geoffrey Gambado. And his mother noted, not without a
sinking of the heart, that the window-seat which in his solitary
moods Dickie most frequented was precisely that one of the eastern bay
which commanded--beyond the smooth, green expanse and red walls of the
troco-ground--a good view of the grass ride, running parallel
with the lime avenue, along which the horses from the racing-stables
were taken out and back, morning and evening, to the galloping ground. Then
fears began to assail Katherine that the boy's childhood, the content
and repose of it, were nearly past. Small wonder that her heart should
sink!
but I did not know if I ought--and yet I did not quite like to ask
Auntie Marie or Julius. And, of course, one doesn't speak to the
servants about anything of that sort."
once known love in all its completeness and its strength, of choice live
ever afterwards in perfect chastity of act and thought.
discipline of thirteen years had tamed the hot blood in her which made her
order out the Clown for execution. But as Ormiston spoke, her face
softened, her eyes grew luminous and smiled back at him with an exquisite
gladness. The soft gloom of her black, velvet dress emphasised the warm,
golden whiteness of her bare shoulders and arms. Ormiston seeing her just
then, understanding something of the drama of her thought, was moved from
his habitual cool indifference of bearing.
is only one man in the world, I fancy, whom Mary would ever care to
marry--poor Camp, did I tickle you?--and he, I believe, has not
asked her yet."
that stanza tells. And the battle was long and fierce, as, from out a
background of steeple-shaped, honey-combed rocks and sparse
trees with large, golden leaves--like those on the panels of the
great, lacquered cabinets in the Long Gallery--innumerable hordes of
fanatic Chinamen poured down on him, a hideous bedizenment of vermilion
war-devils painted on their blue tunics and banners and shields. And
he, Richard,--or was it he, Witherington?--alone facing them
all,--they countless in number, always changing yet always the same.
From under their hard, upturned hats, a peacock feather erect in each, the
cruel, oblique-eyed, impassive faces stared at him. They pressed him
back and back against the base of a seven-storied pagoda, the
wind-bells of which jangled far above him from the angles of its
tiers of fluted roofs. And the sky was black and polished. Yet it was
broad, glaring daylight, every object fearfully distinct. And he was fixed
there, unable to get away because--yes, of course, he was
Witherington, so there was no need of further explanation of that inability
of escape.
calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered
up and looked at the bird, and it crawled away among the cabbages
ignominiously, covered with the shame of its incompleteness and its fallen
estate.
in common with, and was nearer--far nearer--to the maimed
fighting-man of the old ballad, even to the poor sea-gull
robbed of its power of flight, than to all those dear people whose business
in life it seemed to pet and amuse him, and to minister to his every
want--to the handsome soldier uncle, whose home-coming had so
excited him, to Julius March, his indulgent tutor, to Mademoiselle de
Mirancourt, his delightful companion, to Clara, his obedient playfellow, to
brown-eyed Mary Cathcart, and even to his lovely mother herself!
needles. On the right, the fir wood is broken by coppices of
silver-stemmed birches, and spaces of heather--which shows a
purple-brown against the grey of the reindeer moss out of which it
springs. Tits swung and frolicked among the tree-tops, and a jay
flew off noisily with a flash of azure wing-coverts and volley of
harsh, discordant cries.
security, but his, just then, all too sensitive mind. So that,
notwithstanding a fine assumption of gaiety, as he kissed his hand in
return, he found the dear vision of his mother somewhat blurred by foolish
tears which he had resolutely to wink away.
night. This man had seemed so near him just now while they talked. Suddenly
he became remote again, all understanding of him shut away by that slight
insolence of bearing. Still he did as Richard prayed him. Miss Cathcart was
at home. She had just come in from riding.
come, and kissed the rough, Welsh pony refusing the grip by the roadside
long ago. The hint of a moustache emphasised the upturned corners of her
mouth--but that was rather captivating. Her eyes danced, under eyelids
which fluttered for the moment. She was not beautiful, not a woman to make
men run mad. Yet the comeliness of her body, and the spirit to which that
body served as index, was so unmistakably healthful, so sincere, that
surely no sane man, once gathering her into his arms, need ask a better
blessing.--"But," Ormiston went on, still watching her,
"nothing would satisfy Dick but he must see you. With many
injunctions regarding his safety, Katherine made him over to me for the
afternoon. I'm on duty, you see. Where he goes, I'm bound to go
also--even to the destruction of your poor tulips."
nothing spendthrift? You see I run through the list of my titles again to
make sure this transaction is fair and square and
above-board."
with a difference. There had been interludes that had contributed somewhat
freely to the peopling of that same locked-up room. But it is
possible for a man to love many times, yet always love one woman best.
and weary. On such occasions she would rally Julius March, not without a
touch of malice, saying:--
same magic flood--days when she had known of its existence only by the
mirage, born of the dazzle of its waters, which plays over the innocent,
vacant spaces of a young girl's mind.
surface of the moorland. He and Mary had bumped over fir roots and scuttled
down bridle-paths in the pony-carriage, to avoid the rush of
flame and smoke; had skirmished round at a hand gallop, in search of
recruits to reinforce Ormiston, and Iles, and a small army of beaters,
battling against the blazing line that threatened destruction to the fir
avenue. Now and again, with a mighty roar, which sent Dickie's heart
into his mouth, great tongues of flame, clear as topaz and ruby in the
steady sunshine, would leap upwards, converting a whole tall fir into a
tree of fire, while the beaters running back, grimed with smoke and sweat,
took a moment's breathing-space in the open.
fourth or fifth cast a fish rose, and he played it--with skirling reel
and much advice and most complimentary excitement on the part of the whole
good company--and brought it skilfully within range of Stamp's
landing-net. Never surely was trout spawned that begot such bliss in
the heart of an angler! As, with panting sides and open gills, this
three-quarter-pound treasure of treasures flopped about on
the sunny stream bank all the hereditary instinct of sport spoke up clearly
in Dickie. The boy--such is youthful masculine human
nature--believed he understood at last why the world was made! At
dressing-time he had his sacred fish carried on a plate up to his
room to show Clara; and, but for strong remonstrance on the part of that
devoted handmaiden, would have kept it by his bedside all night, so as to
assure himself at intervals, by sense of touch--let alone that of
smell--of the adorable fact of its veritable existence.
recurrent ring of an axe came from somewhere away in the fir plantations,
and the strident rasping of a saw from the wood-yard in the beech
grove near the house.
hard hat. His right eye had suffered damage, and the pupil of it was white
and viscous. His lips were straight and purplish in colour. He raised his
hat and would have followed on down the slope, but Dickie called to
him.
was sweet indeed. For there remains rich harvest of poetry in all sport
worth the name, let squeamish and sentimental persons declaim against it as
they may. Strength and endurance, disregard of suffering, have a permanent
appeal and value, even in their coarsest manifestations. No doubt the noble
gentlemen of the neighbourhood, who "lay at Brockhurst two
nights" on the occasion of Sir Denzil's historic
house-warming, to witness the mighty bear-baiting, were
sensible of something more in that somewhat disgusting exhibition, than the
mere gratification of brutal instincts, the mere savage relish for wounds
and pain and blood. And to Sir Denzil's latest descendant the first
sight of the training-stable--as the pony-carriage came
to a standstill alongside the grass plot in the centre of the great,
gravelled square--offered very definite and stirring poetry of a
kind.
free of this establishment. About the most first-class private
establishment in England, sir, though I say it that have run the concern
pretty well single-handed for the best part of the last fifteen
years--make you free of it right away, sir. And, look you, when
you've got hold, don't you leave hold."
anecdotes to which Dickie lent most attentive ear. He was keen to learn,
his attention was on the stretch. He was in process of initiation, and
every moment of the sacred rites came to him with power and value. Yet it
must be owned that he found the lessening of the strain on his memory and
attention not wholly unwelcome when Mr. Chifney, sitting beside him on the
big, white-painted corn-bin opposite Diplomacy's
loose-box, began to tell him of the old times when he--a little
fellow of eight to ten years of age--had been among the boys in his
cousin, Sam Chifney's famous stable at Newmarket. Of the long, weary
travelling, before the days of railways, when the horses were walked by
highroad and country lane, ankle deep in mud, from Newmarket to Epsom; and
after victory or defeat, walked by slow stages all the way home again. Of
how, later, he had migrated to Doncaster; but, not liking the
"Yorkshire tykes," had got taken on in some well-known
stables upon the Berkshire downs.
same," he added, parenthetically, as he set it down on the table
again.--"What do you say, Maria--about time we toddled off
to bed?"
which--so it seemed to him--he had to-day entered. Still,
in his present humour, Dickie's sense of noblesse
oblige was strong.
slight roundness of the shoulders. Seeing him, there remained no doubt as
to whence Mary inherited her large mouth; but matter for thankfulness that
she had avoided further inheritance. For Mr. Cathcart was notably plain.
Small eyes and snub nose, long, lower jaw, and grey, forward-curled
whiskers rendered his appearance unfortunately simian. He suggested a
caricature; but one, let it be added, of a person undeniably
well-bred.
He was willing even to sacrifice a measure of personal dignity in her
service.
required some fortitude to cross this space, for here was nothing to lay
hold of for support.
about his loose lips:--" Don't be afraid. I'll
handle him very gently. Probably I shan't hurt him at
all--certainly not much."
surely, to speak so plainly? But John Knott went on quietly, commiserating
her inwardly, yet unswerving in common sense.
height and emaciation of his figure. His appearance offered a marked
contrast to that of the man with whom Katherine had just parted. His
occupation offered a marked contrast also. He carried a gold chalice and
paten, and his head was bowed reverentially above the sacred vessels. His
eyes were downcast, and the dull pallor of his face and of his long, thin
hands was very noticeable. He did not look round, but passed silently,
still as a dream, into the chapel. Katherine paced the width of the great
room, turned and paced back and forth again some half-dozen times,
before he emerged from the chapel door. In her present humour she did not
want him, yet she resented his abstraction. The physician of the soul, like
the physician of the body, appeared to her lamentably devoid of power to
sustain and give comfort at the present juncture.
death-chamber suddenly appeared to him as an act of possible
selfishness.
and concealing the humiliation of deformity, were almost forgotten. To
those who have once loved, love must always supremely appeal. Julius
appeared to her in a new aspect. She felt she had done him injustice. She
placed her hand on his arm with a movement of apology and tenderness. And
the man grew faint, trembled, feeling her hand, seeing it lie white and
fair on the sleeve of his black cassock. Since childhood it was the first,
the solitary, caress he had received.
whose orioles rose in an upward curve. to the majestic image of the Christ
in the central light--a Christ risen and glorified, enthroned, His
feet shining forever upon heaven's sapphire floor. Before the altar
hung three, silver-gilt lamps of Italian workmanship, in the crimson
cup of each of which it had so long been Julius's pleasure to keep
the tongue of flame constantly alive. The habits of a lifetime are not
hastily set aside. Gazing on these things, his normal attitude returned to
him. Not that which he essentially was but that which, by long and careful
training of every thought, every faculty, he had become, authoritatively
claimed him. His eyes fell from contemplation of the glories of the window
to that of the long, straight folds of the cassock which clothed him. It
was hardly the garb in which a man goes forth to woo! Then he looked at
Lady Calmady--she altogether seductive in her innocence and in her
wistful mockery as she leaned against the jamb of the door.
too. You can go to him now, Lady Calmady. Keep him cheerful, please, and
give him his head as much as you can."
till Helen was here and wanted me to show her the house. I supposed
everyone would take it for granted, as you all do here at home. And then
I'd a hope Dr. Knott might find a way to hide it and so help me.
But--but he can't. That hope's quite gone."
kiss you give me, every pretty word you say to me, is treasured up for his,
as well as for your own, dear sake."
towards her again, while his face brightened. "He said some awfully
jolly things to me."
the completeness of love failed before pride touched to the very quick.
the greed of personal power and undisputed rule, could not affect her for
long. It wounded her, as a slight upon the memory of the man she had so
wholly loved, that this first conflict between Richard and herself should
turn on the question of horses and the racing-stable. The irony of
the position appeared unpardonable. And then, the vision of poor
Richard--her darling, whom she had striven so jealously to shield ever
since the day, over thirteen years ago, when undressing her baby she had
first looked upon its malformed limbs--Richard riding forth for all
the staring, mocking world to see, again arose before her.
offered but small matter of interest. For Farley Row is one of those
dead-alive, little towns on the borders of the forest land, across
which progress, even at the time in question, 1856, had written Ichabod in
capital letters. During the early years of the century some ninety odd
coaches, plying upon the London and Portsmouth road, would stop to change
horses at the White Lion in the course of each twenty-four hours.
That was the golden age of the Row. Horns twanged, heavy wheels rumbled,
steaming teams were led away, with drooping heads, into the spacious inn
yard, and fresh horses stepped out cheerily to take their place between the
traces. The next stage across Spendle Flats was known as a risky one.
Legends of Claude Duval and his fellow-highwaymen still haunt the
woods and moors that top the long hill going north-eastward. And the
passengers by those ninety coaches were wont to recover themselves from
terrors escaped, or fortify themselves against terrors to come, by
plentiful libations at the bar of the handsome red-brick inn. The
house did a roaring trade. But now the traffic upon the great road had
assumed a local and altogether undemonstrative character. The coaches had
fallen into lumber, the spanking teams had each and all made their squalid
last journey to the knacker's. And the once famous Gentlemen of the
Road had long lain at rest in Mother Earth's lap--sleeping there
none the less peacefully because the necks of many of them had suffered a
nasty rick from the hangman's rope, and because the
hard-trodden pavement of the prison-yard covered them.
And now, as he waited beneath the rustling sycamores, it was with a
sensation of quick, yet half-shy, pleasure, that he saw the
disreputable figure lurch out of the inn yard, stand for a minute shading
eyes with hand while making observations, and then hobble across the
street, touching the peak of a battered, black-velvet cap as it
advanced.
what a-quiver. All the coarse detail, all the unlovely foundations,
of the business of pleasure were rather distressingly obvious to his sight.
A merry-go-round was in full activity--wooden horses and
most unseaworthy boats describing a jerky circle to the squeaking of tin
whistles and purposeless thumpings of a drum. Close by a crop-eared
lurcher, tied beneath one of the vans, dragged choking at his chain and
barked himself frantic under the stones and teasing of a knot of idle boys.
A half-tipsy slut of a woman threatened a child, who, in soiled
tights and spangles, crouched against the muddy hind-wheel of a
waggon, tears dribbling down his cheeks, his arm raised to ward off the
impending blow. From the menagerie--an amorphous huddle of grey tents,
ranged behind a flight of wooden steps leading up to an open gallery hung
with advertisements of the many attractions within--came the hideous
laughter of a hyena, and the sullen roar of a lion weary of the rows of
stolid English faces staring daily, hourly, between the bars of his foul
and narrow cage, heart-sick with longing for sight of the open,
starlit heaven and the white-domed, Moslem tombs amid the prickly,
desert thickets and plains of clean, hot sand. On the edge of the
encampment horses grazed--sorry beasts for the most part, galled,
broken-kneed and spavined, weary and heart-sick as the
captive lion. But weary not from idleness, as he. Weary from heavy loads
and hard travelling and scant provender. Sick of collar and whip and
reiterated curses.
tambourine in one hand, tin mug for the holding of pennies in the other.
She wore a black, velvet bodice, rusty with age, and a blue, silk skirt of
doubtful cleanliness, looped up over a widely distended scarlet petticoat.
Rows of amber beads encircled her brown throat. She laughed and leered,
bold-eyed and coarsely alluring, at a couple of sheepish country
lads on the green below. She called to them, pointing over her shoulder
with the tin cup, to the sign-board of her show. At the painting on
that board Richard Calmady gave one glance. His lips grew thin and his face
white. He jerked at the reins, causing the horses to start and swerve. Was
it possible that, as old Jackie Deeds said, God Almighty had His jokes too,
jokes at the expense of His own creation? That in cynical abuse of human
impotence, as a wanton pastime, He sent human beings forth into the world
thus ludicrously defective? The thought was unformulated. It amounted
hardly to a thought indeed,--was but a blind terror of insecurity,
which, coursing through the boy's mind, filled him with agonised and
angry pity towards all disgraced fellow-beings, all enslaved and
captive beasts. Dimly he recognised his kinship to all such.
than his first, it is to be feared. But in all healthy natures, in all
those in whom the love of beauty is keen, there must be in youth strong
repudiation of the brotherhood of suffering. Time will teach a finer and
deeper lesson to those that have faith and courage to receive it; yet it is
well the young should defy sorrow, hate suffering, gallantly, however
hopelessly, fight.
was a long line of women-servants, ranging from Denny, in rustling,
black silk, and Clara,--alert and pretty, though a trifle
tearful,--through many grades and orders, down to the little
scullery-maid, fresh from the keeper's cottage on the
Warren--home-sick, and half scared by the grand gentlemen and
ladies in evening-dress, by the strange, lovely figures in the
stained-glass windows, by the great, gold cross and flowers, and the
rich altar-cloth and costly hangings but half seen in the
conflicting light of the moonbeams and flickering candles.
him. But the movement was a passing one. He leaned back in his stall again
and folded his arms, with a movement of quiet pride, almost of
contempt.
People are not always very considerate of one another. But ill-usage
cannot touch you, my dearest. You are saved by love, by position, by
wealth."
suppose it's the best we can do for him." An ugly
saddle--yet had Josiah Appleyard ample reason to skip,
lamb-like, being glad. For, ugly or not, it fulfilled its purpose,
bringing custom to the maker, and happiness and health to the owner of
it.
owned he suffered many bad quarters of an hour. He was, at once, older in
thought and younger in practical experience than his
fellow-undergraduates. He was cut off, of necessity, from their
sports. They would eat his breakfasts, drink his wine, and show no violent
objection to riding his horses. They were considerate, almost anxiously
careful of him, being generous and good-hearted lads. And yet poor
Dick was perturbed by the fear that they were more at ease without him,
that his presence acted as a slight check upon their genial spirits and
their rattling talk. And so it came about that though his acquaintances
were many, his friends were few. Chief among the latter was Ludovic Quayle,
a younger son of Lord Fallowfeild--whom that kindly, if not very
intelligent, nobleman had long ago proposed to export from the Whitney to
the Brockhurst nursery with a view to the promotion of general
cheerfulness. Mr. Ludovic Quayle was a rather superfine, young gentleman,
possessed of an excellent opinion of himself, and a modest opinion of other
persons--his father included. But under his somewhat supercilious
demeanour there was a vein of true romance. He loved Richard Calmady. And
neither time, nor opposing interests, nor certain black chapters which had
later to be read in the history of life, destroyed or even weakened that
love.
exploits of his former pupil. While Ludovic Quayle, with raised eyebrows
and half-tender, half-ironical amusement relaxing the corners
of his remarkably beautiful mouth, would say:--
not until the autumn of the following year, when he had reached the age of
three-and-twenty, and had already, for some six months,
served his Queen and country in the capacity of Justice of the Peace for
the county of Southampton, that any event occurred greatly affecting his
fortunes, and therefore worthy to set forth at large in this history.
interest to the passers-by; that persons of very various age and
class had stopped and turned to gaze at him; and that, while crossing the
bridge spanning the dark, oily waters of the canal, in the industrial
quarter of the pushing, wide-awake, county town, he had been the
subject of brutal comment, followed by a hoarse laugh from the collarless
throats of some dozen operatives and bargees loitering thereupon.
this morning. Calmady's generally charming; but I must say, when he
likes, he can be about the most insolent fellow I've ever met, in a
gentleman-like way."
Calmady sickened yet more, recognising in that a parable of perpetual
application. For are there not always other cases? The tragedy of the
individual life reaching its climax seems, to the chief actor, worthy to
claim and hold universal attention. Yet the sun never stands still in
heaven, nor do the footsteps of men tarry upon earth. No one person may
take up too much space, too much time. The movement of things is not
stayed. The single cry, however bitter, is drowned in the roar of the
pushing crowd. The individual, however keen his griefs, however heinous the
offence done him, must make way for those same other cases. This is the
everlasting law.
were insufficient, memory arose and recalled other displeasures of long
ago. Recalled old Jackie Deeds lurching out of that same inn yard, empty
pipe in mouth, greedy of alms. Recalled the old postboy's ugly morsel
of profanity--"God Almighty had His jokes too." And, at
that, the laughter of those loafers upon the canal bridge saluted
Richard's ears once more, as did the loud, familiar phrases of Mr.
Lemuel Image, the Westchurch brewer.
the turn of the leaf was very brilliant that year. The sweetly sober
English landscape seemed to have run mad and decked itself, as for a
masquerade, in extravagant splendours of colour. The smooth-stemmed
beeches had taken on every tint from fiery brown, through orange and amber,
to verdigris green touching latest July shoots. The round-headed
oaks, practising even in carnival time a measure of restraint, had arrayed
themselves in a hundred rich, finely-gradated tones of russet and
umber. While, here and there, a tall bird-cherry, waxing wanton, had
clothed itself like the Woman of Babylon in rose-scarlet from crown
to lowest black-barked twig. Higher up, the larch plantations rose
in crowds of butter-coloured spires. Amethystine, and
blood-red, white-spotted toad-stools, in little
companies, pushed through the light soil on either side the road. Trailing
sprays of bramble glowed as flame. Rowan berries hung in heavy coral
bunches, and the dogwood spread itself in sparse, china-pink
clusters. Only the undergrowth of crooked alders, in swampy,
low-lying places, kept its dark, purplish green; and the light
foliage of the ash waved in shadowy pallor against its knobbed and knotted
branches; and the ranks of the encircling firs retained their solemn habit,
as though in protest against the universal riot.
hide-and-seek with some glad secret which at any instant
might be revealed to him. It murmured to him in the brook. It scolded at
him merrily with the scolding squirrels. It startled the surrounding
stillness, with the down-pattering beech-masts and fluttering
of leaves. It eluded him deftly, rustling away unseen through the green and
gold of the bracken. Lastly when, reaching the summit of the ridge of hill,
he entered upon the levels of the great tableland, it hailed him in the
long-drawn sighing of the fir forest. For a wind, suddenly awakened,
swept towards him from some far distance, neared, broke overhead, as summer
waves upon a shingly beach, died in delicious whispers, only to sweep up
and break and die again. Meanwhile the grey pall of cloud parted in the
west, disclosing spaces of faint yet clearest blue, and the declining sun,
from behind dim islands of shifting vapour, sent forth immense rays of mild
and misty light.
heather and bracken, fringed lower down with a coppice of delicate birches,
falls steeply away in front and on either hand. Outstretched below, besides
the panorama of the great woods, lies all the country about Farley, on to
Westchurch, and beyond again--pasture and cornlands, scattered hamlets
and red-roofed farms half hidden among trees, the glint of streams
set in the vivid green of water-meadows, and soft, blue range behind
range of distance to that pale uprising of chalk down in the far south.
