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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 distra