Upon the right, some quarter of a mile away, blocking the end of an avenue
of secular Scotch firs, the eastern façade of Brockhurst House shows
planted proudly upon the long grey and red lines of the terrace.
startled on the edge of the covert--her head raised, her face keen
with inquiry. Her expression changed, became serious, almost stern. She
recoiled, as in pain, as in an approach to fear--this strong,
nymphlike creature.
face was white with anger, and his lips rigid with pain--a rigidity
begotten of the determination that they should not tremble in altogether
too unmanly fashion. Sometimes it is very sad to be young. The flesh is
still very tender, so that a scratch hurts more then than a
sword-thrust later. Only, let it be remembered, the scratch heals
readily; while of the sword-thrust we die, even though at the moment
of receiving it we seem not so greatly to suffer. And unquestionably as
Dickie sat there, on his handsome horse, hat in hand, looking down at the
lady of the cigarette, the hurt of that lately received scratch began quite
sensibly to lessen. For her eyes, their first unsparing scrutiny
accomplished, rested on his with a strangely flattering and engaging
insistence.
And Clara, as in duty and affection bound, not without additional
testimony in a certain dimness of her pretty, honest, brown eyes, did
indeed very much think so. It followed, therefore, that Dickie saw the St.
Quentin family drive away, nurses and luggage complete, quite unmoved. And
returned, with satisfaction and renewed self-confidence, to the
exclusive society of all those dear, grown-up people--gentle
and simple--who were never guilty of leaving him behind--to that
of Camp, the old, white bull-dog, and young Camp, his son and heir,
who, if they so far forgot themselves as to run away, invariably ran back
again and apologised, fawning upon him and pushing their broad, ugly,
kindly muzzles into his hands--and to that of
But, with the above-mentioned exception, the little boy's
self-content suffered but slight disturbance. He took himself very
much for granted. He was very curious of outside things, very much amused.
Moreover, he was king of a far from contemptible kingdom; and in the
blessed ignorance of childhood--that finds pride and honour in things
which a wider and sadder knowledge often proves far from glad or
glorious--it appeared to him not unnatural that a king should differ,
even to the point of some slightly impeding disabilities, from the rank and
file of his obedient and devoted subjects. For Dickie, happily for him, was
as yet given over to that wholly pleasant vanity, the aristocratic idea.
The rough justice of democracy, and the harsh breaking of all purely
personal and individualistic dreams that comes along with it, for him, was
not just yet.
And Richard's continued and undismayed acquiescence in his
physical misfortune was fostered, indirectly, by the captivating poetry of
myth and legend with which his mind was fed. He had an insatiable appetite
for stories, and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt was an
untiring raconteuse. On Sunday afternoons
upon the terrace, when the park lay bathed in drowsy sunshine and sapphire
shadows haunted the under edge of the great woods, the pretty, old
lady--her eyes shining with gentle laughter, for Marie de
Mirancourt's faith had reached the very perfect stage in which the
soul dares play, even as lovers play, with that it holds most
sacred--would tell Dickie the fairy tales of her Church. Would tell
him of blessed St. Francis and of Poverty, his sweet, sad bride; of his
sermon to
Page 92
These and many another wonder tale of Christian miracle did she tell to
Dickie--he squatting on a rug beside her, resting his curly head
against her knees, while the pink-footed pigeons hurried hither and
thither, picking up the handfuls of barley he scattered on the flags, and
the peacocks sunned themselves with a certain worldly and disdainful grace
on the hand-rails of the grey balustrades, and young Camp, after
some wild skirmish in search of sport, flung himself down panting, his
tongue lolling out of his grinning jaws, by the boy's side.
And Katherine, putting aside her cares as regent of Dickie's
kingdom and the sorrow that lay so chill against her heart, would tell him
stories too, but of a different order of sentiment and of thought. For
Katherine was young yet, and her stories were gallant--since her own
spirit was very brave--or merry, because it delighted her to hear the
boy laugh. And often, as he grew a little older, she would sit with her arm
round him, in the keen, winter twilights before the lamps were lit, on the
broad, cushioned bench of the oriel window in the Chapel-Room.
Outside, the stars grew in number and brightness as the dusk deepened.
Within, the firelight played over the white-panelled walls,
revealing fitfully the handsome faces of former Calmadys--shortlived,
passing hence all unsated with the desperate joys of living--painted
by Vandyke and Sir Peter Lely, or by Romney and Sir Joshua. Then she would
tell him not only of Aladdin, of Cinderella, and time-honoured
Puss-in-Boots, but of Merlin the great enchanter, and of King
Arthur and his company of noble knights. And of the loves of Sigurd the
Niblung and Brunhilda the wise and terrible queen, and of their lifelong
sorrow, and of the fateful treasure of fairy gold which lies buried beneath
the rushing waters of the Rhine. Or she would tell him of those cold,
clear, far-off times in the northern
Page 93
And through all of these stories, of Christian and heathen origin alike,
Richard began dimly, almost unconsciously, to trace, recurrent as a strain
of austere music, the idea--very common to ages less soft and
fastidious than our own--of payment in self-restraint and
labour, or in actual bodily pain, loss, or disablement, for all good gained
and knowledge won.
He found the same idea again when, under the teaching of Julius March,
he began reading history, and when his little skill in Greek and Latin
carried him as far as the easier passages of the classic poets. Dick was a
very apt, if somewhat erratic and inaccurate, scholar. His insatiable
curiosity drove him forward. He scurried, in childish fashion by all
short-cuts available, to get at the heart of the matter--a
habit of mind detestable to pedants, since to them the letter is the main
object, not the spirit. Happily Julius was ceasing to be a pedant, even in
matters ecclesiastical. He loved the little boy, the mingled charm and
pathos of whose personality held him as with a spell. With untiring
patience he answered, to the best of his ability,
Page 94
And so, having once apprehended that idea of payment, he searched for
justification of it instinctively in all he saw and read. He found it again
in the immortal story of the siege of Troy, and in the long wanderings and
manifold trials of that most experimental of philosophers, the great
Ulysses. He found it too in more modern and more authentic history--in
the lives of Galileo and Columbus, of Sir Walter Raleigh and many another
hero and heroine, of whom, because of some unusual excellence of spirit or
attainment, their fellow-men, and, as it would seem, the very gods
themselves, have grown jealous, not enduring to witness a beauty rivalling
or surpassing their own.
The idea was all confused as yet, coloured by childish fancies,
instinctive merely, not realised. Yet it occupied a very actual place in
the little boy's mind. He lingered over it silently, caressing it,
returning to it again and again in half-frightened delight. It lent
a fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and
unsightly creatures--to blind-worms and slow-moving
toads, to trapped cats, and dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged
sea-gull, property of Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners,
that paced, picking up loathsome living in the matter of slugs and snails,
about the cabbage beds, all the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of
the freedom of the sea in its wild, pale eyes.
It further provoked Dickie to expend his not inconsiderable gift of
draughtsmanship in the production of long processions of half-human
monsters of a grotesque and essentially uncomfortable character. He
scribbled these upon all available pieces of paper, including the
fly-leaves of Todhunter's Arithmetic, and of his Latin and
Greek primers. In an evil hour, for the tidiness of his school books, he
came across the ballad of "Aiken-Drum," with its rather
terrible mixture of humour, realism, and pathos. From thenceforth for some
weeks--though he adroitly avoided giving any direct account of the
origin of these grisly, imaginative freaks--many margins were adorned,
or rather defaced, by fancy portraits of that "foul and stalwart
ghaist" the Brownie of Badnock.
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So did Dickie dwell, through all his childhood and the early years of
youth, in the clear land of dreams, petted, considered, sheltered with
perhaps almost cruel kindness, from the keen. winds of truth that blow
forever across the world. Which winds, while causing all to suffer, and
bringing death to the weak and fearful, to the lovers of lies and the
makers of them, go in the end to strengthen the strong who dare face them,
and fortify these in the acceptance of the only knowledge really worth
having--namely the knowledge that romance is no exclusive property of
the past, or eternal life of the future, but that both these are here,
immediately and actually, for whoso has eyes to see and courage to
possess.
The fairest dreams are true. Yet it is so ordered that to know that we
must awake from them. And the awakening is an ugly process enough, too
often. When Dickie was about thirteen, the awakening began for him. It came
in time-honoured forms--those of horses and of a woman.
CHAPTER II
IN WHICH OUR HERO IMPROVES HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH MANY
THINGS--HIMSELF INCLUDED
IT came about in this wise. Roger Ormiston was expected at
Brockhurst, after an absence of some years. He had served with distinction
in the Sikh war; and had seen fighting on the grand scale in the battles of
Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Later the restless genius of travel had taken
hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward across the
Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange
gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and
their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic
jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the
naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on
fire. The return of Roger Ormiston was, to him, as the return of the mighty
Ulysses himself.
For a change was coming over the boy. He began to weary of fable and cry
out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was growing fast;
and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been unusually tall,
graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this increase of
stature had come a listless-
Page 96
On the day of her brother's return, Katherine, after rather
anxious search, so found Richard. He was standing on the book-strewn
window-seat. He had pushed open the tall narrow casement and leaned
out. The April afternoon was fitfully bright. A rainbow spanned the
landscape, from the Long Water in the valley to the edge of the forest
crowning the tableland. Here and there showers of rain fell, showing white
against huge masses of purple cloud piled up along the horizon.
And as Katherine drew near, threading her way carefully between the
Chinese cabinets, oriental jars, and many quaint treasures furnishing the
end of the great room, she saw that, along the grass ride, some twenty
racehorses came streelling homeward in single file--a long line of
brown, chestnut, black, and of the raw yellows and scarlets of
horse-clothing, against the delicate green of springing turf and
opening leaves. Beside them, clad in pepper-and-salt mixture
breeches and gaiters complete, Mr. Chifney pricked forward soberly on his
handsome grey cob. The boys called to one another now and then, admonished
a fretful horse breaking away from the string. One of them whistled shrilly
a few bars of that popular but undistinguished tune--"Pop goes
the weasel." And Richard craned far out, steadying himself against
the stone mullion on either side with uplifted hands, heedless alike of his
mother's presence and of the heavy drops of rain which splattered in
at the open casement.
Page 97
"Dickie, Dickie," Katherine called, in swift anxiety.
"Be careful. You will fall."
She came close, putting her arm round him.--"You reckless
darling," she went on; "don't you see how dangerous the
least slip would be?"
The boy stood upright and looked round at her. His blue eyes were
alight. All the fitful brightness, all the wistful charm, of the April
evening was in his face.
"But it's the only place where I can see them, and
they're such beauties," he said. "And I want to see them
so much. You know we always miss them somehow, mummy, when we go
out."
Katherine was off her guard. Three separate strains of feeling
influenced her just then. First, her growing recognition of the change in
Richard, of that passing away of childhood which could not but make for
difficulty and, in a sense, for pain. Secondly, the natural excitement of
her brother's home-coming, disturbing the monotony of her
daily life, bringing, along with very actual joy, memories of a past,
well-beloved yet gone beyond recall. Lastly, the practical and
immediate fear that Dickie had come uncommonly near tumbling incontinently
out of the window. And so, being moved, she held the boy tightly and
answered rather at random, thereby provoking fate.
"Yes, my dearest, I know we always miss them somehow when we go
out. It is best so. But do pray be more careful with these high
windows."
"Oh! I'm all right--I'm careful
enough."--His glance had gone back to where the last of the
horses passed out of sight behind the red wall of the gardens. "But
why is it best so? Ah! they're gone!" he exclaimed.
Katherine sat down on the window-seat, and Richard, clinging to
the window-ledge, while she still held him, lowered himself into a
sitting position beside her.
"Thank you, mummy," he said. And the words cut her. They
came so often in each day, and always with the same little touch of civil
dignity. The courtesy of Richard's recognition of help given, failed
to comfort her for the fact that help was so constantly required. Lady
Calmady's sense of rebellion arose and waxed strong whenever she
heard those thanks.
"Mother," he went on, "I want to ask you something.
You won't mind?"
"Do I ever mind you questioning me?" Yet she felt a certain
tightening about her heart.
"Ah, but this is different! I've wanted to for a long while,
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Richard's curly head went up with a fine, little air of pride as
he said the last few words. His mother smiled at him. There was no doubt as
to her son's breeding.
"Well, what then?" she said.
"I want to know--you're sure you don't
mind--why you dislike the horses, and never go to the stables or take
me there? If the horses are wrong, why do we keep them? And if
they're not wrong, why, mother, don't you see, we may enjoy
them, mayn't we?"
He flushed, looking up at her, spoke coaxingly, merrily, a trifle
embarrassed by his own temerity, yet keen to prove his point and acquire
possession of this so coveted joy.
Katherine hesitated. She was tempted to put aside his question with some
playful excuse. And yet, where was the use? The question must inevitably be
answered one day, and Katherine, as had been said, was moved just now,
dumbness of long habit somewhat melted. Perhaps this was the appointed
time. She drew her arm from around the boy and took both his hands in
hers.
"My dearest," she said, "our keeping the horses is not
wrong. But--one of the horses killed your father."
Richard's lips parted. His eyes searched hers.
"But how?" he asked presently.
"He was trying it at a fence, and it came down with him--and
trampled him."
There was a pause. At last the boy asked rather
breathlessly:--"Was he killed then, mother, at
once?"
It had been Katherine's intention to state the facts simply,
gravely, and without emotion. But to speak of these things, after so long
silence, proved more trying than she had anticipated. The scene in the red
drawing-room, the long agony of waiting and of farewell, rose up
before her after all these years with a vividness and poignancy that
refused to be gainsaid.
"No," she answered, "he lived four days. He spoke to
me of many things he wished to do. And--I have done them all, I think.
He spoke to me of you"--Katherine closed her eyes. "The
boy might care for the stables. The boy must ride straight." For the
moment she could not look at Richard, knowing that which she must see. The
irony of those remembered words appeared too great.--"But he
suffered," she went on brokenly, "he suffered--ah! my
dear"--
Page 99
"Mummy, darling mummy, don't look like that!" Dickie
cried. He wrenched his hands from her grasp and threw his arms impulsively
about her neck. "Don't--it hurts me. And --and, after
all," he added, reasoningly, consolingly, "it wasn't one
of these horses you know. They've never done anybody any harm. It was
an accident. There must always be accidents sometimes, mustn't there?
And then, you see, it all happened long, long ago. It must have, for I
don't remember anything about it. It must have happened when I was a
baby."
"Alas, no!" Katherine exclaimed, wrung by the pathos of his
innocent egoism; "it happened even before then, my dearest, before
you were born."
With the unconscious arrogance of childhood, Richard had, so far, taken
his mother's devotion very much as a matter of course. He had never
doubted that he was, and always had been, the inevitable centre of all her
interests. So, now, her words and her bearing, bringing--in as far as
he grasped them--the revelation of aspects of her life quite
independent of his all-important, little self, staggered him. For
the first time poor Dickie realised that even one's own mother, be
she never so devoted, is not her child's exclusive and wholly private
property, but has a separate existence, joys and sorrows apart.
Instinctively he took his arms from about her neck and backed away into the
angle of the window-seat, regarding her with serious and somewhat
startled attention. And, doing so, he for the first time realised
consciously something more, namely the greatness of her beauty.
For the years had dealt kindly with Katherine Calmady. Not the great
sorrows of life, or its great sacrifices, but fretfulness, ignoble worries,
sordid cares, are that which draw lines upon a woman's face and
harshen her features. At six and thirty Lady Calmady's skin was
smooth and delicate, her colour still clear and softly bright. Her hair,
though somewhat darker than of old, was abundant. Still she wore it rolled
up and back from her forehead, showing the perfect oval of her face. Her
eyes, too, were darker; and the expression of them had become
profound--the eyes of one who has looked on things which may not be
told and has chosen her part. Her bosom had become a little fuller; but the
long, inward curve of her figure below it to the round and shapely waist,
and the poise of her rather small hips, were lithe and free as ever. While
there was that enchanting freshness about her which is more than the mere
freshness of youth or of physical health--which would seem, indeed, to
be the peculiar dowry of those women who, having
Page 100
And a perception not only of the grace of her person, as she sat
sideways on the window-seat in her close-fitting, grey gown,
with its frilled lace collar and ruffles at the wrists, came to Richard
now. He perceived something of this more intimate and subtle charm which
belonged to her. He was enthralled by the clear sweetness, as of dewy grass
newly turned by the scythe, which always clung about her, and by the
whispering of her silken garments when she moved. A sudden reverence for
her came upon him, as though, behind her gracious and so familiar figure,
he apprehended that which belonged to a region superior, almost divine. And
then he was seized--it is too often the fate of worshippers--with
jealousy of that past of hers of which he had been, until now, ignorant.
And yet another emotion shook him, for, in thus realising and
differentiating her personality, he had grown vividly, almost painfully,
conscious of his own.
He turned away, laying his cheek against the stone window-ledge,
while the drops of a passing scud of rain beat in on his hot face.
"Then--then my father never saw me," he exclaimed
vehemently. And, after a moment's pause, added:--"I
am glad of that--very glad."
"Ah! But, my dearest," Lady Calmady cried, bewildered and
aghast, "you don't know what you are
saying--think!"
Richard kept his face to the splashing rain.
"I don't want to say anything wrong; but," he
repeated, "I am glad."
He turned to her, his lips quivering a little, and a desolate expression
in his eyes, which told Katherine, with only too bitter assurance, that his
childhood and the repose of it were indeed over and gone.
She held out her arms to him in silent invitation, and drew the dear
curly head on to her bosom.
"You're not displeased with me, mummy?"
"Does this seem as if I was displeased?" she asked.
Then they sat silent once more, Katherine swaying a little as she held
him, soothing him almost as in his baby days.
"I won't lean out of the window again," he said
presently, with a sigh of comfort. "I promise that."
"There's a darling. But I am afraid we must go. Uncle Roger
will be here soon."
Page 101
The boy raised his head.
"Mother," he said quickly, "will you send Clara,
please, to put away these books? And may I have Winter to fetch me?
I--I'm tired. If you don't mind? I don't care to
walk."
Yet, since happily at thirteen Richard's moods were still as many
and changeful as the aspects of that same April day, he enjoyed some
royally unclouded hours before he--most unwillingly--retired to
bed that night. For, on close acquaintance, the great Ulysses proved a very
satisfactory hero. Roger Ormiston's character had consolidated. It
was to some purpose that he had put away the pleasant follies of his youth.
He looked out now with a coolness and patience, born of wide experience,
upon men and upon affairs. He had ceased to lose either his temper or his
head. Acquiescing with undismayed and cheerful common sense in the fact
that life, as we know it, is but a sorry business, and that rough things
must of necessity be done and suffered every day, he had developed an
active--though far from morbidly sentimental--compassion for the
individual, man and beast alike. Not that Colonel Ormiston formulated all
that, still less held forth upon it. He was content, as is so many another
Englishman, to be a dumb and practical philosopher--for which those
who have lived with philosophers of the eloquent sort will unquestionably
give thanks, knowing, to their sorrow, how often handsome speech is but a
cloak to hide incapacity of honest doing.
And so, after dinner, under plea of an imperative need of cigars,
Ormiston had borne Dickie off to the Gun-Room; and there, in the
intervals of questioning him a little about his tastes and occupations, had
told him stories many and great. For he wanted to get hold of the boy and
judge of what stuff he was made. Like all sound and healthy-minded
men he had an inherent suspicion of the abnormal. He could not but fear
that persons unusually constituted in body must be the victims of some
corresponding crookedness of spirit. But as the evening drew on he became
easy on this point. Whatever Richard's physical infirmity, his nature
was wholesome enough. Therefore when, at close upon ten o'clock, Lady
Calmady arrived in person to insist that Dickie must go, there and then,
straight to bed, she found a pleasant scene awaiting her.
The square room was gay with lamplight and firelight, which brought into
strong relief the pictures of famous horses and trophies of old-time
weapons--matchlocks, basket-handled swords, and neat,
silver-hilted rapiers, prettiest of toys with which to pink your
man--that decorated its white-panelled walls.
Page 102
Ormiston stood with his back to the fire, one heel on the fender, his
broad shoulders resting against the high chimney-piece, his head
bent forward as he looked down, in steady yet kindly scrutiny, at the boy.
His face was tanned by the sun and wind of the long sea voyage--people
still came home from India by the Cape--till his hair and moustache
showed pale against his bronzed skin. And to Richard, listening and
watching from the deep arm-chair drawn up at right angles to the
hearth, he appeared as a veritable demigod, master of the secrets of life
and death--beheld, moreover, through an atmosphere of fragrant
tobacco-smoke, curiously intoxicating to unaccustomed nostrils.
Dickie had tucked himself into as small a space as possible, to make room
for young Camp, who lay outstretched beside him. The
bull-dog's great underhung jaw and pendulous, wrinkled cheeks
rested on the arm of the chair, as he stared and blinked rather sullenly at
the fire--moved and choked a little, slipping off unwillingly to
sleep, to wake with a start, and stare and blink once more. The embroidered
couvre-pieds, which Dickie had spread
across him gathering the top edge of it up under the front of his Eton
jacket, offered luxurious bedding. But Camp was a typical conservative,
slow-witted, stubborn against the ingress of a new idea. This tall,
somewhat masterful stranger must prove himself a good man and
true--according to bull-dog understanding of those
terms--before he could hope to gain entrance to that faithful, though
narrow heart.
Ormiston meanwhile, finely contemptuous of canine criticism, greeted his
sister cheerily.
"You're bound to give us a little law to-night,
Kitty," he said, holding out his hand to her. "We won't
break rules and indulge in unbridled license as to late hours again, will
we, Dick? But, you see, we've both been doing a good deal, one way
and another, since we last met, and there were arrears of conversation to
make up."--He smiled very charmingly at Lady Calmady, and his
fingers closed firmly on her hand.--"We've been getting on
famously, notwithstanding our long separation." He looked down at
Richard again.--"Fast friends, already, and mean to remain so,
don't we, old chap?"
Thereupon Lady Calmady's soul received much comfort. Her pride was
always on the alert, fiercely sensitive concerning Richard. And the joy of
this meeting had, till now, an edge of jealous anxiety to it. If Roger did
not take to the boy, then--deeply though she loved him--Roger
must go. For the same elements were constant in Katherine Calmady. Not all
the
Page 103
"Katherine," he said, "do you know you take one rather
by surprise? Upon my word you're more beautiful than ever."
And Richard's clear voice rang out eagerly from the depths of the
big chair:--
"Yes--yes--isn't she, Uncle
Roger--isn't she--delicious?"
The man's smile broadened almost to laughter.
"You young monkey," he said very gently; "so you have
discovered that fact already have you? Well, so much the better. It's
a safe basis to start from; don't you think so, Kitty?"
But Lady Calmady drew away her hand. The blood had rushed into her face
and neck. Her beauty, now for so long, had seemed a negligible quantity, a
thing that had out-lasted its need and use--since he who had so
rejoiced in it was dead. What is the value of ever so royal a crown when
the throne it represents has fallen to ruin? And yet, being very much a
woman, those words of praise came altogether sweetly to Katherine from the
lips of her brother and her son. She moved away, embarrassed, not quite
mistress of herself, sat down on the arm of Richard's chair, leaned
across him and patted the bull-dog--who raised his heavy head
with a grunt, and slapped Dickie smartly in the stomach with his tail, by
way of welcome.
"You dear foolish creatures," she said, "pray talk of
something more profitable. I am growing old, and, in some ways, I am rather
thankful for it. All the same, Dickie, darling, you positively must and
shall go to bed."
But Colonel Ormiston interrupted her. He spoke with a trace of
hesitation, turning to the fireplace and flicking the ash off the end of
his cigar.
"By the bye, Katherine, how's Mary Cathcart? Have you seen
her lately?"
"Yes, last week."
"Then she's not gone the way of all flesh and
married?"
"No," Lady Calmady answered. She bent a little lower,
tracing out the lines on the dog's wrinkled forehead with her
finger.--"Several men have asked her to marry. But there
Page 104
"Ah! there," Ormiston exclaimed quickly, "you are
mistaken."
"Am I?" Katherine said. "I have great faith in Mary. I
suppose she was too wise to accept even him, being not wholly convinced of
his love."
Lady Calmady raised her eyes. Ormiston looked very keenly at her. And
Richard, watching them, felt his breath come rather short with excitement,
for he understood that his mother was speaking in riddles. He observed,
moreover, that Colonel Ormiston's face had grown pale for all its
sunburn.
"And so," Katherine went on, "I think the man in
question had better be quite sure of his own heart before he offers it to
Mary Cathcart again."
Ormiston flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. He came and
stood in front of Richard.
"Look here, old chap," he said, "what do you say to
our driving over to Newlands to-morrow? You can set me right if
I've forgotten any of the turns in the road, you know. And you and
Miss Cathcart are great chums, aren't you?"
"Mother, may I go?" the boy asked.
Lady Calmady kissed his forehead.
"Yes, my dearest," she said. "I will trust you and
Uncle Roger to take care of each other for once. You may go."
The immediate consequence of all which was, that Richard went to bed
that night with a brain rather dangerously active and eyes rather
dangerously bright. So that when sleep at last visited him, it came
burdened with dreams, in which the many impressions and emotions of the day
took altogether too lively a part, causing him to turn restlessly to and
fro, and throw his arms out wide over the cool, linen sheets and
pillow.
For there was a new element in Dickie's dreams
to-night-namely a recurrent distress of helplessness and
incapacity of movement, and therefore of escape, in the presence of some
on-coming, multitudinous terror. He was haunted, moreover, by a
certain stanza of the ballad of Chevy Chase. It had given him a peculiar
feeling, sickening yet fascinating, ever since he could remember first to
have read it, a feeling which caused him to dread reading it beforehand,
yet made him turn back to it again and again. And, to-night,
sometimes Richard was himself, sometimes his personality seemed merged in
that of Witherington, the crippled fighting-man, of whose maiming,
and deadly courage,
Page 105
And still, at the same time, he could see Chifney on the handsome, grey
cob, trotting soberly along the green ride, beside the long string of
racehorses coming home from exercise. The young leaves were fragile and
green now, not sparse and metallic, and the April rain splashed in his
face. He tried to call out to Tom Chifney, but the words died in his
throat.--If they would only put him on one of those horses! He knew he
could ride, and so be safe and free. He called again. That time his voice
came. They must hear. Were they not his own servants, after all, and his
own horses--or would be soon, when he was grown up? But neither the
trainer, nor the boys so much as turned their heads; and the living ribbon
of brown and chestnut swept on and away out of sight. No one would heed
him! No one would hearken to his cry!
Once his mother and some man, whom he knew yet did not know, passed by
him hand in hand. She wore a white dress, and smiled with a look of
ineffable content. Her companion was tall, gracious in bearing and
movement, but unsubstantial, a luminous shadow merely. Richard could not
see his face. Yet he knew the man was of near kin to him. And to them he
tried to speak. But it was useless. For now he was not Richard any more. He
was not even Witherington, the crippled fighting-man of the Chevy
Chase ballad. He was--he was the winged seagull, with wild, pale eyes,
hiding--abject yet fierce--among the vegetable beds in the
Brockhurst kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of
snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston,
Page 106
And then from out the honey-combed rocks, under the black,
polished sky, the blue-tunicked Chinamen swept down on Richard again
with the maddening horror of infinite number. They crushed in upon him,
nearer and nearer, pressing him back against the wall of that evil pagoda.
The air was hot and musky with their breath and thick with the muffled roar
of their countless footsteps. And they came right in on him, trampling him
down, suffocating, choking him with the heat of them and the dead
weight.
Shouting aloud--as it seemed to him--in angry terror, the boy
woke. He sat up trembling, wet with perspiration, bewildered by the
struggle and the wild phantasmagoria of his dream. He pulled open the neck
of his night-shirt, leaned his head against the cool, brass rail of
the back of the bedstead, while he listened with growing relief to the
rumble of the wind in the chimney, and the swish of the rain against the
casements, and watched the narrow line of light under the door of his
mother's room.
Yes, he was Richard Calmady, after all,--here in his own sheltered
world, among those who had loved and served him all his life. Nothing
hurtful could reach him here, nothing of which he need be afraid. There was
no real meaning in that ugly dream.
And then Dickie paused a moment, still sitting up in the warm darkness,
pressing his hands down on the mattress on either side to keep himself from
slipping. For involuntarily he recalled the feeling which had prompted his
declaration that he was glad his father had never seen him; recalled his
unwillingness to walk, lest he should meet Ormiston unexpectedly; recalled
the instinct which, even during that glorious time in the Gun-Room,
had impelled him to keep the
embroidered couvre-pieds carefully
over
his legs and feet. And, recalling these things, poor Dickie arrived at
conclusions regarding himself which he had happily avoided arriving at
before. For they were harsh conclusions, causing him to cower down in the
bed, and bury his face in the pillows to stifle the sound of the tearing
sobs which would come.
Alas! was there not only too real a meaning in that same ugly dream and
that shifting of personality? He understood, while his body quivered with
the anguish of it, that he had more
Page 107
Thus did the bitter winds of truth, which blow forever across the world,
first touch Richard Calmady, cutting his poor boyish pride as with a whip.
But he was very young. And the young, mercifully, know no such word as the
inevitable; so that the wind of truth is ever tempered for them--the
first smart of it over--by the sunshine of ignorant and unlimited
hope.
CHAPTER III
CONCERNING THAT WHICH, THANK GOD, HAPPENS ALMOST EVERY
DAY
THE merry, spring sky was clear, save in the south where a vast
perspective of dappled cloud lay against it, leaving winding rivers of blue
here and there, as does ribbed sand for the incoming tide. As the white
gate of the inner park--the grey, unpainted palings ranging far away
to right and left--swung to behind them, and Henry, the groom, after a
smart run, clambered up into his place again beside Camp on the back seat
of the double dog-cart, Richard's spirits rose. Ahead
stretched out the long vista of that peculiar glory of Brockhurst, its
avenue of Scotch firs. The trunks of them, rough-barked and purple
below, red, smooth, and glistering above, shot up some thirty odd
feet--straight as the pillars of an ancient temple--before the
branches, sweeping outward and downward, met, making a whispering, living
canopy overhead, through which the sunshine fell in tremulous shafts upon
the shining coats and gleaming harness of the horses, upon Ormiston's
clear-cut, bronzed face and upright figure, and upon the even,
straw-colored gravel of the road. The said road is raised by about
three feet above the level of the land on either side. On the left, the
self-sown firs grow in close ranks. The ground below them is bare
but for tussocks of coarse grass and ruddy beds of fallen fir
Page 108
The rapid movement, the moist, pungent odour of the woodland, the
rhythmical trot of the horses, the rattle of the splinter-bar chains
as the traces slackened going downhill, above all the presence of the man
beside him, were pleasantly stimulating to Richard Calmady. The boy was
still a prey to much innocent enthusiasm. It appeared to him, watching
Ormiston's handling of the reins and whip, there was nothing this man
could not do, and do skilfully, yet all with the same easy unconcern.
Indeed the present position was so agreeable to him that Dickie's
spirits would have risen to an unusual height, but for a certain chastening
of the flesh in the shape of the occasional pressure of a broad strap
against his middle, which brought him unwelcome remembrance of recent
discoveries it was his earnest desire to ignore, still better to
forget.
For just at starting there had been a rather bad moment. Winter, having
settled him on the seat of the dog-cart, was preparing to tuck him
in with many rugs, when Ormiston said:--
"Look here, dear old chap, I've been thinking about this,
and upon my word you don't seem to me very safe. You see this is a
different matter to your donkey-chair, or the pony-carriage.
There's no protection at the side, and if the horses shied or
anything--well, you'd be in the road. And I can't afford
to spill you the first time we go out together, or there'd be a
speedy end of all our fun."
Richard tried to emulate his uncle's cool indifference, and take
the broad strap as a matter of course. But he was glad the tongue of the
buckle slipped so directly into place; and that Henry's attention was
engaged with the near horse, which fretted at standing; and that Leonard,
the footman, was busy making Camp jump up at the back; and that his mother,
who had been watching him from the lowest of the wide steps, turned away
and went up to the flight to join Julius March standing under the grey
arcade. As the horses sprang forward, clattering the little pebbles of the
drive against the body of the carriage, and swung away round the angle of
the house, Katherine came swiftly down the steps again smiling, kissing her
hand to him. Still, the strap hurt--not poor Dickie's somewhat
ill-balanced body, to which in truth it lent an agreeable sense of
Page 109
But now that disquieting incident was left nearly ten minutes behind.
The last park gate and its cluster of mellow-tinted, thatched
cottages was past. Not only out-of-doors and all the natural
exhilaration of it, but the spectacle of the world beyond the precincts of
the park--into which world he, in point of fact, so rarely
penetrated--wooed him to interest and enjoyment. To Dickie, whose life
through his mother's jealous tenderness and his own physical
infirmity had been so singularly circumscribed, there was an element,
slightly pathetic, of discovery and adventure in this ordinary, afternoon
drive.
He did not want to talk. He was too busy simply seeing--everything
food for those young eyes and brain so greedy of incident and of beauty. He
sat upright and stared at the passing show.--At the deep lane, its
banks starred with primroses growing in the hollows of the gnarled roots of
oaks and ash trees. At Sandyfield rectory, deep-roofed,
bow-windowed, the red walls and tiles of it half smothered in ivy
and cotoneaster. At the low, squat-towered, Georgian church,
standing in its acre of close-packed graveyard, which is shadowed by
yew trees and by the clump of three enormous Scotch firs in the rectory
garden adjoining. At the Church Farm, just beyond--a square white
house, the slated roofs of it running up steeply to a central block of
chimneys, it having, in consequence, somewhat the effect of a monster
extinguisher. At the rows of pale, wheat stacks, raised on granite
staddles; at the prosperous barns, yards, and stables, built of wood on
brick foundations, that surround it, presenting a mass of rich, solid
colour and of noisy, crowded, animal life. At the fields, plough and
pasture, marked out by long lines of hedgerow trees, broken by
coppices--these dashed with tenderest green--stretching up and
back to the dark, purple-blue range of the moorland. At scattered
cottages, over the gates of whose gardens gay with daffodils and
polyanthus, groups of little girls and babies, in flopping
sun-bonnets and scanty lilac pinafores, stared back at the passing
carriage, and then bobbed the accustomed curtsey. In the said groups were
no boys, save of infant years. The boys were away shepherding, or to
plough, or bird-minding. For as yet education was free
indeed--in the sense that you were free to take it, or leave it, as
suited your pocket and your fancy.
Page 110
Richard stared too at the pleasant, furze-dotted commons,
spinning away to right and left as the horses trotted sharply
onward--commons whereon meditative donkeys endured rather than enjoyed
existence, after the manner of their kind; and prodigiously large families
of yellow-grey goslings streeled after the flocks of white geese,
across spaces of fresh sprung grass around shallow ponds, in which the blue
and dapple of the sky were reflected. He stared at Sandyfield village
too--a straight street of detached houses, very diverse in colour and
in shape, standing back, for the most part, amid small orchards and gardens
that slope gently up from the brook, which last, backed, here by a row of
fine elms, there by one of Lombardy poplars, borders the road. Three or
four shops, modest in size as they are ambitious in the variety of objects
offered for sale in them, advance their windows boldly. So does the
yellow-washed inn, the Calmady arms displayed upon its swinging
sign-board. A miller's tented waggon, all powdery with flour,
and its team of six horses, brave with brass harness and bells, a
timber-carriage, and a couple of spring-carts, were drawn up
on the half-moon of gravel before the porch; while, from out the
open door, came a sound of voices and odour of many pipes and much stale
beer.
And Richard had uninterrupted leisure to bestow on all this seeing, for
his companion, Colonel Ormiston, was preoccupied and silent. Once or twice
he looked down at the boy as though suddenly remembering his presence and
inquired if he was "all right." But it was not until they had
crossed the long, white-railed bridge, at the end of Sandyfield
street--which spans not only the little, brown river overhung by
black-stemmed alders, but a bit of marsh, reminiscent of the ancient
ford, lush with water-grasses, beds of king-cups, and
broad-leaved docks--not until then, did Colonel Ormiston make
sustained effort at conversation. Beyond the bridge the road forks.
"Left to Newlands, isn't it?" he asked sharply.
Then, as the carriage swept round the turn, he woke up from his long
reverie, waking Richard up also, from his long dream of mere seeing, to
human drama but dimly apprehended close there at his side.
"Oh, well, well!" the man exclaimed, throwing back his head
in sharp impatience, as a horse will against the restraint of the
bearing-rein. He raised his eyebrows, while his lips set in a smile
the reverse of gay. Then he looked down at Richard again, an unwonted
softness in his expression.
Page 111
"Been happy?" he said. "Enjoyed your drive?
That's right. You understand the art of being really good company,
Dick."
"What's that?"
"Allowing other people to be just as bad company as they
like."
"I--I don't see how you could be bad company,"
Dickie said, flushing at the audacity of his little compliment.
"Don't you, dear old chap? Well, that's very nice of
you. All the same I find, at times, I can be precious bad company to
myself."
"Oh! but I don't see how," the boy argued, his
enthusiasm protesting against all possibility of default in the object of
it. Richard wanted to keep his hands down,--unconsciousness, if only
assumed, told for personal dignity,--but, in the agitation of protest,
spite of himself, he laid hold of the top edge of that same chastening
strap. "It must be so awfully jolly to be like you--able to do
everything and go everywhere. There must be such a lot to think
about."
The softness was still upon Ormiston's face.--"Such a
lot?" he said. "A jolly lot too much, believe me, very often,
Dick."
He looked away up the copse-bordered road, over the ears of the
trotting horses.
"You've read the story of Blue Beard and that unpleasant
locked-up room of his, where the poor, little wives hung all of a
row? Well, I'm sorry to say, Dick, most men when they come to my age
have a room of that sort. It's an inhospitable place. One
doesn't invite one's friends to dine and smoke there. At least
no gentleman does. I've met one or two persons who set the door open
and rather gloried in inviting inspection--but they were blackguards
and cads. They don't count. Still each of us is obliged to go in
there sometimes himself. I tell you it's anything but lively.
I've been in there just now."
The dappled cloud creeping upward from the southern horizon veiled the
sun, the light of which grew pale and thin. The scent of the larch wood, on
the right, hung in the air. Richard's eyes were wide with inquiry.
His mind suffered growing-pains, as young minds of any intellectual
and poetic worth needs must. The possibility of moral experience,
incalculable in extent as that golden-grey outspread of creeping,
increasing vapour overhead, presented itself to him. The vastness of life
touched him to fear. He struggled to find a limit, clothing his effort in
childish realism of statement.
Page 112
"But in that locked-up room, Uncle Roger, you can't
have dead women--dead wives?"
Ormiston laughed quietly.
"You hit out pretty straight from the shoulder, Master
Dick," he said. "Happily I can reassure you on one point. All
manner of things are hung up in there--some ugly--almost all ugly
now, to my eyes, though some of them had charming ways with them once upon
a time. But, I give you my word, neither ugly nor charming, dead nor alive,
are there any wives."
The boy considered a moment, then said stoutly:--"I
wouldn't go in there again. I'd lock the door and throw away
the key."
"Wait till your time comes! You'll find that is precisely
what you can't do."
"Then I'd fetch them out, once and for all, and bury
them."
The carriage had turned in at the lodge gate. Soon a long, low, white
house and range of domed conservatories came into view.
"Heroic remedies!" Ormiston remarked, amused at the
boy's vehemence. "But no doubt they do succeed now and then. To
tell you the truth, Dick, I have been thinking of something of the kind
myself. Only I'm afraid I shall need somebody to help me in carrying
out so extensive a funeral."
"Anybody would be glad enough to help you," Richard
declared, with a strong emphasis on the pronoun.
"Ah! but the bother is anybody can't help one. Only one
person in all this great rough and tumble of a world can really help one.
And often one finds out who that person is a little bit too late. However,
here we are. Perhaps we shall know more about it all in the next
half-hour, if these good people are at home."
In point of fact the good people in question were not at home. Ormiston,
holding reins and whip in one hand, felt for his card-case.
"So we've had our journey for nothing you see, Dick,"
he said.
And to Richard the words sounded regretful. Moreover, the drama of this
expedition seemed to him shorn of its climax. He knew there should be
something more, and pushed for it.
"You haven't asked for Mary," he said. "And I
thought we came on purpose to see Mary. She won't like us to go away
like this. Do ask."
Colonel Ormiston's expression altered, hardened. And Richard, in
his present hypersensitive state, remembered the cool scrutiny bestowed on
the winged sea-gull of his dream last
Page 113
"Tell her Sir Richard Calmady is here, and would like, if he may,
to see her."
Without waiting for a reply, Ormiston unbuckled that same chastening
strap silently, quickly. He got down and, coming round to the farther side
of the carriage, lifted Richard out; while Camp, who had jumped off the
back seat, stood yawning, whining a little, shaking his heavy head and
wagging his tail in welcome on the doorstep. With the bull-dog close
at his heels, Ormiston carried the boy into the house.
The inner doors were open, and, up the long, narrow, pleasantly
fresh-tinted drawing-room, Mary Cathcart came to meet them.
The folds of her habit were gathered up in one hand. In the other she
carried a bunch of long-stalked, yellow and scarlet tulips. Her
strong, supple figure stood out against the young green of the lawns and
shrubberies, seen through the French windows behind her. She walked
carefully, with a certain deliberation, thanks to her narrow habit and
top-boots. The young lady carried her thirty-one years
bravely. Her irregular features and large mouth had always been open to
criticism. But her teeth, when her lips parted, were white and even, and
her brown eyes frankly honest as ever.
"Why, Dickie dear, it is simply glorious to have you and Camp
paying visits on your own account."--Her speech broke into a
little cry, while her fingers closed, so tightly on the tulips that the
brittle stalks snapped, and the gay-coloured bells of them hung
limply, some falling on to the carpet about her feet.
"Roger--Colonel Ormiston--I didn't know you were
home--were here!"--Her voice was uncontrollably glad.
Still carrying the boy, Ormiston stood before her, observing her keenly.
But he was no longer remote. His insolence, which, after all, may have been
chiefly self-protective, had vanished.
"I'm very sorry--I mean for those poor tulips. I came
to pay my respects to Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart, and not finding them was
preparing to drive humbly home again. But"--Certainly she
carried her years well. She looked absurdly young. The brown and
rose-red of her complexion was clear as that of the little maiden
who had fought with, and over-
Page 114
Miss Cathcart made no direct answer.
"Sit here, Dickie," she said, pointing to a sofa.
"But you don't really mind our coming in, do you?" he
asked, rather anxiously.
The young lady placed herself beside him, drew his hand on to her knee,
patted it gently.
"Mind? No; on the whole, I don't think I do mind very much.
In fact, I think I should probably have minded very much more if you had
gone away without asking for me."
"There, I told you so, Uncle Roger," the boy said
triumphantly. Camp had jumped up on to the sofa too. He put his arm
comfortably round the dog's neck. It was as well to acquire support
on both sides, for the surface of the glazed chintz was slippery,
inconveniently unsustaining to his equilibrium.--"It's an
awfully long time since I've seen Mary," he continued,
"more than three weeks."
"Yes, an awfully long time," Ormiston echoed, "more
than six years."
"Dear Dickie," she said; "how pretty of you! Do you
always keep count of my visits?"
"Of course I do. They were about the best things that ever
happened, till Uncle Roger came home."
Forgetting herself, Mary Cathcart raised her eyes to Ormiston's in
appeal. The boy's little declaration stirred all the latent
motherhood in her. His fortunes at once passed so very far beyond, and fell
so far short of, the ordinary lot. She wondered whether, and could not but
trust that, this old friend and new-comer was not too
self-centred, too hardened by ability and success, to appreciate the
intimate pathos of the position. Ormiston read and answered her
thought.
Page 115
"Oh! we are going to do something to change all that," he
said confidently. "We are going to enlarge our borders a bit,
aren't we, Dick? Only, I think, we should manage matters much better
if Miss Cathcart would help us, don't you?"
Richard remembering the locked-up room of evil contents and that
proposal of inclusive funeral rites, gave this utterance a wholly
individual application. His face grew bright with intelligence. But,
greatly restraining himself, he refrained from speech. All that had been
revealed to him in confidence, and so his honour was engaged to
silence.
Ormiston pulled forward a chair and sat down by him, leaning forward,
his hands clasped about one knee, while he gazed at the tulips scattered on
the floor.
"So tell Miss Cathcart we all want her to come over to Brockhurst
just as often as she can," he continued, "and help us to make
the wheels go round a little faster. Tell her we've grown very old,
and discreet, and respectable, and that we are absolutely incapable of
doing or saying anything foolish or naughty, which she would object
to--and"--
But Richard could restrain himself no longer.--"Why
don't you tell her yourself, Uncle Roger?"
"Because, my dear old chap, a burnt child fears the fire. I tried
to tell Miss Cathcart something once, long ago. She mayn't
remember"--
"She does remember," Mary said quietly, looking down at
Richard's hand and patting it as it lay on her lap.
"But she stopped me dead," Ormiston went on. "It was
quite right of her. She gave the most admirable reasons for stopping me.
Would you care to hear them?"
"Oh! don't, pray don't," Mary murmured.
"It is not generous."
"Pardon me, your reasons were absolutely just--true in
substance and in fact. You said I was a selfish,
good-for-nothing spendthrift, and so"--
"I was odious," she broke in. "I was a
self-righteous little Pharisee--forgive me"--
"Why--there's nothing to forgive. You spoke the
truth."
"I don't believe it," Richard cried, in vehement
protest.
"Dickie, you're a darling," Mary Cathcart said.
Colonel Ormiston left off nursing his knee, and leaned a little farther
forward.
"Well then, will you come over to Brockhurst very often, and help
us to make the wheels go round, and cheer us all up, and do us no end of
good, though--I am a selfish, good-for-
Page 116
A silence followed, which appeared to Richard protracted to the point of
agitation. He became almost distressingly conscious of the man's
still, bronzed, resolute face on the one hand, of the woman's mobile,
vivid, yet equally resolute face on the other, divining far more to be at
stake than he had clear knowledge of. Tired and excited, his impatience
touched on anger.
"Say yes, Mary," he cried impulsively, "say yes. I
don't see how anybody can want to refuse Uncle Roger
anything."
Miss Cathcart's eyes grew moist. She turned and kissed the
boy.
"I don't think--perhaps--Dickie, that I quite see
either," she answered very gently.
"Mary, you know what you've just
said?"--Ormiston's tone was stern. "You understand
this little comedy? It means business. This time you've got to go the
whole hog or none."
She looked straight at him, and drew her breath in a long
half-laughing sigh.
"Oh, dear me! what a plague of a hurry you are in!" she
said. "Well--then--then--I suppose I must--it is
hardly a graceful expression, but it is of your choosing, not of
mine--I suppose I must go the whole hog."
Roger Ormiston rose, treading the fallen tulips under foot. And Richard,
watching him, beheld that which called to his remembrance, not the hopeless
and impotent battle under the black, polished sky of his last night's
dream, but the gallant stories he had heard, earlier last night, of the
battles of Sobraon and Chillianwallah, of the swift dangers of sport, and
large daring of travel. Here he beheld--so it seemed to his boyish
thought-the aspect of a born conqueror, of the man who can serve and
wait long for the good he desires, and who, winning it, lays hold of it
with fearless might. And this, while causing Richard an exquisite delight
of admiration, caused him also a longing to share those splendid powers so
passionate that it amounted to actual pain.
Mary Cathcart's hand slid from under his hand. She too rose to her
feet.
"Then you have actually cared for me all along, all these
years?" Ormiston declared in fierce joy.
"Of course--who else could I care for?
And--and--you've loved me, Roger, all the while?"
And Ormiston answered "Yes,"--speaking the truth,
though
Page 117
All this, however, Dickie did not know. He only knew they dazzled
him--the man triumphantly strong, the woman so bravely glad. He could
not watch them any longer. He went hot all over, and his heart beat. He
felt strangely desolate too. They were far away from him, in thought,
though so close by. Dickie shut his eyes, put his arms round the
bull-dog, pressed his face hard against the faithful beast's
shoulder; while Camp, stretching his short neck to the uttermost, nuzzled
against him and essayed to lick his cheek.
Thus did Richard Calmady gain yet further knowledge of things as they
are.
CHAPTER IV
WHICH SMELLS VERY VILELY OF THE STABLE
APRIL softened into May, and the hawthorns were in blossom
before Richard passed any other very noteworthy milestone on the road of
personal development. Then, greatly tempted, he committed a venial sin;
received prompt and coarse chastisement; and, by means of the said
chastisement, as is the merciful way of the Eternal Justice, found unhoped
of emancipation.
It happened thus. As the spring days grew warm Mademoiselle de
Mirancourt failed somewhat. The darkness and penetrating chill of the
English winter tried her, and this year her recuperative powers seemed
sadly deficient. A fuller tide of life had pulsed through Brockhurst since
Colonel Ormiston's arrival. The old stillness was departing, the old
order changing. With that change Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had no quarrel,
since, to her serene faith, all that came must, of necessity, come through
a divine ordering and in conformity to a divine plan. Yet this more of
activity and of movement strained her. The weekly drive over to Westchurch,
to hear mass at the humble Catholic chapel tucked away in a side street,
sorely taxed her strength. She returned fortified, her soul ravished by
that heavenly love, which, in pure and innocent natures, bears such
gracious kinship to earthly love. Yet in body she was outworn
Page 118
"Ah! très cher ami, had you
only followed the ever blessed footsteps of those dear Oxford friends of
yours and entered the fold of the true Church, what fatigue might you not
now spare me--let alone the incalculable advantages to your own poor,
charming, fatally darkened soul!"
While Julius--who, though no less devout than of yore, was happily
less fastidiously sensitive--would reply:--
"But, dearest lady, had I followed the footsteps of my Oxford
friends, remember I should not be at Brockhurst at all."
"Clearly, then, everything is well ordered," she would say,
folding her fragile hands upon her embroidery frame, "since it is
altogether impossible we could do without you. Yet I regret for your soul.
It is so capable of receiving illumination. You English--even the most
finished among you--remain really deplorably stubborn, and
nevertheless it is my fate perpetually to set my affections upon one or
other of you."
It followed that Katherine devoted much of her time to Mademoiselle de
Mirancourt, walked slowly beside her up and down the sunny, garden paths
sheltered by the high, red walls whereon the clematis and jasmine began to
show for flower; or took her for quiet, little drives within the precincts
of the park. They spoke much of Lucia St. Quentin, of Katherine's
girlhood, and of those pleasant days in Paris long ago. And this brought
soothing and comfort, not only to the old lady, but to the young lady
also--and of soothing and comfort the latter stood in need just
now.
For it is harsh discipline even to a noble woman, whose life is still
strong in her, to stand by and see another woman, but a few years her
junior, entering on those joys which she has lost--marriage, probably
motherhood as well. Roger Ormiston and Mary Cathcart's
love-making was restrained and dignified. But the very calm of their
attitude implied a security of happiness passing all need of advertisement.
And Katherine was very far from grudging them this. She was not envious,
still less jealous. She did not want to take anything of theirs; but she
wanted, she sorely wanted, her own again. A word, a look, a certain
quickness of quiet laughter, would pierce her with recollection. Once for
her too, below the commonplaces of daily detail, flowed that same magic
river of delight. But the springs of it had gone dry. Therefore it was a
relief to be alone with Mademoiselle de Mirancourt--virgin and
saint--and to speak with her of the days before she, Katherine, had
sounded the lovely depths of that
Page 119
It was a relief even, though of sterner quality, to go into the red
drawing-room on the ground floor and pace there, her hands clasped
behind her, her proud head bowed, by the half-hour together. If
personal joy is dead past resurrection, there is bitter satisfaction in
realising to the full personal pain. The room was duly swept, dusted,
casements set open to welcome breeze and sunshine, fires lighted in the
grate. But no one ever sat there. It knew no cheerfulness of social
intercourse. The crimson curtains and covers had become faded. They were
not renewed. The furniture, save for the absence of the narrow bed, stood
in precisely the same order as on the night when Sir Richard Calmady died.
It was pushed back against the walls. And in the wide, empty way between
the two doors, Katherine paced, saturating all her being with thoughts of
that which was, and must remain, wholly and inalienably her
own--namely her immense distress.
And in this she took the more comfort, because something else, until now
appearing wholly her own, was slipping a little away from her.
Dickie's health had improved notably in the last few weeks. His
listlessness had vanished, while his cheeks showed a wholesome warmth of
colour. But his cry was ever--"Mother, Uncle Roger's going
to such a place. He says he'll take me. I can go, can't
I?" Or--"Mother, Mary's going to do such a thing.
She says she'll show me how. She may, mayn't she?" And
Katherine's answer was always "Yes." She grudged the boy
none of his new-found pleasures, rejoiced indeed to see him
interested and gay. Yet to watch the new broom, which sweeps so clean, is
rarely exhilarating to those that have swept diligently with the old one.
The nest had held her precious fledgling so safely till now, and this
fluttering of wings, eager for flight, troubled her somewhat. Not only was
Dickie's readiness to be away from her a trifle hard to bear; but she
knew that disappointment, of a certainty, lay in wait for him, and that
each effort towards wider action would but reveal to him how circumscribed
his powers actually were.
Meanwhile, however, Richard enjoyed himself recklessly, almost
feverishly, in the attempt to disprove the teaching of that ugly dream, and
keep truth at bay. There had been further drives, and the excitement of
witnessing a forest fire--only too frequent in the Brockhurst country
when the sap is up, and the easterly wind and May sun have scorched all
moisture from the
Page 120
There had been more peaceful pastimes as well--several days'
fishing, enchanting beyond the power of language to describe. The clear
trout-stream meandering through the rich water-meadows; the
herds of cattle standing knee-deep in the grass, lazily chewing the
cud and switching their tails at the cloud of flies; the birds and wild
creatures haunting the streamside; the long dreamy hours of gentle sport,
had opened up to Dickie a whole new world of romance. His
donkey-chair had been left at the yellow-washed mill beneath
the grove of silvery-leaved, ever-rustling, balsam poplars.
And thence, while Ormiston and Mary sauntered slowly on ahead, the
men--Winter in mufti, oblivious of plate-cleaning and
cellarage, and the onerous duties of his high estate, Stamp, the
water-bailiff, and Moorcock, one of the
under-keepers--had carried him across the great, green levels.
Winter was an old and tried friend, and it was somewhat diverting to behold
him in this novel aspect, affable and chatty with inferiors, displaying,
moreover, unexpected knowledge in the mysteries of the angler's
craft. The other two men--sharp-featured, their faces ruddy as
summer apples, merry-eyed, clad in velveteen coats, that bulged
about the pockets, and wrinkled leather gaiters reaching half-way up
the thigh--charmed Richard, when his first shyness was passed. They
were eager to please him. Their talk was racy. Their laughter ready and
sincere. Did not Stamp point out to him a water-ouzel, with
impudently jerking tail, dipping and wading in the shallows of the stream?
Did not Moorcock find him a water-rail's nest, hidden in a
tuft of reeds and grass, with ten, yellowish, speckled eggs in it? And did
not both men pluck him handfuls of cowslips, of tawny-pink avens,
and of mottled, snake-headed fritillarias, and stow them away in the
fishing-baskets above the load of silver-and-red
spotted trout?
Mary had protested Dickie could throw a fly, if he had a light enough
rod. And not only did he throw a fly, but at the
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But all this, inspiring though it was, served but as prelude to a more
profoundly coveted acquaintance--that with the racing-stable.
For it was after this last that Dickie still supremely longed--the
more so, it is to be feared, because it was, if not explicitly, yet
implicitly forbidden. A spirit of defiance had entered into him. Being
granted the inch, he was disposed to take the ell. And this, not in
conscious opposition to his mother's will; but in protest, not
uncourageous, against the limitations imposed on him by physical
misfortune. The boy's blood was up, and consequently, with greater
pluck than discretion, he struggled against the intimate, inalienable enemy
that so marred his fate. And it was this not ignoble effort which
culminated in disobedience.
For driving back one afternoon, later than usual,--Ormiston had met
them, and Mary and he had taken a by-path home through the
woods,--the pony-carriage, turned along the high level road
beside the lake, going eastward, just as the string of racehorses, coming
home from exercise, passed along it coming west. Richard was driving,
Chaplin, the second coachman, sitting in the dickey at the back of the low
carriage. He checked the pony, and his eyes took in the whole
scene--the blue-brown expanse of the lake dotted with
water-fowl, on the one hand, the immense, blue-brown
landscape on the other, ranging away to the faint line of the chalk downs
in the south; the downward slope of the park, to the great square of red
stable-buildings in the hollow; the horses coming slowly towards him
in single file. Cawing rooks streamed back from the fallow-fields
across the valley. Thrushes and blackbirds carolled. A wren, in the
bramble-brake close by, broke into sharp, sweet song. The
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Richard stared at that oncoming procession. Half-way between him
and the foremost of the horses the tan ride branched off, and wound down
the hillside to the stables. The boy set his teeth. He arrived at a
desperate decision--touched up the pony and drove on.
Chaplin leaned forward, addressing him over the back of the seat.
"Better wait here, hadn't we, Sir Richard? They'll
turn off in a minute."
Richard did not look round. He tried to answer coldly, but his voice
shook.
"I know. That's why I am going on."
There was a silence save for the cawing of the rooks, ring of the axe,
and grinding of wheels on the gravel. Chaplin, responsible, correct, over
five-and-thirty, and fully intending to succeed old Mr.
Wenham, the head coachman, on the latter's impending retirement from
active service, went very red in the face.
"Excuse me, but I have my orders, Sir Richard," he said.
Dickie still looked straight ahead.
"Very well," he answered, "then perhaps you'd
better get out and walk on home."
"You know I'm bound not to leave you, sir," the man
said.
Dickie laughed a little in uncontrollable excitement. He was close to
them now. The leading horse was just moving off the main road, its shadow
lying long across the turf. How was it possible to give way with the prize
within reach?--"You can go or stay Chaplin, as you please. I
mean to speak to Chifney. I--I mean to see the stables."
"It's as much as my place is worth, sir."
"Oh! bother your place!" the boy cried
impetuously.--Dear heart alive, how fine they were as they filed by!
That chestnut filly, clean made as a deer, her ears laid back as she
reached at the bit; and the brown, just behind her--"I mean, I
mean you needn't be afraid, Chaplin--I'll speak to her
ladyship. I'll arrange all that. Go to the pony's
head."
At the end of the long string of horses came the trainer--a
square-built, short-necked man, sanguine complexioned and
clean shaven. Of hair, indeed, Mr. Chifney could only boast a rim of
carroty-grey stubble under the rim of the back of his
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As he rode up an unwonted expression came over Mr. Chifney's
shrewd, hard-favoured face. He took off his hat and sat there,
bare-headed in the sunshine, looking down at the boy his hand on his
hip.
"Good-day, Sir Richard," he said. "Anything I
can do for you?"
"Yes, yes," Dickie stammered, all his soul in his eyes, his
cheeks aflame, "you can do just what I want most. Take me down,
Chifney, and show me the horses."
Here Chaplin coughed discreetly behind his hand. But that proved of
small avail, save possibly in the way of provocation. For, socially,
between the racing and house stables was a great gulf fixed; and Mr.
Chifney could hardly be expected to recognise the existence of a man in
livery standing at a pony's head, still less to accept direction from
such a person. Servants must be kept in their place--impudent, lazy
enough lot anyhow, bless you! On his feet the trainer had been known to
decline to moments of weakness. But in the saddle, a good horse under him,
he possessed unlimited belief in his own judgment, fearing neither man,
devil, nor even his own meek-faced wife with lilac ribbons in her
cap. Moreover, he felt such heart as he had go out strangely to the
beautiful, eager boy gazing up at him.
"Nothing 'ud give me greater pleasure in life, Sir
Richard," he said, "if you're free to come. We've
waited a long time, a precious long time, sir, for you to come down and
take a look at your horses."
"I'd have been to see them sooner. I'd have given
anything to see them. I've never had the chance, somehow."
Chifney pursed up his lips, and surveyed the distant landscape with a
very meaning glance. "I daresay not, Sir Richard. But better late
than never, you know; and so, if you are free to come"--
Again Chaplin coughed.
"Free to come? Of course I am free to come," Dickie
asserted, his pride touched to arrogance. And Mr. Chifney looked at him, an
approving twinkle in his sound eye.
"I agree, Sir Richard. Quite right, sir, you're free, of
course."
Stolen waters are sweet, says the proverb. And to Richard Calmady, his
not wholly legitimate experience of the next hour
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On three sides the quadrangle was shut in by one-storied, brick
buildings, the woodwork of doors and windows immaculate with white paint.
Behind, over the wide archway,--closed fortress-like by heavy
doors at night,--were the head-lad's and helpers'
quarters. On either side, forge and weighing-room, saddler's
and doctor's shop. To right and left a range of stable doors, with
round swing-lights between each; and, above these, the windows of
hay and straw lofts and of the boys' dormitories. In front were the
dining-rooms and kitchens, and the trainer's house--a
square clock tower, carrying an ornate gilt vane, rising from the cluster
of red roofs. Twenty years had weathered the raw of brick walls, and
painted the tiling with all manner of orange and rusty-coloured
lichens; yet the whole place was admirably spick and span, free of litter.
Many cats, as Dickie noted, meditated in sunny corners, or prowled in the
open with truly official composure. Over all stretched a square of bluest
sky, crossed by a skein of homeward-wending rooks. While above the
roofs, on either side the archway, the high-lying lands of the park
showed up, broken here and there by clumps of trees.
Mr. Chifney slipped out of the saddle.--"Here, boy, take my
horse," he shouted to a little fellow hurrying across the yard.
"I'm heartily glad to see you, Sir Richard," he went on.
"Now, if you care, as your father's son can't very well
be off caring, for horses"--
"If I care!" echoed Dickie, his eyes following the graceful,
chestnut filly as she was led in over the threshold of her stable.
"I like that. That'll do. Chip of the old block after
all," the trainer said, with evident relish. "Well then, since
you do care for horses as you ought to, Sir Richard, we'll just make
you
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"No, I won't," Dickie said stoutly.
Mr. Chifney was in a condition of singular emotion, as he wrapped
Richard's rug about him and bore him away into the stables. He even
went so far as to swear a little under his breath; and Chifney was a very
fairly clean-mouthed man, unless members of his team of twenty and
odd naughty boys got up to some devilry with their charges. He carried
Richard as tenderly as could any woman, while he tramped from stall to
stall, loose-box to loose-box, praising his racers, calling
attention to their points, recounting past prowess, or prophesying future
victories.
And the record was a fine one; for good luck had clung to the masterless
stable, as Lady Calmady's bank-books and ledgers could
testify.
"Vinedresser, by Red Burgundy out of Valeria--won two races
at the Newmarket Spring Meeting the year before last. Lamed himself somehow
in the horse-box coming back--did nothing for eighteen
months--hope to enter him for some of the autumn
events."--Then later:--"Sahara, by North
African out of Sally-in-our-Alley. Beautiful mare? I
believe you, Sir Richard. Why she won the Oaks for you. Jack White was up.
Pretty a race as ever I witnessed, and cleverly ridden. Like to go up to
her in the stall? She's as quiet as a lamb. Catch hold of her head,
boy."
And so Dick found himself seated on the edge of the manger, the
trainer's arm round him, and the historic Sahara snuffing at his
jacket pockets.
Then they crossed the quadrangle to inspect the colts and fillies, whose
glories still lay ahead.
"Verdigris, by Copper King out of Valeria again. And if he
doesn't make a name I'll never judge another horse, sir. Strain
of the old Touchstone blood there. Rather ugly? Yes, they're often a
bit ugly that lot, but devilish good 'uns to go. You ask Miss
Cathcart about them. Never met a lady who'd as much knowledge as she
has of a horse. The Baby, by Punch out of Lady Bountiful. Not much good,
I'm afraid. No grip, you see, too contracted in the hoofs.
Chloroform, by Sawbones out of sister to Castinette."
And so forth, an endless repetition of genealogies, comments,
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"And it was there, Sir Richard," he said, "I met your
father, and we fancied each other from the first. And he asked me to come
to him. These stables were just building then. And here I've been
ever since."
Mr. Chifney stared down at the clean, red quarries of the stable floor,
and tapped his neat gaiters with the switch he held in his hand.
"Rum places, racing-stables," he went on,
meditatively, "and a lot of rum things go on in 'em, one way
and another, as you'll come to know. And it ain't the easiest
thing going, I tell you, to keep your hands clean. Ungrateful business a
trainer's, Sir Richard--wearing business--shortens a
man's temper and makes him old before his time. Out by four
o'clock on summer mornings, minding your cattle and keeping your eye
on those shirking blackguards of boys. No real rest, sir, day or night.
Wearing business--studying all the meetings and entering your horses
where you've reason to reckon they've most chance. And if your
horse wins, the jockey gets all the praise and the petting. And if it
fails, the trainer gets all the blame. Yes, it's wearing work. But,
confound it all, sir," he broke out hotly, "there's
nothing like it on the face of God's earth.
Horses--horses--horses--why the very smell of the
bedding's sweeter than a bunch of roses. Love 'em? I believe
you. And you'll love 'em too before you've
done."
He turned and gripped Dickie hard by the shoulder.
"For we'll make a thorough-paced sportsman of you
yet, Sir Richard," he said, "God bless you--danged if we
don't."
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Which assertion Mr. Chifney repeated at frequent intervals over his grog
that evening, as he sat, not in the smart dining-room hung round
with portraits of Vinedresser and Sahara and other equine notabilities, but
in the snug, little, back parlour looking out on to the yard. Mrs. Chifney
was a gentle, pious woman, with whom her husband's profession went
somewhat against the grain. She would have preferred a nice grocery, or
other respectable, uneventful business, in a country town, and dissipation
in the form of prayer rather than of race-meetings. But as a
slender, slightly self-righteous, young maiden she had fallen very
honestly and completely in love with Tom Chifney. So there was nothing for
it but to marry him and regard the horses as her appointed cross. She
nursed the boys when they were sick or injured, intervened fairly
successfully between their poor, little backs and her husband's
all-too-ready ash stick; and assisted Julius March in
promoting their spiritual welfare, even while deploring that the latter put
his faith in forms and ceremonies rather than in saving grace. Upon the
trainer himself she exercised a gently repressive influence.
"We won't swear, Mr. Chifney," she remarked mildly
now.
"Swear! It's enough to make the whole bench of bishops swear
to see that lad."
"I did see him," Mrs. Chifney observed.
"Yes, out of window. But you didn't carry him round, and
hear him talk--knowledgeable talk as you could ask from one of his
age. And watch his face--as like as two peas to his
father's."
"But her ladyship's eyes," put in Mrs. Chifney.
"I don't know whose eyes they are, but I know he can use
'em. It was as pretty as a picture to see how he took it
all."
Chifney tossed off the remainder of his tumbler of brandy and water at a
gulp.
"Swear," he repeated, "I could find it in my heart to
swear like hell. But I can find it in my heart to do more than that. I can
forgive her ladyship. By all that's"--
"Thomas, forgiveness and oaths don't go suitably
together."
"Well, but I can though, and I tell you, I do," he said
solemnly. "I forgive her.--Shoot the Clown! by G--! I beg
your pardon, Maria--but upon my soul, once or twice, when I had him in
my arms to-day, I felt I could have understood it if she'd had
every horse shot that stood in the stable."
He held the tumbler up against the lamp. But it was quite empty.
"Uncommon glad she didn't though, poor lady, all the
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CHAPTER V
IN WHICH DICKIE IS INTRODUCED TO A LITTLE DANCER WITH
BLUSH-ROSES IN HER HAT
"HER ladyship's inquired for you more than once,
sir."--This from Winter meeting the pony-carriage and the
returning prodigal at the bottom of the steps.
The sun was low. Across the square lawn--whereon the Clown had
found death some thirteen years before--peacocks led home their hens
and chicks to roost within the two sexagonal, pepper-pot
summer-houses that fill in the angles of the red-walled
enclosure. The pea-fowl stepped mincingly, high-shouldered,
their heads carried low, their long necks undulating with a
self-conscious grace. Dickie's imagination was aglow like that
rose-red, sunset sky. The virile sentiment of all just heard and
seen, and the exultation of admitted ownership were upon him. He felt
older, stronger, more secure of himself, than ever before. He proposed to
go straight to his mother and confess. In his present mood he entertained
no fear but that she would understand.
"Is Lady Calmady alone?" he asked.
"Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart are with her, Sir
Richard."--Winter leant down, loosening the rug. His usual
undemonstrative speech took on a loftiness of tone. "Mrs. William
Ormiston and her daughter have driven over with Mrs.
Cathcart."--The butler was not without remembrance of that
dinner on the day following Dickie's birth. Socially he had never
considered Lady Calmady's sister-in-law quite up to the
Brockhurst level.
Richard leaned back, watching the mincing peacocks. It was so fair here
out of doors. The scent of the may hung in the air. The flame of the sunset
bathed the façade of the stately house. No doubt it would be
interesting to see new people, new relations; but he really cared to see no
one, just now, except his mother. From her he wanted to receive absolution,
so that, his conscience relieved of the burden of his disobedience, he
might revel to the full in the thought of the inheritance upon
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"I suppose I've got to go in and help entertain
everybody," he remarked.
"Her ladyship'll think something's wrong, Sir Richard,
and be anxious if you stay away."
The boy held out his arms. "All right then, Winter," he
said.
Here Chaplin again gave that admonitory cough. Richard, his face
hardening to slight scorn, looked at him over the butler's
shoulder.
"Oh! You need not be uneasy, Chaplin. When I say I'll do a
thing, I don't forget."
Which brief speech caused the butler to reflect, as he bore the boy
across the hall and upstairs, that Sir Richard was coming to have an
uncommonly high manner about him, at times, considering his age.
An unwonted loudness of conversation filled the Chapel-Room. It
was filled also by the rose-red light of the sunset streaming in
through the curve of the oriel-window. This confused and dazzled
Richard slightly, entering upon it from the silence and sober clearness of
the stair-head. A shrill note of laughter.--Mr.
Cathcart's voice saying--"I felt it incumbent upon me to
object, Lady Calmady. I spoke very plainly to
Fallowfeild."--Julius March's delicately refined
tones--"I am afraid spirituality is somewhat deficient in that
case."--Then the high, flute-like notes of a child,
rising dearly above the general murmur-"
And Ormiston, breaking the silence, called to him
cheerily:--
"Hello, old chap, what have you been up to? You gave Mary and me
the slip."
"I know I did," the boy answered bravely. "How
d'ye do, Mrs. Cathcart?" as the latter nodded and smiled to
him--a large, gentle, comfortable lady, uncertain in outline, thanks
to voluminous draperies of black silk and black lace. "How d'ye
do, sir?" this to Mr. Cathcart--a tall, neatly-made man,
but for a
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"My darling, you are very late," Katherine said. Her back
was towards her guests as she stooped down arranging the embroidered rug
across Dickie's feet and legs. Laying his hand on her wrist he
squeezed it closely for a moment.
"I--I'll tell you all about that presently, mummy, when
they're gone. I've been enjoying myself awfully--you
won't mind?"
Katherine smiled. But, looking up at her, it appeared to Richard that
her face was very white, her eyes very large and dark, and that she was
very tall and, somehow, very splendid just then. And this fed his
fearlessness, fed his young pride, even as, though in a more subtle and
exquisite manner, his late experience of the racing-stable had fed
them. His mother moved away and took up her interrupted conversation with
Mr. Cathcart regarding the delinquencies of Lord Fallowfeild. Richard
looked coolly round the room.
Everyone was there--Julius, Mary, Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, while
away in the oriel-window Roger Ormiston stood talking to a pretty,
plump, very much dressed lady, who chattered, laughed, stared, with
surprising vivacity. As Dickie looked at her she stared back at him through
a pair of gold eye-glasses. Against her knee, that rosy light
bathing her graceful, little figure, leant a girl about Dickie's own
age. She wore a pale pink and blue frock, short and outstanding in the
skirts. She also wore a broad-brimmed, white hat, with a garland of
blush-roses around the crown of it. The little girl did not stare.
She contemplated Richard languidly, yet with sustained attention. Her
attitude and bearing were attractive. Richard wanted to see her close, to
talk to her. But to call and ask her to come to him was awkward. And to go
to her--the boy grew a little hot again--was more awkward
still.
Mrs. Ormiston dropped her gold eye-glasses into her lap.
"It really is ten thousand pities when these things happen in the
wrong rank of life," she said. "Rightly placed they might be so
profitable."
"For goodness sake, be careful, Charlotte," Ormiston put in
quickly.
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"Oh! my dear creature, don't be nervous. Everybody's
attending to everybody else, and if they did hear they wouldn't
understand. I'm one of the fortunate persons who are supposed never
to talk sense and so I can say what I like." Mrs. Ormiston gave her
shrill little laugh. "Oh! there are consolations, depend upon it, in
a well-sustained reputation for folly!"
The laugh jarred on Richard. He decided that he did not quite like his
aunt Charlotte Ormiston. All the same he wished the charming, little girl
would come to him.
"But to return.--It's a waste. To some poor family it
might have been a perfect fortune. And I hate waste. Perhaps you have never
discovered that?"
Ormiston let his glance rest on the somewhat showy figure.
"I doubt if William has discovered it either," he
remarked.
"Oh! as to your poor brother William, Heaven only knows what he
has or has not discovered!--Now, Helen, this conversation becomes
undesirable. You've asked innumerable questions about your cousin. Go
and make acquaintance with him. I'm the best of mothers of course,
but, at times, I really can do quite well without you."
Now surely this was a day of good fortune, for again Dickie had his
desire. And a most surprisingly pretty, little desire it
proved--seductive even, deliciously finished in person and in manner.
The boy gazed at the girl's small hands and small, daintily shod
feet, at the small, lovely, pink and white face set in a cloud of
golden-brown hair, at the innocent, blue eyes, at the mouth with
upturned corners to it. Richard was not of age to remark the eyes were
rather light in colour, the lips rather thin. The exquisite refinement of
the girl's whole person delighted him. She was delicate as a
miniature, as a figure carved in ivory. She was like his uncle Roger, when
she was silent and still. She was like--oh, poor Dick!--some
bright glancing, small, saucy bird when she spoke and her voice had those
clear, flute tones in it.
"Since you did not come to me, I had to come to you," she
said. "I have wanted so much to see you. I had heard about you at
home, in Paris."
"Heard about me?" Dickie repeated, flattered and surprised.
"But won't you sit down? Look--that little chair. I can
reach."
And leaning sideways he stretched out his hand. But his
finger-tips barely touched the top rail. Richard
flushed.--"I'm awfully sorry," he said, "but I
am afraid--it isn't heavy--I must let you get it
yourself."
Page 132
The girl, who had watched him intently, her hands clasped, gave a little
sigh. Then the corners of her mouth turned up as she smiled. A delightful
dimple showed in her right cheek.
"But, of course," she replied, "I will get
it."
She settled herself beside him, folded her hands, crossed her feet,
exposing a long length of fine, open-work, silk stocking.
"I desired enormously to see you," she continued. "But
when you came in I grew shy. It is so with one sometimes."
"You should use your influence, Lady Calmady," Mr. Cathcart
was saying. "Unquestionably the condition of the workhouse is far
from satisfactory. And Fallowfeild is too lenient.
That laisser-aller policy of his
threatens to land us in serious difficulties. The place is insanitary, and
the food is unnecessarily poor. I am not an advocate for extravagance, but
I cannot bear to see discomfort which might be avoided. Fallowfeild is the
most kind-hearted of men, but he has a fatal habit of believing what
people tell him. And those workhouse officials have got round him. The
whole matter ought to be subjected to the strictest
investigation."
"It is very nice of you to have wanted so much to see me,"
Dickie said. His eyes were softly bright.
"Oh! but one always wants to see those who are talked about. It is
a privilege to have them for one's relations."
"But--but--I'm not talked about?" the boy
put in, somewhat startled.
"But certainly. You are so rich. You have this superb
château. You are"--she put her head on one side with a
pretty, saucy, birdlike
movement--"enfin," she said,
"I had the greatest curiosity to make your acquaintance. I shall tell
all my young friends at the convent about this visit. I promised them that,
as soon as mama said we should probably come here. The good sisters also
are interested. I shall recount a whole history of this beautiful castle,
and of you, and your"--
She paused, clasped her hands, looking away at her mother, then sideways
at Richard, bowing her little person backwards and forwards, laughing
softly all the while. And her laughing face was extraordinarily pretty
under the shade of her broad-brimmed hat.
"It is a great misfortune we stay so short a time," she
continued. "I shall not see the half of all that I wish to
see."
Then an heroic plan of action occurred to Richard. The daring engendered
by his recent act of disobedience was still active in him. He was in the
humour to attempt the impossible. He longed, moreover, to give this
delectable little person pleasure.
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"Oh! but if you care so much, I--I will show you the
house," he said.
"Will you?" she cried, "You and I alone together? But
that is precisely what I want. It would be ravishing."
Poor Dickie's heart misgave him slightly; but he summoned all his
resolution. He threw off the concealing rug.
"I--I walk very slowly, I'm afraid," he said
rather huskily, looking up at her, while in his expression appeal mingled
pathetically with defiant pride.
"But, so much the better," she replied. "We shall be
the longer together. I shall have the more to observe, to
recount."
She was on her feet. She hovered round him, birdlike, intent on his
every movement.
Meanwhile the sound of conversation rose continuous. Lady Calmady,
calling to Julius, had moved away to the great writing-table in the
farther window. Together they searched among a pile of papers for a letter
of Dr. Knott's, embodying his scheme of the new hospital at
Westchurch. Mr. Cathcart stood by, expounding his views on the subject.
"Of course a considerable income can be derived from letters of
recommendation," he was saying, "in-patient and
out-patient tickets. The clergy come in there. They cannot be
expected to give large donations. It would be unreasonable to expect that
of them."
Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, Mrs. Cathcart, and Mary, had drawn their
chairs together. The two elder ladies spoke with a subdued enthusiasm,
discussing pleasant details of the approaching wedding, which promised the
younger lady so glad a future. Mrs. Ormiston chattered; while Ormiston,
listening to her, gazed away down the green length of the elm avenue,
beyond the square lawn and pepper-pot summer-houses, and
pitied men who made such mistakes in the matter of matrimony as his brother
William obviously had. The rose of the sunset faded in the west. Bats began
to flit forth, hawking against the still-warm house-walls for
flies.
And so, unobserved, Dickie slipped out of the security of his
arm-chair, and rose to that sadly deficient full height of his. He
was nervous, and this rendered his balance more than ever uncertain. He
shuffled forward, steadying himself by a piece of furniture here and there
in passing, until he reached the wide open space before the door on to the
stair-head. And it
Page 134
Little Helen Ormiston had kept close beside him so far. Now she drew
back, leaving him alone. Leaning against a table, she watched his laborious
progress. Then a fit of uncontrollable laughter took her. She flew
half-way across to the oriel-window, her voice ringing out
clear and gay, though broken by bursts of irrepressible merriment.
"Regardez, regardez donc, Maman! Ma bonne
m'avait dit qu'il était un avorton, et que ce serait
très amusant de le voir. Elle m'a conseiller de lui faire
marcher."
She darted back, and clapping her hands upon the bosom of her charming
frock, danced, literally danced and pirouetted around poor Dickie.
"Moi, je ne comprenais pas ce que
c'était qu'un avorton," she continued rapidly.
"Mais je comprends parfaitement maintenant. C'est un monstre,
n'est-ce pas, Maman?"
She threw back her head, her white throat convulsed by laughter.
"Ah! Mon Dieu, qu'il est drôle!" she cried.
Silence fell on the whole room, for sight and words alike were
paralysing in their grotesque cruelty. Ormiston was the first to speak. He
laid his hand somewhat roughly on his sister-in-law's
shoulder.
"For God's sake, stop this, Charlotte," he said.
"Take the girl away. Little brute," he added, under his breath,
as he went hastily across to poor Dick.
But Lady Calmady had been beforehand with him. She swept across the
room, flinging aside the dainty, dancing figure as she passed. All the
primitive fierceness, the savage tenderness, of her motherhood surged up
within her. Katherine was in the humour to kill just then, had killing been
possible. She was magnificently regardless of consequences, regardless of
conventionalities, regardless of every obligation save that of sheltering
her child. She cowered down over Richard, putting her arms about him,
knew--without question or answer--that he had heard and
understood. Then gathering him up against her, she stood upright, facing
them all, brother, sister, old and tried friends, a terrible expression in
her eyes, the boy's face pressed down upon her shoulder. For the
moment she appeared alienated from, and at war with, even Julius, even
Marie de Mirancourt. No love, however faithful, could reach her. She was
alone, unapproachable, in her immense anger and immense sense of
outrage.
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"I will ask you to go," she said to her
sister-in-law,--"to go and take your daughter with
you, and to enter this house no more."
Mrs. Ormiston did not reply. Even her chatter was for the moment
stilled. She pressed a handkerchief against the little dancer's
forehead, and it was stained with blood.
"Ah! she is a wicked woman!" wailed the child. "She
has hurt me. She threw me against the table. Maman quel
malheur ça se verra. Il y aura certainement une
cicatrice!"
"Nonsense," Ormiston said harshly. "It's
nothing, Kitty, the merest scratch."
"Yes, my dear, we will have the carriage at
once,"--this from Mr. Cathcart to his wife. The incident, from
all points of view, shocked his sense of propriety. Immediate retirement
became his sole object.
Lady Calmady moved away, carrying the boy. She trembled a little. He was
heavy. Moreover, she sickened at the sight of blood. But little Helen
Ormiston caught at her dress, and looked up at her.
"I hate you," she said, hissing the words out with
concentrated passion between her pretty even teeth. "You have spoilt
me. I will hate you always, when I grow up. I will never forget."
Alone in the great state-bedroom next door, a long time elapsed
before either Richard or Katherine spoke. The boy leaned back against the
sofa cushions, holding his mother's hand. The casements stood wide
open, and little winds laden with the scent of the hawthorns in the park
wandered in, gently stirring the curtains of the ebony bed, so that the
Trees of the Forest of This Life, thereon embroidered, appeared somewhat
mournfully to wave their branches, while the Hart fled forward and the
Leopard, relentless in perpetual pursuit, followed close behind. There was
a crunching of wheels on the gravel, a sound of hurried farewells. Then in
a minute or two more the evening quiet held its own again.
Suddenly Dickie flung himself down across Katherine's lap, his
poor body shaken by a tempest of weeping.
"Mother, I can't bear it--I can't bear it,"
he sobbed. "Tell me, does everybody do that?"
"Do what, my own precious?" she said, calm from very excess
of sorrow. Later she would weep too, in the dark, lying lonely in the cold
comfort of that stately bed.
"Laugh at me, mother, mock at me?" and his voice, for all
that he tried to control it, tore at his throat and rose almost to a
shriek.
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CHAPTER VI
DEALING WITH A PHYSICIAN OF THE BODY AND A PHYSICIAN OF
THE SOUL
HISTORY repeats itself, and to Katherine just now came most
unwelcome example of such repetition. She had foreseen that some such
crisis must arise as had arisen. Yet when it arose, the crisis proved none
the less agonising because of that foreknowledge. Two strains of feeling
struggled within her. A blinding sorrow for her child, a fear of and shame
at her own violence of anger. Katherine's mind was of an
uncompromising honesty. She knew that her instinct had, for a space at
least, been murderous. She knew that, given equal provocation, it would be
murderous again.
And this was, after all, but the active, objective aspect of the matter.
The passive and subjective aspect showed danger also. In her extremity
Katherine's soul cried out for God--for the sure
resting-place only to be found by conscious union of the individual
with the eternal will. But such repose was denied her. For her anger
against God, even while thus earnestly desiring Him, was even more profound
than her anger against man. The passion of those terrible early days when
her child's evil fortune first became known to her--held in
check all these years by constant employment and the many duties incident
to her position--returned upon her in its first force. To believe God
is not, leaves the poor human soul homeless, sadly desolate, barren in
labour as is a slave. But the sorrow of such belief is but a trifle beside
the hideous fear that God is careless and unjust, that virtue is but a fond
imagination of all-too-noble human hearts, that the
everlasting purpose is not good but evil continually. And, haunted by such
fears, Katherine once again sat in outer darkness. All gracious things
appeared to her as illusions; all gentle delights but as passing anodynes
with which, in his misery, man weakly tries to deaden the pain of
existence. She suffered a profound discouragement.
And so it seemed to her but as part of the cruel whole when history
repeated itself yet further, and Dr. Knott, pausing at the door of
Richard's bedroom, turned and said to her:--
"It will be better, you know, Lady Calmady, to let him face it
alone. He'll feel it less without you. Winter can give me all the
assistance I want." Then he added, a queer smile playing
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"Ah!" Katherine said, under her breath.
"You see it is done by his own wish," John Knott went
on.
"I know," she answered.
She respected and trusted this man, entertained for him, notwithstanding
his harsh speech and uncouth exterior, something akin to affection. Yet
remembering the part he had played in the fate of the father, it was very
dreadful to her that he should touch the child. And Dr. Knott read her
thought. He did not resent it. It was all natural enough! From his heart he
was sorry for her, and would have spared her had that been possible. But he
discriminated very clearly between primary and secondary issues, never
sacrificing, as do feeble and sentimental persons, the former to the
latter. In this case the boy had a right to the stage, and so the mother
must stand in the wings. John Knott possessed a keen sense of values in the
human drama which the exigencies of his profession so perpetually presented
to him. He waited quietly, his hand on the door-handle, looking at
Katherine from under his shaggy eyebrows, silently opposing his will to
hers.
Suddenly she turned away with an impatient gesture.
"I will not come with you," she said.
"You are right."
"But--but--do you think you can really do anything to
help him, to make him happier?" Katherine asked, a desperation in the
tones of her voice.
"Happier? Yes, in the long-run, because certainty of
whatever kind, even certainty of failure, makes eventually for peace of
mind."
"That is a hard saying."
"This is a hard world."--Dr. Knott looked down at the
floor, shrugging his unwieldy shoulders. "The sooner we learn to
accept that fact the better, Lady Calmady. I know it is sharp discipline,
but it saves time and money, let alone disappointment.--Now as to all
these elaborate contrivances I've brought down from London,
they're the very best of their kind. But I am bound to own the most
ingenious of such arrangements are but clumsy remedies for natural
deficiency. Man hasn't discovered how to make over his own body yet,
and never will. The Almighty will always have the whip-hand of us
when it comes to dealing with flesh and blood. All the same we've
got to try these legs and things"--
Katherine winced, pressing her lips together. It was brutal,
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"Try 'em every one, and so convince Sir Richard one way or
the other. This is a turning-point. So far his general health has
been remarkably good, and we've just got to set our minds to keeping
it good. He must not fret if we can help it. If he frets, instead of
developing into the sane, manly fellow he should, he may turn peevish, Lady
Calmady, and grow up a morbid, neurotic lad, the victim of all manner of
brain-sick fancies--become envious, spiteful, a misery to
others and to himself."
"Is it necessary to say all this?" Katherine asked
loftily.
Dr. Knott's eyes looked very straight into hers, and there were
tears in them.
"Indeed, I believe it is," he replied, "or, trust me,
I wouldn't say it. I take no pleasure in giving pain at this time of
day, whether mental or physical. All I want is to spare pain. But one must
sacrifice the present to the future, at times, you know-use the
knife to save the limb. Now I must go to my patient. It isn't fair to
keep him waiting any longer. I'll be as quick as I can. I suppose I
shall find you here when I've finished?"
As he opened the door Dr. Knott's heavy person showed in all its
ungainliness against the brightness of sunlight flooding Dickie's
room. And to Katherine he seemed hideous just then--inexorable in his
great common sense, in the dead weight of his personality and of his will,
as some power of nature. He was to her the incarnation of things as they
are--not things as they should be, not things as she so passionately
desired they might be. He represented rationalism as against miracle,
intellect as against imagination, the bitter philosophy of experience as
against that for which all mortals so persistently cry out--namely the
all-consoling promise of extravagant hope. As with chains he bound
her down to fact. Right home on her he pressed the utter futility of
juggling with the actual. From the harsh truth that, neither in matters
practical nor spiritual, is any redemption without shedding of blood he
permitted her no escape.
And all this Katherine's clear brain recognised and admitted, even
while her poor heart only rebelled the more madly. To be convinced is not
to be reconciled. And so she turned away from that closed door in a
veritable tempest of feeling, and went out into the Chapel-Room. It
was safer, her mind and heart thus working, to put a space between herself
and that closed door.
Just then Julius March crossed the room, coming in from the
stair-head. The austere lines of his cassock emphasised the
Page 139
This, it so happened, was one of those days when the mystic joy of his
priestly office held Julius March forcibly. He had ministered to others,
and his own soul was satisfied. His expression was exalted, his
short-sighted eyes were alive with inward light. Tired and worn,
there was still a remarkable suavity in his bearing. He had come forth from
the holy of holies, and the vision beheld there dwelt with him yet.
Meanwhile, brooding storm sat on Katherine's brow, on her lips,
dwelt in her every movement. And something of this Julius perceived, for
his devotion to her was intact, as was his self-abnegation.
Throughout all these years he had never sought to approach her more
closely. His attitude had remained as delicately scrupulous, untouched by
worldliness, or by the baser part of passion, as in the first hour of the
discovery of his love. Her near presence gave him exquisite pleasure; but,
save when she needed his assistance in some practical matter, he refused to
indulge himself by passing much time in her society. Abstinence still
remained his rule of life. Just now, however, strong with the mystic
strength of his late ministrations and perceiving her troubled state, he
permitted himself to remain and pace beside her.
"You have been out all day?" Katherine said.
"Yes, I stayed on to the end with Rebecca Light. They sent for me
early this morning. She passed away very peacefully in that little attic at
the new lodge looking out into the green heart of the woods."
"Ah! It's simple enough to die," Katherine said,
"being old. The difficult thing is to live, being still
young."
"Has my absence been inconvenient? Have you wanted me?"
Julius asked.--Those quiet hours spent in the humble
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"Oh no!" she answered bitterly. "Why should I want you
Have I not sent Roger and Mary away? Am I not secretly glad dear Marie de
Mirancourt is just sufficiently poorly to remain in her room? When the real
need comes--one learns that among all the other merciless
lessons--one is best by oneself."
For a while, only the whisper of Lady Calmady's skirts, the soft,
even tread of feet upon the thick carpet. Then she said, almost
sharply:--
"Dr. Knott is with Richard."
"Ah! I understand," Julius murmured.
But Lady Calmady took up his words with a certain heat.
"No, you do not understand. You none of you understand, and that
is why I am better by myself. Mary and Roger in their happiness, dear Marie
in her saintly resignation, and you"--Katherine turned her head,
smiled at him in lovely scorn--"you, my dear Julius, of all men,
what should you know of the bitter pains of motherhood, you who are too
good to be quite human, you who regard this world merely as the antechamber
of paradise, you, whose whole affection is set on your Church--your
God--how should you understand? Between my experience and yours there
is a very wide interval. How can you know what I suffer--you who have
never loved?"
Under the stress of her excitement Katherine's pace quickened. The
whisper of her skirts grew to a soft rush. Julius kept beside her. His head
was bent reverently, even as over the sacred vessels he had so lately
carried.
"I too have loved," he said at last.
Katherine stopped short, and looked at him incredulously.
"Really, Julius?" she said.
Raising his head, he looked back at her. This avowal gave him a strange
sense of completeness and mastery. So he allowed his eyes to meet
Katherine's, he allowed himself to reckon with her grace and
beauty.
"Very really," he answered.
"But when?"
"Long ago--and always."
"Ah!" she said. Her expression had changed. Brooding storm
no longer sat on her brow and lips. She was touched. For the moment the
weight of her personal distress was lifted. Dickie and Dr. Knott together
in that bed-chamber, experimenting with unlovely, mechanical devices
for aiding locomotion
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"Pardon me, dear Julius," she said. "I must have
pained you at times, but I did not know this. I always supposed you coldly
indifferent to those histories of the heart which mean so much to some of
us; supposed your religion held you wholly, and that you pitied us as the
wise pity the foolish, standing above them, looking down. Richard told me
many things about you, before he brought me home here, but he never told me
this."
"Richard never knew it," he answered, smiling. Her perfect
unconsciousness at once calmed and pained him. He had kept his secret, all
these years, only too well.
Katherine turned and began to pace again, her hands clasped behind her
back.
"But, tell me--tell me," she said. "You can trust
me, you know. I will never speak of this unless you speak. But if I knew,
it would bring us nearer together, and that would be comforting, perhaps,
to us both. Tell me, what happened? Did she know, and did she love you? She
must have loved you, I think. Then what separated you? Did she
die?"
"No thank God she did not die," Julius said.--He
paused. He longed to gain the relief of fuller confession, yet feared to
betray himself. "I believe she loved me truly as a friend--and
that was sufficient."
"Oh no, no!" Katherine cried. "Do not decline upon
sophistries. That is never sufficient."
"In one sense, yes--in another sense, no," Julius said.
"It was thus. I loved her exactly as she was. Had she loved me as I
loved her she would have become other than she was."
"Ah! but surely you are too ingenious, too fastidious!"
Katherine's voice took tones of delicate remonstrance and pleading.
"That would be your danger, in such a case. Le
mieux est l'ennemi du bien, and you would always risk
sacrificing the real to the ideal. I am sorry. I would like you to have
tasted the fulness of life. Even though the days of perfect joy are very
few, it is well to have had them"--
She threw back her head, her eyebrows drew together, and her face
darkened somewhat.
Page 142
"Yes, it is well to have had them, though the memory of them cuts
one to the very quick."--Then her manner changed again, gaining
a touch of gaiety. "Really I am very unselfish in wishing all this
otherwise," she said, "for it would have been a sore trial to
part with you. I cannot imagine Brockhurst without you. I should have been
in great straits deprived of my friend and counsellor. And yet, I would
like you to have been very happy, dear Julius."
Their pacing had just brought them to the arched doorway of the chapel.
Katherine stopped, and raising her arm leaned her hand against the stone
jamb of it above her head.
"See," she went on, "I want to be truly unselfish. I
know how generous you are. Perhaps you remain here out of all too great
kindness towards my poor Dick and me. You mustn't do that, Julius.
You say she is still living. Consider--is it too late?"
Was it indeed too late? All the frustrated manhood cried aloud in Julius
March. He covered his face with his hands. His carefully restrained
imagination ran riot, presenting enchantments.
And Katherine, watching him, found herself strangely moved. For it was
very startling to see this so familiar figure under so unfamiliar an
aspect--to see Julius March, her every-day companion and
assistant, his reticence, his priestly aloofness, his mild and courtly
calm, swept under by a tide of personal emotion. Lady Calmady was drawn to
him by deepened sympathy. Yet regret arose in her that this man proved to
be, after all, but as other men are. She was vaguely disappointed, having
derived more security than she had quite realised from his apparent
detachment and impassibility. And, as an indirect consequence, her revolt
against God suffered access of bitterness. For not only was He--to her
seeing--callous regarding the fate of the many, but He failed to
support those few most devoted to His cause. In the hour of their trial He
was careless even of His own elect.
"Ah! I think it is indeed by no means too late!" she
exclaimed.
Julius March let his hands drop at his sides. He gazed at her, and her
expression was of wistful mockery--compassionate rather than ironical.
Then he looked away down the length of the chapel. In the warm afternoon
light, the solid and rich brown of the arcaded stalls on either hand,
emphasised the harmonious radiance of the great, east window, a radiance as
of clear jewels.--Ranks of kneeling saints, the gold of
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"You are mistaken, dear Katherine," he said. "It has
always been too late."
"But why--why--if she is free to listen?"
"Because I am not free to speak."
Julius smiled at her. His suavity had returned, and along with it a
dignity of bearing not observable before.
"Let us walk," he said. And then:--"After
all I have given you a very mutilated account of this matter. Soon after I
took orders, before I had ever seen the very noble, to me perfect, woman
who unconsciously revealed to me the glory of human love, I had dedicated
my life, and all my powers--poor enough, I fear--of mind and body
to the service of the Church. I was ambitious in those days. Ambition is
dead, killed by the knowledge of my own shortcomings. I have proved an
unprofitable servant--for which may God in His great mercy forgive me.
But, while my faith in myself has withered, my faith in Him has come to
maturity. I have learned to think very differently on many subjects, and to
perceive that our Heavenly Father's purposes regarding us are more
generous, more far-reaching, more august, than in my youthful
ignorance I had ever dreamed. All things are lawful in His sight. Nothing
is common or unclean--if we have once rightly apprehended Him, and He
dwells in us. And yet--yet, a vow once made is binding. We may not do
evil to gain however great a good."
Katherine listened in silence. The words came with the power of
immutable conviction. She could not believe, yet she was glad to have him
believe.
Page 144
"And that vow precludes marriage?" she said at last.
"It does," Julius answered.
For a time they paced again in silence. Then Lady Calmady spoke, a
delicate intimacy and affection in her manner, while once more, for a
moment, she let her hand rest on his arm.
"So Brockhurst keeps you--I keep you, dear Julius, to the
last?"
"Yes, if you will, to the very last."
"I am thankful for that," she said. "You must forgive
me if in the past I have been inconsiderate at times. I am afraid the
constant struggle, which certain circumstances of necessity create, tends
to make me harsh and imperious. I carry a trouble, which calls aloud for
redress, forever in my arms. They ache with the burden of it. And there is
no redress. And the trouble grows stronger, alas! Its voice--so dear,
yet so dreaded--grows louder, till it deafens me to all other sounds.
The music of this once beautiful world becomes faint. Only angry discord
remains. And I become selfish. I am the victim of a fixed idea. I become
heedless of the suffering of those about me. And you, my poor Julius, must
have suffered very much!"
"Now, less than ever before," he answered.--But even as
he spoke, Katherine was struck by his pallor, by the drawn look of his
features and languor of his bearing.
"Ah, you have fasted all day!" she cried.
"What matter?" he said, smiling. "The body surely can
sustain a trifle of hunger, if the soul and spirit are fed. I have feasted
royally to-day in that respect. I am strangely at ease. As to baser
sort of food, what wonder if I forgot?"
The door of Dickie's bed-chamber opened, letting in long
shafts of sunlight, and Dr. Knott came slowly forward. His aspect was
savage. Even his philosophy had been not wholly proof against the pathos of
his patient's case. It irritated him to fall from his usual
relentlessness of common sense into a melting mood. He took refuge in
sarcasm, desirous to detect weakness in others, since he was, unwillingly,
so disagreeably conscious of it in himself.
"Well, we're through with our business, Lady Calmady,"
he said.--"Eh! Mr. March, what's wrong with you?
Putty-coloured skin and shortness of breath. A little less prayer
and a little more physical exercise is what you want. Successful, Lady
Calmady?--Umph--I'm afraid the less said about that the
better. Sir Richard will talk it out with you himself. Upset? Yes, I
don't deny he is a little upset--and, like a fool, I'm
upset
Page 145
John Knott watched her as she moved away. He shrugged his shoulders and
thrust his hands into his breeches pockets.
"She's going to hear what she won't much relish, poor
thing," he said. "But I can't help that. One man's
meat is another man's poison; and my affair is with the boy's
meat, even if it should be of a kind to turn his mother's stomach. He
shall have just all the chance I can get him, poor little chap.--And
now, Mr. March, I propose to prescribe for you, for you look uncommonly
like taking a short-cut to heaven, and, if I know anything about
this house, you've got your work cut out for you here below for a
long time to come. Through with this business? Pooh! we've only taken
a preliminary canter as yet. That boy's out of the common in more
ways than one, and, cripple or no cripple, he's bound to lead you all
a pretty lively dance before he's done."
CHAPTER VII
AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE BEST OF IT
THE day had been hot, though the summer was but young. A wealth
of steady sunlight bathed the western front of the house. All was notably
still, save for a droning of bees, a sound of wood-chopping, voices
now and again, and the squeak of a wheelbarrow away in the gardens.
Richard lay on his back upon the bed. He had drawn the blue embroidered
coverlet up about his waist; but his silk shirt was thrown open, exposing
his neck and chest. His arms were flung up and out across the pillow on
either side his gold-brown, close-curled head. As his mother
entered he turned his face towards the open window. There was vigour and
distinction in the profile--in the straight nose, full chin, and
strong line of the lower jaw, in the round, firm throat, and small ear set
close against the head. The muscles of his neck and arms were well
developed. Seen thus, lying in the quiet glow of the afternoon sunshine,
all possibility of physical disgrace seemed far enough from Richard
Calmady. He might indeed, not unfitly, have been compared to one of those
nobly graceful lads, who, upon the frieze of some Greek temple, set forth
forever the perfect pattern of temperance and high courage, of youth and
health.
Page 146
As Katherine sat down beside the bed, Richard thrust out his left hand.
She took it in both hers, held and stroked the palm of it. But for a time
she could not trust herself to speak. For she saw that, notwithstanding the
resolute set of his lips, his breath caught in short quick sobs and that
his eyelashes were glued in points by late shed tears. And, seeing this,
Katherine's motherhood arose and confronted her with something of
reproach. It seemed to her she had been guilty of disloyalty in permitting
her thought to be beguiled even for the brief space of her conversation
with Julius March. She felt humbled, a little in Dickie's debt, since
she had not realised to the uttermost each separate moment of his trial as
each of those moments passed.
"My darling, I am afraid Dr. Knott has hurt you very much?"
she said at last.
"Oh! I don't know. I suppose he did hurt. He pulled me about
awfully, but I didn't mind that. I told him to keep on till he made
sure," Richard answered huskily, still turning his face from her.
"But none of those beastly legs and things fitted. He could not fix
them so that I could use them. It was horrid. They only made me more
helpless than before. You see--my--my feet are in the
way."
The last words came to Katherine as a shock. The boy had never spoken
openly of his deformity, and in thus speaking he appeared to her to rend
asunder the last of those veils with which she had earnestly striven to
conceal the disgrace of it from him. She remained very still, bracing
herself to bear--the while slowly stroking his hand. Suddenly the
strong, young fingers closed hard on hers. Richard turned his head.
"Mother," he said, "the doctor can't do anything
for me. It's no use. We've just got to let it be."
He set his teeth, choking a little, and drew the back of his right hand
across his eyes.
"It's awfully stupid; but somehow I never knew I should mind
so much. I--I never did mind much till just lately. It began--the
minding, I mean--the day Uncle Roger came home. It was the way he
looked at me, and hearing about things he'd done. And I had a beastly
dream that night. And it's all grown worse since."
He paused a minute, making a strong effort to speak steadily.
"I suppose it's silly to mind. I ought to be accustomed to
it by this time. I've never known anything else. But I never thought
of all it meant and--and--how it looked to other people
Page 147
"My own darling," Katherine murmured.
"Yes, please say that!" he cried, looking up eagerly.
"I am your darling, mother, am I not, just the same? Dr. Knott said
something about you just now. He's an awfully fine old chap. I like
him. He talked to me for a long time after we'd sent Winter away, and
he was ever so kind. And he told me it was bad. for you too, you
know--for both of us. I'm afraid I had not thought much about
that before. I've been thinking about it since. And I began to be
afraid that--that I might be a nuisance,--that you might be
ashamed of me, later, when I am grown up--since I've always got
to be like this, you see."
The boy's voice broke.
"Mother, mother, you'll never despise me, whoever does, will
you?" he sobbed.
And it seemed to Lady Calmady that now she must have touched bottom in
this tragedy. There could surely be no farther to go? It was well that her
mood was soft, that for a little while she had ceased to be under the
dominion of her so sadly fixed idea. In talking with Julius March she had
been reminded how constant a quantity is sorrow; how real, notwithstanding
their silence, are many griefs; how strong is human patience. And this
indirectly had fortified her. Wrung with anguish for the boy, she yet was
calm. She knelt down by the bedside and put her arms round him.
"Most precious one--listen," she said. "You must
never ask me such a question again. I am your mother--you cannot
measure all that implies, and so you cannot measure the pain your question
causes me. Only you must believe, because I tell it you, that your
mother's love will never grow old or wear thin.
It is always there, always fresh, always ready. In utter security you
can come back to it again and again. It is like one of those clear springs
in the secret places of the deep woods--you know them--which
bubble up forever. Drink, often as you may, however heavy the drought or
shrunken the streams elsewhere, those springs remain full to the very
lip."--Her tone changed, taking a tender playfulness.
"Why, my Dickie, you are the light of my eyes, my darling, the one
thing which makes me still care to live. You are your father's gift
to me. And so every
Page 148
She leaned back, laid her head on the pillow beside his, cheek to cheek.
Katherine was a young woman still--young enough to have moments of
delicate shyness in the presence of her son. She could not look at him now
as she spoke.
"You know, dearest, if I could take your bodily misfortune upon
me, here, directly, and give you my wholeness, I would do it more readily,
with greater thankfulness and delight than I have ever done anything
in"--
But Richard raised his hand and laid it, almost violently, upon her
mouth.
"Oh, stop, mother, stop!" he cried.
"Don't--it's too dreadful to think of."
He flung away, and lay at as far a distance as the width of the bed
would allow, gazing at her in angry protest.
"You can't do that. But you don't suppose I'd
let you do it even if you could," he said fiercely. Then he turned
his face to the sunny western window again.--"I like to know
that you're beautiful anyhow, mother, all--all over," he
said.
There followed a long silence between them. Lady Calmady still knelt by
the bedside. But she drew herself up, rested her elbows on the bed and
clasped her hands under her chin. And as she knelt there something of proud
comfort came to her. For so long she had sickened, fearing the hour when
Richard should begin clearly to gauge the extent of his own
ill-luck; yet, now the first shock of plain speech over, she
experienced relief. For the future they could be honest, she and
he,--so she thought,--and speak heart to heart. Moreover, in his
so bitter distress, it was to her--not to Mary, his good comrade, not
to Roger Ormiston, the Ulysses of his fancy--that the boy had turned.
He was given back to her, and she was greatly gladdened by that. She was
gladdened too by Richard's last speech, by his angry and immediate
repudiation of the bare mention of any personal gain which should touch her
with loss. Katherine's eyes kindled as she knelt there watching her
son. For it was very much to find him thus chivalrous, hotly sensitive of
her beauty and the claims of her womanhood. In instinct, in thought, in
word, he had shown himself a very gallant, high-bred
gentleman--child though he was. And this gave Katherine not only proud
comfort in the present, but cheered the future with hope.
"Look here, Dickie darling," she said softly at last,
"tell me a little more about your talk with Dr. Knott."
"Oh! he was awfully kind," Richard answered, turning
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The boy put out his hand and began playing with the bracelets on
Katherine's wrists. He kept his eyes fixed on them as he fingered
them.
"He told me I was very strong and well made--except, of
course, for it. And that I was not to imagine myself ill or invalidy,
because I'm really less ill than most people, you know. And--and
he said--you won't think me foolish, mother, if I tell
you?--he said I was a very handsome fellow."
Richard glanced up quickly, while his colour deepened.
"Am I really handsome?" he asked.
Katherine smiled at him.
"Yes, you are very handsome, Dickie. You have always been that.
You were a beautiful baby, a beautiful little child. And now, every day,
you grow more like your father. I can't quite talk about him, my
dear--but ask Uncle Roger--ask Marie de Mirancourt what he was
when she knew him first."
The boy's face flashed back her smile, as the sea does the
sunlight.
"Oh, I say, but that's good news!" he said. He lay
quite still on his back for a little while, thinking about it.
"That seems to give one a shove, you know," he remarked
presently. Then he fell to playing with her bracelets again. "After
all, I've got a good many shoves to-day, mother. Dr.
Knott's a regular champion shover. He told me about a number of
people he'd known who had got smashed up somehow, or who'd
always had something wrong, you know--and how they'd put a good
face on it and hadn't let it interfere, but had done things just the
same. And he told me I'd just got to be plucky--he knew I could
if I tried--and not let it interfere either. He told me I
mustn't be soft, or lazy, because doing things is more difficult for
me than for other people. But that I'd just got to put my back into
it, and go in and win. And I told him I would--and you'll help
me, mummy, won't you?"
"Yes, darling, yes," Lady Calmady said.
"I want to begin at once," he went on hurriedly, looking
hard at the bracelets. "I shouldn't like to be unkind to her,
mother, but do you think Clara would give me up? I don't need a nurse
now. It's rather silly. May one of the men-servants valet me?
I should like Winter best, because he's been here always, and I
shouldn't feel shy with him. Would it bore you awfully to speak about
that now, so that he might begin to-night?"
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Lady Calmady's brave smile grew a trifle sad. The boy was less
completely given back to her than she had fondly supposed. This day was
after all to introduce a new order. And the woman always pays. She was to
pay for that advance, so was the devoted handmaiden, Clara. Still the boy
must have his way-- were it even towards a merely imagined good.
"Very well, dearest, I will settle it," she answered.
"You don't mind, though, mother?"
Katherine stroked the short, curly hair back from his forehead.
"I don't mind anything that promises to make you happier,
Dickie," she said. "What else did you and Dr. Knott
settle--anything else?"
Richard waited, then he turned on his elbow and looked full and very
earnestly at her.
"Yes, mother, we did settle something more. And something that
I'm afraid you won't like. But it would make me happier than
anything else--it would make all the difference that--that can be
made, you know."
He paused, his expression very firm though his lips quivered.
"Dr. Knott wants me to ride."
Katherine drew back, stood up, threw out her hands as though to keep off
some actual and tangible object of offence.
"Not that, Richard!" she cried. "Anything in the world
rather than that!"
He looked at her imploringly, yet with a certain determination, for the
child was dying fast in him and the forceful desires and intentions of
youth growing.
"Don't say I mustn't, mother. Pray, pray don't,
because"--
He left the sentence unfinished, overtaken by the old habit of
obedience, yet he did not lower his eyes.
But Lady Calmady made no response. For the moment she was outraged to
the point of standing apart even from her child. For a moment, even
motherhood went down before purely personal feeling--and this, by the
irony of circumstance, immediately after motherhood had made supreme
confession of immutability. But remembering her husband's death,
remembering the source of all her child's misfortune, it appeared to
her indecent, a wanton insult to all her past suffering, that such a
proposition should be made to her. And, in a flash of cruelly vivid
perception, she knew how the boy would look on a horse, the grotesque, to
the vulgar wholly absurd, spectacle he must, notwithstanding his beauty,
necessarily present. For a moment
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"But, how can you ride?" she said. "My poor child,
think--how is it possible?"
Richard sat upright, pressing his hands down on the bedclothes on either
side to steady himself. The colour rushed over his face and throat.
"It is possible, mother," he answered resolutely, "or
Dr. Knott would never have talked about it. He couldn't have been so
unkind. He drew me the plan of a saddle. He said I was to show it to Uncle
Roger to-night. Of course it won't be easy at first, but I
don't care about that. And Chifney would teach me. I know he would.
He said the other day he'd make a sportsman of me yet."
"When did you talk with Chifney?"--Lady Calmady spoke
very quietly, but there was that in her tone which came near frightening
the boy. It required all his daring to answer honestly and at once.
"I talked to him the day Aunt Charlotte and Helen were here.
I--I went down to the stables with him and saw all the
horses."
"Then either you or he did very wrong," Lady Calmady
remarked.
"It was my fault, mother, all my fault. Chifney would have ridden
on, but I stopped him. Chaplin tried to prevent me. I--I told him to
mind his own business. I meant to go. I--I saw all the horses, and
they were splendid," he added, enthusiasm gaining over
fear.--"I saw the stables, and the weighing-room, and
everything. I never enjoyed myself so much before. I told Chaplin I would
tell you, because he ought not to be blamed, you know. I did mean to tell
you directly I came in. But all those people were
here."--Richard's face darkened. "And you remember
what happened? That put everything else out of my head."--A
pause. Then he said:--"Are you very angry?"
Katherine made no reply. She moved away round the foot of the bed and
stood at the sunny window in silence. Bitterness of hot humiliation
possessed her. Heretofore, whatever her trial, she had been mistress of the
situation; she had reigned a queen-mother, her authority undisputed.
And now it appeared her kingdom was in revolt, conspiracy was rife.
Richard's will and hers were in conflict; and Richard's will
must eventually obtain, since he would eventually be master. Already
courtiers bowed to that will. All this was in her mind. And a wounding of
feeling, far deeper and more intimate than this--since
Katherine's nobility of character was great and the worldly aspect,
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Thinking of all this, Katherine gazed out over the stately home
scene--grass plot and gardens, woodland and distant landscape, rich in
the golden splendour of steady sunshine--with smarting eyes and a
sense of impotent misery that wrapped her about as a burning garment. The
boy was beginning to go his own way. And his way was not hers. And those
she had trusted were disloyal, helping him to go it. Alone, in retirement,
she had borne her great trouble with tremendous courage. But how should she
bear it under changed conditions, amid publicity, gossip, comment?
Dickie, meanwhile, had let himself drop back against the pillows. He set
his teeth and waited. It was hard. An opportunity of escape from the
galling restraints of his infirmity had been presented to him, and his
mother--his mother after promise given, after the sympathy of a
lifetime, his mother, in whom he trusted absolutely--was unwilling he
should accept it! As he lay there all the desperate longing for freedom and
activity that had developed in him of late--all the passion for sport,
for that primitive, half-savage manner of life, that intimate, if
somewhat brutal, relation to nature, to wild creatures and to the beasts
whom man by centuries of usage has broken to his service, which is the
special heritage of Englishmen of gentle blood--sprang up in Richard,
strong, all-compelling. He must have his part in all this. He would
not be denied. He cried out to her imperiously:--
"Mother, speak to me! I haven't done anything really wrong.
I've a right to what any other boy has--as far as I can get it.
Don't you see riding is just the one thing to--to make
up--to make a man of me? Don't you see that?"
He sat bolt upright, stretching out his arms to her in fierce appeal,
while the level sunshine touched his bright hair and wildly eager face.
"Mummy, mummy darling, don't you see? Try to see. You
can't want to take away my one chance!"
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Katherine turned at that reiterated cry, and her heart melted within
her. The boy was her own, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. From her he
had life. From her he had also lifelong disgrace and deprivation. Was there
anything then, which, he asking, she could refuse to give? She cast herself
on her knees beside the bed again and buried her face in the sheet.
"My precious one," she sobbed, "forgive me. I am
ashamed, for I have been both harsh and weak. I said I would help you, and
then directly I fail you. Forgive me."
And the boy was amazed, speechless at first, seeing her broken thus;
shamed in his turn by the humility of her attitude. To his young chivalry
it was an impiety to look upon her tears.
"Please don't cry, mother," he entreated tremulously,
a childlike simplicity of manner taking him.--"Don't
cry--it is dreadful. I never saw you cry before."--Then,
after a pause, he added:--"And--never mind about my
riding. I don't so very much care about it--really, I
don't believe I do--after all."
At that dear lie Katherine raised her bowed head, a wonderful sweetness
in her tear-stained face, tender laughter upon her lips. She drew
the boy's hands on to her shoulders, clasped her hands across his
extended arms, and kissed him upon the mouth.
"No, no, my beloved, you shall ride," she said. "You
shall have your saddle--twenty thousand saddles if you want them! We
will talk to Uncle Roger and Chifney to-night. All shall be as you
wish."
"But you're not angry, mother, any more?" he asked, a
little bewildered by her change of tone and by the passion of her lovely
looks and speech.
Katherine shook her head, and still that tender laughter curved her
lips.
"No, I am never going to be angry any more--with you at
least, Dick. I must learn to be plucky too. A pair of us, Dickie, trying to
keep up one another's pluck! Only let us go forward hand in hand, you
and I, and then, however desperate our doings, I at least shall be
content."
Page 154
CHAPTER VIII
TELLING, INCIDENTALLY, OF A BROKEN-DOWN POSTBOY AND
A COUNTRY FAIR
THE Brockhurst mail-phaeton waited, in the shade of the
three large sycamores, before Appleyard's shop at Farley Row. A groom
stood stiff and straight at the horses' heads. While upon the high
driving-seat, a trifle excited by the suddenness of his elevation,
sat Richard. He held the reins in his right hand, and stretched his left to
get the cramp out of his fingers. His arms ached--there was no
question about it. He had never driven a pair before, and the horses needed
a lot of driving. For the wind was gusty, piling up heavy masses of
black-purple rain-cloud in the south-east. It made the
horses skittish and unsteady, and Dickie found it was just all he could do
to hold them, so that Chifney's reiterated admonition, "Keep
'em well in hand, Sir Richard," had been not wholly easy to
obey.
From out the open shop-door came mingled odour of new leather and
of horse clothing. Within Mr. Chifney delivered himself of certain orders;
while Appleyard--a small, fair man, thin of nose, a spot of violent
colour on either cheek-bone--skipped before him
lamb-like, in a fury of complacent intelligence. For it was not
every day so notable a personage as the Brockhurst trainer crossed his
threshold. To Josiah Appleyard, indeed--not to mention his two
apprentices stretching eyes and ears from the back-shop, to catch
any chance word of Mr. Chifney's conversation--it appeared as
though the gods very really condescended to visit the habitations of men.
While Mrs. Appleyard, peeping from behind the wire blind of the parlour,
had--as she afterwards repeatedly declared--"felt her
insides turn right over," when she saw the carriage draw up. The
conversation was prolonged and low-toned. For the order was of a
peculiar and confidential character, demanding much explanation on the one
part, much application on the other. It was an order, in short, wholly
flattering to the self-esteem of the saddler, both as tribute to his
social discretion and his technical skill. Thus did Josiah skip
lamb-like, being glad.
Meanwhile, Richard Calmady waited without, resting his aching arms,
gazing down the wide, dusty street, his senses lulled by the flutter of the
sycamore leaves overhead. The said street
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The fine stables of the White Lion stood tenantless, now, from
year's end to year's end. Rats scampered, and bats squeaked in
unlovely ardours of courtship, about the ranges of empty stalls and
cobweb-hung rafters. Yet one ghost from out the golden age haunted
the place still--a lean, withered, bandy-legged, little stick
of a man, arrayed in frayed and tarnished splendour of sky-blue
waist-jacket, silver lace, and jackboots--of which the soles
and upper leathers threatened speedy and final divorce. In all weathers
this bit of human wreckage--Jackie Deeds by name--might be seen
wandering aimlessly about the vacant yard, or seated upon the bench beside
the portico of the silent, bow-windowed inn, pulling at a, too often
empty, clay-pipe and spitting automatically.
Over Richard, tender-hearted as yet towards all creatures whom
nature or fortune had treated cavalierly, the decrepit postboy exercised a
fascination. One day, when driving through the Row with Mary Cathcart, he
had succeeded in establishing relations with Jackie Deeds through the
medium of a half-crown.
Page 156
"Be 'e come to zee the show, sir?" the old man coughed
out, peering with dim, blear eyes up into the boy's fresh face.
"No, we've come about something from Appleyard's.
I--I didn't know there was a show."
"Oh! bain't there though, Sir Richard! I tell 'e there
be a prime sight of a show. There be monkeys down town, and dorgs what
dances on their 'inder legs, and gurt iron cages chock-full er
wild beastises, by what they tells me."
Dickie, feeling anxiously in his pockets for some coin of sufficient
size to be worthy of Mr. Deeds' acceptance, ejaculated
involuntarily:--"Oh! are there? I'd give anything to
see them."
"Sixpence 'ud do most er they 'ere shows, I expect.
The wild beastises 'ud run into a shilling may be."--The
old postboy made a joyless, creaking sound, bearing but slightest affinity
to laughter. "But you 'ud see your way round more'n a
shilling, Sir Richard. A terrible, rich, young gentleman, by what they
tells me."
Something a trifle malicious obtained in this attempt at jocosity,
causing Dickie to bend down rather hastily over the wheel, and thrust his
offering into the crumpled, shaky hands.
"There," he said. "Oh! it's nothing. I'm
so pleased you--you don't mind. Where do you say this show
is?"
"Gor a'mighty bless 'e, sir," the old man
whimpered, with a change of tone. "Tain't every day poor old
Jackie Deeds runs across a rich, young gentleman as 'll give him
'arf a crown. Times is bad, mortal bad--couldn't be much
wuss."
"I'm so sorry," Richard answered. He felt apologetic,
as though in some manner responsible for the decay of the coaching system
and his companion's fallen estate.
"Mortal bad, couldn't be no wuss."
"I'm very sorry. But about the show--where is it,
please?" the boy asked again, a little anxious to change the
subject.
"Oh! that there show. Tain't much of a show neither, by what
they tells me."
Mr. Deeds spoke with sudden irritability. Uplifted by the possession of
half a crown, he became contemptuous of the present, jealous of the past
when such coin was more plentiful with him.
Page 157
"Not much of a show," he repeated. "The young
'uns'll crack up most anything as comes along. But that's
their stoopidness. Never zee'd nothing better. Law bless 'e,
this ain't a patch on the shows I've a-zeen in my day.
Cock-fightings, and fellows--wi' a lot er money laid on
'em by the gentry too--a-pounding of each other till
there weren't an inch above the belt of 'em as weren't
bloody. And the Irish giant, and dwarfs 'ad over from France. They
tell me most Frencheys's made that way. Ole Boney 'isself
wasn't much of a one to look at. And I can mind a calf wi' two
'eads--'ud eat wi' both mouths at once, and all the
food 'ud go down into the same belly. And a man wi' no arms,
never 'ad none, by what they used to tell me"--
"Ah!" Richard exclaimed quickly.
"No, never 'ad none, and yet 'ud play the drum
wi' 'is toes and fire off a horse pistol. Lor, you would er
laughed to 'ave zeen 'im. 'E made fine sport for the
folks 'e did."
Jackie Deeds had recovered his good-humour. He peered up into the
boy's face again maliciously, and broke into cheerless, creaking
merriment.
"Gor a'mighty 'as 'is jokes too," he said.
"I'm thinking, by the curous-made creeturs 'e
sends along sometimes."
"Chifney," Richard called imperatively. "Chifney, are
you nearly ready? We ought to get home. There's a storm coming
up."
"Well, we shall get that matter of the saddle done right enough,
Sir Richard," the trainer remarked presently, as the carriage bowled
up the street. "Don't be too free with the whip,
sir.--Steady, steady there.--Mind the
donkey-cart.--Bear away to the right. Don't let 'em
get above themselves. Excuse me, Sir Richard."
He leaned forward and laid both hands quietly on the reins.
"Look here, sir," he said, "I think you'd better
let Henry lead the horses past all this variety business."
The end of the street was reached. On either hand small red or white
houses trend away in a broken line along the edge of a flat, grass common,
backed by plantations of pollarded oak trees. In the foreground, fringing
the broad roadway, were booths, tents, and vans. And the staring colours of
these last, raw reds and yellows, the blue smoke beating down from their
little stove-pipe chimneys, the dirty white of tent flaps and
awnings, stood out harshly in a flare of stormy sunlight against the solid
green of the oaks and uprolling masses of black-purple cloud.
Here indeed was the show. But to Richard Calmady's eyes it lacked
disappointingly in attraction. His nerves were some-
Page 158
About the tents and booths, across the grass, and along the roadway,
loitered a sad-coloured, country crowd. Even to the children, it
took its pleasure slowly and silently; save in the case of a hulking, young
carter in a smock-frock, who, being pretty far gone in liquor,
alternately shouted bawdy songs and offered invitation to the company
generally to come on and have its head punched.
Such were the pictures that impressed themselves upon Richard's
brain, as Henry led the dancing carriage-horses up the road. And it
must be owned that from this first sight of life, as the common populations
live it, his soul revolted. Delicately nurtured, finely bred, his
sensibility accentuated by the prickings of that thorn in the flesh which
was so intimate a part of his otherwise noble heritage, the grossness and
brutality of much which most boys of his age have already learned to take
for granted affected him to the point of loathing. And more especially did
he loathe the last picture presented to him on the outskirts of the common.
At the door of a gaudily-painted van, somewhat apart from the rest,
stood a strapping lass,
Page 159
Meanwhile the carriage bowled along the smooth road and up the long
hill, bordered by fir and beech plantations, which leads to Spendle Flats.
And there, in the open, the storm came down, in rolling thunder and lashing
rain. Tall, shifting, white columns chased each other madly across the
bronze expanse of the moorland. Chifney, mindful of his charge, hurried
Dickie into a greatcoat, buttoned it carefully round him, offered to drive,
almost insisted on doing so. But the boy refused curtly. He welcomed the
stinging rain, the swirling wind, the swift glare of lightning, the ache
and strain of holding the pulling horses. The violence of it all heated his
blood as with the stern passion of battle. And under the influence of that
passion his humour changed from agonised pity to a fierce determination of
conquest. He would fight, he would come through, he would win, he would
slay dragons. Prometheus-like he would defy the gods. Again his
thought was unformulated, little more than the push of young, untamed
energy impatient of opposition. But that he could face this wild mood of
nature and control and guide these high-mettled, headstrong horses
gave him coolness and self-confidence. It yielded him assurance that
there was, after all, an immensity of distance between himself and all
caged, outworn creatures, and that the horrible example of deformity upon
the brazen-faced girl's show-board had really nothing
to do with him. Dickie's last humour was less noble
Page 160
And the warlike instinct remained by Dickie all that evening. He was
determined to assert himself, to measure his power, to obtain. While Winter
was helping him dress for dinner he gave orders that his chair should be
placed at the bottom of the table.
"But the colonel sits there, Sir Richard."
Dickie's face did not give in the least.
"He has sat there," he answered rather shortly. "But I
have spoken to her ladyship, and in future he will sit by her. I'll
go down early, Winter. I prefer being in my place when the others come
in."
It must be added that Ormiston accepted his deposition in the best
possible spirit, patting the boy on the shoulder as he passed him.
"Quite right, old chap. I like to see you there. Claim your own,
and keep it."
At which a lump rose in Dickie's throat, nearly causing him to
choke over his first spoonful of soup. But Mary Cathcart, whose kind eyes
saw most things, smiled first upon her lover and then upon him, and began
talking to him of horses, as one sportsman to another. And so Dickie
speedily recovered himself and grew eager, playing host very prettily at
his own table.
He demanded to sit up to prayers, moreover, and took his place in the
dead Richard Calmady's stall nearest the altar rails on the gospel
side. Next him was Dr. Knott, who had come in unexpectedly just before
dinner. He had the boy a little on his mind; and, while contemptuous of his
own solicitude in the matter, wanted badly to know just how he was. Lady
Calmady had begged him to stay. He could be excellent company when he
pleased. He had laid aside his roughness of manner and been excellent
company to-night. Next him was Ormiston, while the seats immediately
below were occupied by the men-servants, Winter at their head.
Opposite to Richard, across the chapel, sat Lady Calmady. The fair,
summer moonlight streaming in through the east window spread a network of
fairy jewels upon her stately, grey-clad figure and beautiful head.
Beside her was Mary Cathcart, and then came a range of dark, vacant stalls.
And below these
Page 161
John Knott was impressed by the scene too, though hardly on the same
lines as the little scullery-maid. He had long ago passed the doors
of orthodoxy and dogma. Christian church and heathen temple--could he
have had the interesting experience of entering the latter--were alike
to him. The attitude and office of the priest, the same in every age and
under every form of religion, filled him with cynical scorn. Yet he had to
own there was something inexpressibly touching in the nightly gathering
together of this great household, gentle and simple; and in this bowing
before the source of the impenetrable mystery which surrounds and encloses
the so curiously urgent and vivid consciousness of the individual. He had
to own, too, that there was something inexpressibly touching in the tones
of Julius March's voice as he read of the young Galilean prophet
"going about and doing good "--simple and gracious record
of tenderness and pity, upon which, in the course of centuries, the
colossal fabric of the modern Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, has
been built up.
"'And great multitudes came to Him,'" read
Julius, "'having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb,
maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet, and He
healed them; insomuch that the multitude marvelled when they saw the dumb
to speak, and the maimed to be whole, and the lame to
walk'"--
How simple it all sounded in that sweet, old-world story! And yet
how lamentably, in striving to accomplish just these same things, his own
far-reaching science failed!
"'The maimed to be whole, the lame to
walk'"--involuntarily he looked round at the boy beside
him.
Richard leaned back in his stall, tired with the long day and its
varying emotions. His eyes were half closed, and his profile showed pale as
wax against the background of dark woodwork. His eyebrows were drawn into a
slight frown, and his face bore a peculiar expression of reticence. Once he
glanced up at the reader, as though on a sudden a pleasant thought occurred
to
Page 162
Later that night, as her custom was, Katherine opened the door of
Richard's room softly, and entering bent over his bed in the warm
dimness to give him a last look before going to rest herself.
To-night Dickie was awake. He put his arms round her coaxingly.
"Stay a little, mummy darling," he said. "I am not a
bit sleepy. I want to talk."
Katherine sat down on the edge of the bed. All the mass of her hair was
unbound, and fell in a cloud about her to the waist. Richard, leaning on
one elbow, gathered it together, held and kissed it. He was possessed by
the sense of his mother's great beauty. She seemed so magnificently
far removed from all that is coarse, spoiled, or degraded. She seemed so
superb, so exquisite a personage. So he gazed at her, kissed her hair, and
gently touched her arms, where the open sleeves of her white
dressing-gown left them bare, in reverential ecstasy.
Katherine became almost perplexed.
"My dearest, what is it?" she asked at last.
"Oh! it's only that you're so perfect, mother,"
he said. "You make me feel so safe somehow. I'm never afraid
when you are there."
"Afraid of what?" she asked. A hope came upon her that he
had grown nervous of riding, and wanted her to help him to retire
gracefully from the matter. But his next words undeceived her. He threw
himself back against the pillow and clasped his hands under his head.
"That's just it," he said. "I don't know
exactly what I am afraid of, and yet I do get awfully scared at times. I
suppose, mother, if one's in a good position--the position
we're in, you know--nobody can ill-use one very
much?"
Lady Calmady's eyes blazed with
indignation.--"Ill-use you? Who has ever dared to hint
at, to dream of, such a thing, dear Richard?"
"Oh, no one--no one! Only I can't help wondering about
things, you know. And some--some people do get most awfully
ill-used. I can't help seeing that."
Katherine paused before answering. The boy did not look at her. She
spoke with quiet conviction, her eyes gazing out into the dimness of the
room.
"I know," she said, almost reluctantly. "And perhaps
it is as well you should know it too, though it is sad knowledge.
Page 163
"You are sure of that, mother?"
"Sure? Of course I am sure, darling," she answered. Yet even
while speaking her heart sank.
Richard remained silent for a space. Then he said, with certain
hesitancy:--"Mother, tell me, it is true then that I am
rich?"
"Quite true, Dick."
"But sometimes people lose their money."
Katherine smiled.--" Your money is not kept in a stocking,
dearest."
"I don't suppose it is," the boy said, turning towards
her. "But don't banks break?"
"Yes, banks break. But a good many broken banks would not affect
you. It is too long a story to tell you now, Dickie, but your income is
very safe. It would almost need a revolution to ruin you. You are rich now;
and I am able to save considerable sums for you yearly."
"It's--it's awfully good of you to take so much
trouble for me, mother," he interrupted, stroking her bare arm again
delicately.
To Katherine his half-shy endearments were the most delicious
thing in life--so delicious that at moments she could hardly endure
them. They made her heart too full.
"Eight years hence, when you come of age and I give account of my
stewardship, you will be very rich," she said.
Richard lay quite still, his eyes again fixed on the dimness.
"That--that's good news," he said at last,
drawing a long breath. "I saw things to-day, mother, while we
were driving. It was nobody's fault. There was a fair with a
menagerie and shows at Farley Row. I couldn't help seeing.
Don't ask me about it, mother. I'd rather forget, if I can.
Only it made me understand that it is safer for anyone--well, anyone
like--me--don't you know, to be rich."
Richard sat up, flung his arms round her and kissed her with sudden
passion.
"Beautiful mother, honey-sweet mother," he cried,
"you've told me just everything I wanted to know. I won't
be afraid any more." Then he added, in a charming little tone of
authority:--"Now you mustn't stay here any longer.
You must be tired. You must go to bed and go to sleep."
Page 164BOOK III
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH OUR HERO'S WORLD GROWS SENSIBLY
WIDER
IN the autumn of 1862 Richard Calmady went up to Oxford. Not
through ostentation, but in obedience to the exigencies of the case, his
going was in a somewhat princely sort, so that the venerable city, moved
from the completeness of her scholarly and historic calm, turned her eyes,
in a flutter of quite mundane excitement, upon the new-comer. Julius
March accompanied Richard. Time and thought had moved forward; but the
towers and spires of Oxford, her fair cloisters and enchanting gardens, her
green meadows and noble elms, her rivers, Isis and Cherwell, remained as
when Julius, too, had been among the young and ardent of her sons. He was
greatly touched by this return to the Holy City of his early manhood. He
renewed old friendships. He reviewed the past, taking the measure calmly of
what life had promised, what it had given of good. A pleasant house had
been secured in St. Giles's; and a contingent of the Brockhurst
household, headed by Winter, went with the two gentlemen, while Chaplin and
a couple of grooms preceded them, in charge of a goodly number of
horse-boxes.
For that first saddle, fashioned now some six years ago by Josiah
Appleyard of Farley Row, had worked something as near a miracle as ever yet
was worked by pigskin. It was a singularly ugly saddle, running up into a
peak front and back, furnished with a complicated system of straps and
buckles and--in place of stirrups and
stirrup-leathers--with a pair of contrivances resembling
old-fashioned holsters. Mary Cathcart's brown eyes had grown
moist on first beholding it. And Colonel Ormiston had
exclaimed:--"Good God! Oh, well, poor dear little chap, I
Page 165
The boy rode fearlessly, while exercise and exertion begot in him a
certain light-heartedness and audacity good to see. The
window-seat of the Long Gallery, the bookshelves of the library,
knew him but seldom now. He was no less courteous, no less devoted to his
mother, no less in admiration of her beauty; but the young barbarian was
wide awake in Dickie, and drove him out of doors, on to the moorland or
into the merry green-wood, with dog, and horse, and gun. On his
well-broken pony he shot over the golden stubble fields in autumn;
brought down his pheasants, stationed at the edge of the great coverts;
went out for long afternoons, rabbiting in the warrens and field banks,
escorted by spaniels and retrievers, and keepers carrying lithe,
lemon-coloured ferrets tied up in a bag.
Later, when he was older,--but this tried Katherine somewhat,
reminding her too keenly of another Richard Calmady and days long
dead,--Winter, a trifle reluctant at such shortening of his own
virtuous slumbers, would call Dickie and help dress him, all in the grey of
the summer morning; while, at the little arched doorway in the west front,
Chifney and a groom with a led horse would await his coming, and the boy
would mount and ride away from the great, sleeping house. At such times a
charm of dewy freshness lay on grass and woodland, on hill and vale. The
morning star grew pale and vanished in the clear-flashing delight of
sunrise, as Richard rode forth to meet the string of racers; as he noted
the varying form and fortune of Rattlepate or Sweet Rosemary, of Yellow
Jacket, Morion or Light-o'-Love, over the short,
fragrant turf of the gallop; as he felt the virile joy which the strength
of the horses, and the pounding rush of them as they swept past him, ever
aroused in him, Then he would ride on, by a short-cut, to the old,
red-brick rubbing-house, crowning the rising ground on the
farther side of the lake, and wait there to see the finish, talking of
professional matters with Chifney meanwhile; or, turning his horse's
head towards the wide, distant view, sit silent, drawing near to nature and
worshipping--with the innocent gladness of a still virgin
heart--in the Temple of the Dawn.
Life at Oxford was set in a different key. The university city was well
disposed towards this young man of so great wealth and so strange fortunes;
and Richard was unsuspicious, and ready enough to meet friendliness
half-way. Yet it must be
Page 166
And so Dick, finding himself at sad disadvantage with most of the
charming young fellows about him in matters of play, turned to matters of
work, letting go the barbarian side of life for a while. In brain, if not
in body, he believed himself the equal of the best of them. His ambition
was fired by the desire of intellectual triumph. He would have the success
of the schools, since the success of the river and the cricket-field
were denied him. Not that Richard set any exaggerated value upon academic
honours. Only two things are necessary--this at least was his code at
that period--never to lapse from the instincts of high-breeding
and honour, and to see just as much of life, of men and of affairs, as
obedience to those instincts permits. Already the sense of proportion was
strong in Richard, fed perhaps by the galling sense of personal deformity.
Learning is but a part of the whole of man's equipment, and a paltry
enough part unless wisdom go along with it. But the thirst of battle
remained in him; and in this matter of learning, at least, he could meet
men of his own age and standing on equal terms and overcome them in fair
fight.
And so, during the last two years of his university course, he did meet
them and overcame, honours falling liberally to his share. Julius March
looked on in pleased surprise at the
Page 167
"Calmady, you really are a shameless glutton! How many more
immortal glories, any one of which would satisfy an ordinary man, do you
propose to swallow "
"I suppose it's a bad year," Richard would answer.
"The others can't amount to very much, or, needless to say, I
shouldn't walk over the course."
"A charming little touch of modesty as far as you yourself are
concerned," Ludovic answered. "But not strikingly flattering to
the others. I would rather suppose you abnormally clever, than all the rest
abnormally stupid--for, after all, you know, am not I, my great self,
among the rest?"
At which Dickie would laugh rather shamefacedly, and
say:--"Oh you!--why you know well enough you could do
anything you liked if you weren't so confoundedly lazy!"
And meanwhile, at Brockhurst, as news arrived of these successes, Lady
Calmady's soul received comfort. Her step was light, her eyes full of
clear shining as she moved to and fro ordering the great house and great
estate. She felt repaid for the bitter pain of parting with her darling,
and sending him forth to face the curious, possibly scornful, world of the
university city. He had proved himself and won his spurs. And this solaced
her in the solitude and loneliness of her present life. For her dear friend
and companion Marie de Mirancourt had found the final repose, before
seeking that of the convent. Early one February morning, in the second year
of Richard's sojourn at Oxford, fortified by the rites of the Church,
she had passed the gates of death peacefully, blessing and blessed.
Katherine mourned for her, and would continue to mourn with still and
faithful sorrow, even while welcoming home her young scholar, hearing the
details of his past achievements and hopes for the future, or
entertaining--with all gracious hospitality--such of his Oxford
friends as he elected to invite to Brockhurst.
It was on one of these last occasions, the young men having gone down to
the Gun-Room to smoke and discuss the day's
pheasant-shooting, that Katherine had kept Julius March standing
before the Chapel-Room fire, and had looked at him, a certain
wistfulness in her face.
"He is happy--don't you think, Julius?" she said.
"He seems to me really happier, more contented, than I have ever seen
him since his childhood."
Page 168
"Yes, I also think that," Julius answered. "He has
reason to be contented. He has measured himself against other men and is
satisfied of his own powers."
"Everyone admires him at Oxford?"
"Yes, they admire and envy him. He has been brilliantly
successful."
Katherine drew herself up, clasping her hands behind her, and smiling
proudly as she mused, gazing into the crimson heart of the burning logs.
Then, after a silence, she turned suddenly to her companion.
"It is very sweet to have you here at home again, Julius,"
she said gently. "I have missed you sorely since dearest Marie de
Mirancourt died. Live a little longer than I do, please. Ah! I am afraid it
is no small thing that I ask you to do for my sake, for I foresee that I
shall survive to a lamentably old age. But sacrifice yourself, Julius, in
the matter of living. Less than ever, when the shadows fall, shall I be
able to spare you."
For which words of his dear lady's, though spoken lightly, half in
jest, Julius March gave God great thanks that night.
It was about this period that two pieces of news, each proving
eventually to have much personal significance, reached Lady Calmady from
the outside world. The first took the form of a letter--a rather
pensive and tired letter--from her brother, William Ormiston, telling
her that his daughter Helen was about to marry the Comte de Vallorbes, a
young gentleman very well known both to Parisian and Neapolitan society.
The second took the form of an announcement in the Morning
Post, to the effect that Lady Tobermory, whose lamented death that
paper had already chronicled, had left the bulk of her not inconsiderable
fortune to her god-daughter Honoria, eldest child of that
distinguished officer General St. Quentin. In both cases Lady Calmady wrote
letters of congratulation, in the latter with very sincere and lively
pleasure. She held her cousin, General St. Quentin, in affection for old
sake's sake. Honoria she remembered as a singularly graceful,
high-bred, little maiden, fleet of foot as a hind--too fleet of
foot indeed for little Dickie's comfort of mind, and therefore
banished from the Brockhurst nursery. In the former case, her
congratulations being somewhat conventional, she added--in her own
name and that of Richard--a necklace of pearls, with a diamond clasp
and bars to it, of no mean value.
In the spring of 1865 Richard left Oxford for good, and took up his
residence once more at Brockhurst. But it was
Page 169
CHAPTER II
TELLING HOW DICKIE'S SOUL WAS SOMEWHAT SICK, AND HOW
HE MET FAIR WOMEN ON THE CONFINES OF A WOOD
RICHARD CALMADY rode homeward through the autumn woods, and the
aspect of them was very lovely. But their loveliness was hectic, a
loveliness as it seemed, at all events at first sight, of death and burial,
rather than of life and hope. The sky was overcast, and a chill clung to
the stream-side and haunted the hollows. The young man's
humour, unfortunately, was only too much in harmony with the more
melancholy suggestions of the scene. For Richard was by nature something of
a poet, though he but rarely wrote verses, and usually burned them as soon
as written being scholar enough to know and feel impatient of the
"second best." And this inherent strain of poetry in him
tempered the active and practical side of his character, making wealth and
position, and all those things which the worldly-minded seek, seem
of slight value to him at times. It induced in him many and very varying
moods. It carried him back often, even now in the strength of his young
manhood, to the fine fancies and exquisite unreason of the
fairy-world in which those so sadly ill-balanced footsteps of
his had first been set. To-day had proved, so far, an unlucky one,
prolific of warfare between his clear brain and all too sensitive heart.
For it was the burden of Richard's temperament-the almost
inevitable result of that ever-present thorn in the flesh--that
he shrunk as a poet, even as a woman, while as a man, and a strong one, he
reasoned and fought.
It fell out on this wise. He had attended the Quarter Sessions at
Westchurch; and a certain restlessness, born of the changing seasons, being
upon him, he had ridden. His habit, when passing outside the limits of his
own property, was to drive. He became aware--and angrily conscious his
groom was aware also--that his appearance afforded a spectacle of the
liveliest
Page 170
The consequence was that the young man arrived in court, his eyes rather
hard and his jaw set. Rich, well-born, not undistinguished too for
his attainments, and only three-and-twenty, Dickie had a fine
fund of arrogance to draw upon yet. He drew upon it this morning, rather to
the confusion of his colleagues upon the bench. Mr. Cathcart, the chairman,
was already present, and stood talking with Mr. Seymour, the rector of
Farley, a shrewd, able squarson of the old sporting type. Captain Fawkes of
Water End was there too; and so was Lemuel Image, eldest son of the Mr.
Image, sometime mayor of Westchurch, who has been mentioned in the early
pages of this chronicle.
In the last twenty years, supported by ever-increasing piles of
barrels, the Image family had mounted triumphantly upward in the social
scale. Lemuel, the man in question, married a poor and distant relation of
Lord Aldborough, the late lord lieutenant of the county; and had by this,
and by a rather truculent profession of high Tory politics, secured himself
a seat on the bench. He had given a fancy price, too, for that pretty,
little place, Frodsmill, the grounds of which form such an exasperating
Naboth's vineyard in the heart of the Newlands property. Neither his
person, nor his politics, nor his absence of culture, found favour in
Richard Calmady's sight. And to-day, being somewhat on edge,
the brewer's large, blustering presence and manner--at once
patronising and servile--struck him as peculiarly odious. Image
betrayed an evil tendency to emphasise his remarks by slapping his
acquaintances upon the back. He was also guilty of supposing a defect of
hearing in all persons older than, or in any measure denied the absolute
plethora of physical vigour so conspicuous in, himself. He invariably
raised his voice in addressing Richard. In return for which graceful
attention Dickie most cordially detested him.
"Image is a bit of a cad, and certainly Calmady makes no bones
about letting him know it," Captain Fawkes remarked to Mr. Seymour,
as they drove back to Farley in the latter's dogcart.
"Fortunately he has a hide like a rhinoceros, or we should have had a
regular row between them more than once
Page 171
"A great deal of that is simply self-protective," the
clergyman answered. "It is not difficult to see how it comes about,
when you take his circumstances into account. If I was him, God forgive me,
I know I shouldn't be half so sweet-tempered. He bears it
wonderfully well, all things considered."
Nor did the disturbing incidents of the day end with the familiarities
of the loud-voiced brewer. The principal case to be tried was a
melancholy one enough--a miserable history of wayward desire, shame
and suffering, followed by a despairing course of lies and petty thieving
to help support the poor baby whose advent seemed so wholly a curse. The
young mother--a pretty, desperate creature--made no attempt at
denial. She owned she had robbed her mistress of a shilling here and
sixpence there, that she had taken now a bit of table silver and then a
garment to the pawn-shop. How could she help it? Her wages were a
trifle, since her character was damaged. Wasn't it a charity to
employ a girl like her at all? so her mistress said. And yet the child must
live. And Richard Calmady, sitting in judgment there with those four other
gentlemen of substantial means and excellent position, sickened as he
listened to the sordid details, the relentless elementary arguments. For
the girl, awed and frightened at first, grew eloquent in
self-defence.--"She loved him"--he being a
smart young fellow, who, with excellent recommendations from Chifney, had
left the Brockhurst stables some two years before, to take service in
Westchurch.--"And he always spoke her fair. Had told her
he'd marry her right enough, after a bit--before God he would.
But it would ruin his chance of first-class places if he married
yet. The gentry wouldn't take any but single men of his age. A wife
would stand in his way. And she didn't want to stand in his
way--he knew her better than that. Not but that he reckoned her just
as much his wife as any woman could be. Of course he did. What a silly she
was to trouble about it. And then when there was no hiding any longer how
it was with her, he up and awayed to London, saying he would make a home
for her there. And he kept on writing for a bit, but he never told her
where to write to him in return, so she couldn't answer. And then his
letters came seldom, and then stopped altogether, and then--and
then"--
The girl was rebuked for her much speaking, and so wasting the time of
the Court. There were other cases. And Richard
Page 172
And so pained, out of tune, troubled too by smouldering fires of anger,
Richard left Westchurch and his fellow-magistrates as early as he
decently could. Avoiding the highroad leading by Newlands and through
Sandyfield village, he cut across country by field lanes and over
waste-lands to Farley Row. The wide quiet of the autumn afternoon,
the slight chill in the air, were grateful to him after the noise and close
atmosphere of the court. Yet the young man strove vainly to think of
pleasant things and to regain his serenity. The girl's
tear-blotted face, the tones of her voice, haunted him. Six
weeks' imprisonment. The sentence, after all, was a light one. Yet
who was he, who were those four other well-to-do gentlemen,
that they should judge her at all? How could they measure the strength of
the temptation which had beset her? If temptation is strong enough, must
not the tempted of necessity yield? If the tempted does not yield, is that
not merely proof that the temptation was not strong enough? The whole thing
appeared to him a matter of mathematics or mechanics. Given a greater
weight than it can carry, the rope is bound to break. And then for those
who have not felt the strain to blame the rope, punish the rope! It seemed
to Richard, as he rode homeward, that human justice is too often a very
comedy of injustice. It all appeared to him so exceedingly foolish. And yet
society must be protected. Other pretty, weak, silly creatures must be
warned, by such rather brutal object-lessons, not to bear bastards
or pawn their mistresses' spoons.
"'Je ne sais pas ce que c'est que
la
vie éternelle, mais celle çi est une mauvaise
plainsanterie,'" Dickie quoted to himself somewhat
bitterly.
He turned aside at Farley Row, following the narrow road that runs
behind the houses in the main street and the great, vacant stables and
outbuildings of the White Lion Inn. And here, as though the immediate
displeasures of this ill-starred day
Page 173
Before him the flat expanse of Clerke's Green opened out; and the
turf of it--beaded with dew which the frail sunshine of the early
morning had failed to burn up--was crossed by long tracks of darker
green, where flocks of geese had wandered over its misty surface. Here the
travelling menagerie and all the booths of the fair had been stationed.
Memory rigged up the tents once more, painted the vans in crude, glaring
colours, set drums beating and merry-go-rounds turning,
pointed a malicious finger at the sign-board of a certain show. How
many times Richard had passed this way in the intervening years, and
remembered in passing, yet thrown all hurt of remembrance from him directly
and lightly! To-day it gripped him. He put his horse into a sharp
trot.
Skirting the edge of the green, he rode down a rutted cart
lane--farm buildings and well-filled rickyards on the
left--and forded the shallow, brown stream which separates the parish
of Farley from that of Sandyfield and the tithing of Brockhurst.
Ahead lay the wide, rough road, ending in a broken avenue of ancient
oaks, and bordered on either hand by a strip of waste-land overgrown
with coarse grasses and low thickets of maple--which leads up to the
entrance of the Brockhurst woods. Over these hung a soft, bluish haze,
making them appear vast in extent, and upraising the dark ridge of the fir
forest, which crowns them, to mountain height against the western sky. A
covey of partridges ran up the sandy road before Richard's horse;
and, rising at last with a long-drawn whir of wings, skimmed the top
of the bank and dropped into the pale stubble field on the other side of
it. He paused at the head of the avenue while the keeper's
wife--in lilac apron and sunbonnet--ran out to open the big,
white gate; the dogs meantime, from their kennels under the Spanish
chestnuts upon the slope behind her gabled cottage, setting up a vociferous
chorus. Thus heralded, Richard passed into the whispering, mysterious
stillness of the autumn woods.
The summer had been dry and fine, the foliage unusually rich and heavy,
all the young wood ripening well. Consequently
Page 174
The stream hidden away in the hazel coppice gurgled and murmured.
Beech-masts pattered down, startling the stillness as with a sudden
dropping of thunder rain. Squirrels, disturbed in the ingathering of their
winter store, whisked up the boles of the great trees and scolded merrily
from the forks of the high branches. Shy, wild things rustled and scampered
unseen through the tangled undergrowth and beds of bracken. While that veil
of bluish haze touched all the distance of the landscape with a delicate
mystery, and softly blotted the vista of each wide shooting-drive,
or winding pathway, to left and right.
And as Richard rode onward, leaves gay even in death fluttering down
around him, his mood began to suffer change. He ceased to think and began
to feel merely. First came a dreamy delight in the beauty of the scene
about him. Then the sense of mystery grew upon him--of mystery, not
merely hanging in the delicate haze, but dwelling in the endless variety of
form and colour which met his eyes, of mystery inviting him in the soft,
multitudinous voices of the woodland. And, as the minutes passed, this
sense grew increasingly provocative, became too increasingly elusive. The
light leapt into Dickie's eyes. He smiled to himself. He was filled
with unreasoning expectation. He seemed--it was absurd, yet very
charming--to be playing
Page 175
Richard laughed involuntarily to himself. For there was a fantastic,
curiously alluring influence in all this. It spoke to him as in delicate
persuasion. His sense of expectation intensified. He would not ride
homeward and shut himself within four walls just yet; but yield himself to
the wooing of these fair sylvan divinities, to that of the spirit of the
evening wind, of the softly shrouding haze, and of the broadening sunlight,
a little longer.
A turf-ride branches away to the left, leading along a narrow
outstanding spur of tableland to a summer-house, the prospect from
which is among the noted beauties of Brockhurst. This summer-house
or Temple, as it has come to be called, is an octagonal structure.
Round-shafted pillars rise at each projecting angle. In the recesses
between them are low stone benches, save in front where an open colonnade
gives upon the view. The roof is leaded, and surmounted by a wooden ball
and tall, three-sided spike. These last, as well as the plastered,
windowless walls, are painted white. Within, the hollow of the dome is
decorated in fresco, with groups of gaily clad ladies and their attendant
cavaliers, with errant cupids, garlands of flowers, trophies of rather
impossible musical instruments, and cages full of imprisoned, and therefore
doubtless very naughty, loves. The colours have grown faint by action of
insweeping wind and weather; but this lends a pathos to the
light-hearted, highly-artificial art, accentuating the
contrast between it and its immediate surroundings.
For the Temple stands on a platform of turf at the extreme point of the
spur of tableland. The hillside, clothed with
Page 176
Richard checked his horse, pausing to look for a moment at that
well-beloved home. Then musing, he let his horse go forward along
the level turf-ride. The grey dome and white columns of the Temple
standing out against the spacious prospect--the growing brightness of
this last, still chastened by the delicious autumn haze--captivated
his imagination. There was, seen thus, a simplicity and distinction
altogether classic in the lonely building. To him it appeared not unfit
shrine for the worship of that same all-pervasive spirit of mystery,
not unfit spot for the revelation of that same glad, yet cunningly elusive
secret, of which he suffered the so fond obsession.
And so it was that when, coming abreast of the building, the sound of
young voices--women's voices--and finely modulated laughter
saluted his ear, though startled, for no stranger had the right of entry to
the park, he was by no means displeased. This seemed but part of the
all-pervasive magic of this strange afternoon. Richard smiled at the
phantasies of his own mood--Yet he forgot to be shy, forgot the
distressing self-consciousness which made him shrink from the
observation of strangers--specially those of the other sex. The
adventure tempted his fancy. Even familiar things had put on a new and
beguiling vesture in the last half-hour, so there were miracles
abroad, perhaps. Anyhow he would satisfy himself as to the aspect of those
sweet-voiced and, as yet, unseen trespassers. He let his horse go
forward slowly across the platform of turf.
Page 177
CHAPTER III
IN WHICH RICHARD CONFIRMS ONE JUDGMENT AND REVERSES
ANOTHER
"HOW magnificently your imagination gallops when it once
gets agoing! Here you are bearing away the spoils, when the siege is not
even yet begun--never will be, I venture to hope, for I doubt if this
would be a very honourable"--
The speaker broke off, abruptly, as the shadow of horse and rider
lengthened upon the turf. And, during the silence which followed, Richard
Calmady received an impression at once arresting and subtly
disquieting.
A young lady, of about his own age, leaned against one of the white
pillars of the colonnade. Her attitude and costume were alike slightly
unconventional. She was unusually tall, and there was a lazy, almost boyish
indifference and grace in the pose of her supple figure and the gallant
carriage of her small head. She wore a straight, pale grey-green
jacket, into the pockets of which her hands were thrust. Her skirt, of the
same colour and material, hung in straight folds to her feet, being
innocent alike of trimming and the then prevailing fashion of crinoline.
Further, she wore a little, round matador's hat, three black pompoms
planted audaciously-upstanding above the left ear. Her eyes, long in
shape and set under straight, observant brows, appeared at first sight of
the same clear, light, warm brown as her hair. Her nose was straight,
rather short, and delicately square at the tip. While her face, unlined,
serenely, indeed triumphantly, youthful, was quite colourless and
sufficiently thin to disclose fine values of bone in the broad forehead and
the cutting of jaw and cheek and chin.
In that silence, as she and Richard Calmady looked full at one another,
he apprehended in her a baffling element, a something untamed and remote, a
freedom of soul, that declared itself alike in the gallantries and
severities of her dress, her attitude, and all the lines of her person. She
bore relation to the glad mystery haunting the fair autumn evening. She
also bore relation to the chill haunting the stream-side and the
deep places of the woods. And her immediate action ratified this last
likeness in his mind. When he first beheld her she was bright, with a
certain teasing insouciance. Then, for a minute, even more, she stood at
gaze, as a hind does suddenly
Page 178
"Helen," she called aloud, in tones of mingled protest and
warning. And thereupon, without more ado, she retired, nay, fled, into the
sheltering, sun-warmed interior of the Temple.
At this summons her companion, who until now had stood contemplating the
wide view from the extreme verge of the platform, wheeled round. For an
appreciable time she, too, looked at Richard Calmady, and that haughtily
enough, as though he, rather than she, was the intruder. Her glance
travelled unflinchingly down from his bare head and broad shoulders to that
pocket-like appendage--as of old-fashioned pistol
holsters--on either side his saddle. Swiftly her bearing changed. She
uttered an exclamation of unfeigned and unalloyed satisfaction--a
little, joyful outcry, such as a child will make on discovery of some lost
treasure.
"Ah! it is you--you!" she said, laughing softly, while
she moved forward, both hands extended. Which hand, by the same token, she
proposed to bestow on Dickie remained matter for conjecture, since in the
one she carried a parasol with a staff-like gold and tortoiseshell
handle to it, and in the other, between the first and second fingers, a
cigarette, the blue smoke of which curled upward in transparent spirals
upon the clear, still air.
As the lady of the grey-green gown retired precipitately within
the Temple, a wave of hot blood passed over Richard's body. For
notwithstanding his three-and-twenty years, his not
contemptible mastery of many matters, and that same honourable appointment
of Justice of the Peace for the county of Southampton, he was but a lad
yet, with all a lad's quickness of sensitive shame and burning
resentment. The girl's repulsion had been obvious--that
instinctive repulsion, as poor Dickie's too acute sympathies assured
him, of the whole for the maimed, of the free for the bound, of the artist
for some jarring colour or sound which mars an otherwise entrancing
harmony. And the smart of all this was, to him, doubly salted by the fact
that he, after all, was a man, his critic merely a woman. The bitter mood
of the earlier hours of the day returned upon him. He cursed himself for a
doting fool. Who was he, indeed, to seek revelation of glad secrets,
cherish fair dreams and tempt adventures?
Consequently it fell out when that other lady--she of the
cigarette--advanced thus delightfully towards him, Richard's
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"But this is the very prettiest piece of good fortune!" she
exclaimed. "Had I arranged the whole matter to suit my own fancy it
could not have turned out more happily."
Her tone was that of convincing sincerity; while, as she spoke, the soft
colour came and went in her cheeks, and her lips parting showed little,
even teeth daintily precious as a row of pearls. The outline of her face
was remarkably pure--in shape an oval, a trifle wide in proportion to
its length. Her eyebrows were arched, the eyelids arched also--very
thin, showing the movement of the eyeballs beneath them, drooping slightly,
with a sweep of dark lashes at the outer corner. It struck Richard that she
bore a certain resemblance to his mother, though smaller and slighter in
build. Her mouth was less full, her hair fairer--soft, glistening hair
of all the many shades of heather honey-comb, broken wax, and sweet,
heady liquor, alike. Her hands, he remarked, were very finished--the
fingers pointed, the palms rosy. The set of her black, velvet coat revealed
the roundness of her bust. The broad brim of her large, black hat, slightly
upturned at the sides, and with sweeping ostrich plumes as trimming to it,
threw the upper part of her charming face into soft shadow. Her heavy,
dove-coloured, silk skirts stood out stiffly from her waist,
declaring its slenderness. The few jewels she wore were of notable value.
Her appearance, in fact, spoke the last word of contemporary fashion in its
most refined applicatio