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The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance

by Lucas Malet · English · Gutenberg #23784 · 1,557,505 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance

Author: Lucas Malet


        
Release date: December 9, 2007 [eBook #23784]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF SIR RICHARD CALMADY: A ROMANCE ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
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Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Dialect spellings, contractions and discrepancies have
been retained.




THE HISTORY
OF
SIR RICHARD CALMADY

A Romance



By

Lucas Malet




NEW YORK
Dodd, Mead & Company
1901

_Copyright_, 1901
BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK.




CONTENTS


BOOK I

THE CLOWN

CHAP.                                                        PAGE

  I. Acquainting the Reader with a Fair Domain
       and the Maker Thereof                                    1

  II. Giving the Very Earliest Information
        Obtainable of the Hero of this Book                     7

 III. Touching Matters Clerical and Controversial              19

  IV. Raising Problems which it is the Purpose
        of this History to Resolve                             25

   V. In which Julius March Beholds the Vision
        of the New Life                                        34

  VI. Accident or Destiny, According to Your Humour            44

 VII. Mrs. William Ormiston Sacrifices a Wine-glass
        to Fate                                                57

VIII. Enter a Child of Promise                                 69

  IX. In which Katherine Calmady Looks on Her Son              76

   X. The Birds of the Air Take Their Breakfast                84


BOOK II

THE BREAKING OF DREAMS

   I. Recording some Aspects of a Small Pilgrim's Progress     93

  II. In which Our Hero Improves His Acquaintance
        with Many Things--Himself Included                    104

 III. Concerning that which, Thank God, Happens
        Almost Every Day                                      117

  IV. Which Smells very Vilely of the Stable                  128

   V. In which Dickie is Introduced to a Little Dancer
        with Blush-roses in Her Hat                           140

  VI. Dealing with a Physician of the Body and a
        Physician of the Soul                                 149

 VII. An Attempt to Make the Best of It                       159

VIII. Telling, Incidentally, of a Broken-down Postboy
        and a Country Fair                                    169


BOOK III

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

   I. In which Our Hero's World Grows Sensibly Wider          181

  II. Telling How Dickie's Soul was Somewhat Sick, and
        How He Met Fair Women on the Confines of a Wood       186

 III. In which Richard Confirms One Judgment and
        Reverses Another                                      195

  IV. Julius March Bears Testimony                            203

   V. Telling How Queen Mary's Crystal Ball Came to Fall
        on the Gallery Floor                                  215

  VI. In which Dickie Tries to Ride Away from His Own
        Shadow, with Such Success as Might Have Been
        Anticipated                                           231

 VII. Wherein the Reader is Courteously Invited to
        Improve His Acquaintance with Certain Persons
        of Quality                                            240

VIII. Richard Puts His Hand to a Plough from which There
        is no Turning Back                                    252

  IX. Which Touches Incidentally on Matters of Finance        264

   X. Mr. Ludovic Quayle Among the Prophets                   280

  XI. Containing Samples Both of Earthly and Heavenly Love    289


BOOK IV

A SLIP BETWIXT CUP AND LIP

   I. Lady Louisa Barking Traces the Finger of Providence     302

  II. Telling How Vanity Fair Made Acquaintance with
        Richard Calmady                                       314

 III. In which Katherine Tries to Nail Up the Weather-glass
        to Set Fair                                           324

  IV. A Lesson Upon the Eleventh Commandment--"Parents
        Obey Your Children"                                   337

   V. Iphigenia                                               350

  VI. In which Honoria St. Quentin Takes the Field            362

 VII. Recording the Astonishing Valour Displayed by a
        Certain Small Mouse in a Corner                       375

VIII. A Manifestation of the Spirit                           386

  IX. In which Dickie Shakes Hands with the Devil             397


BOOK V

RAKE'S PROGRESS

   I. In which the Reader is Courteously Entreated to
        Grow Older by the Space of Some Four Years, and
        to Sail Southward Ho! Away                            417

  II. Wherein Time is Discovered to Have Worked Changes       429

 III. Helen de Vallorbes Apprehends Vexatious Complications   438

  IV. "Mater Admirabilis"                                     447

   V. Exit Camp                                               455

  VI. In which M. Paul Destournelle Has the Bad Taste to
        Threaten to Upset the Apple-cart                      469

 VII. Splendide Mendax                                        479

VIII. Helen de Vallorbes Learns Her Rival's Name              490

  IX. Concerning that Daughter of Cupid and Psyche Whom
        Men Call Voluptas                                     506

   X. The Abomination of Desolation                           511

  XI. In which Dickie Goes to the End of the World and
        Looks Over the Wall                                   526


BOOK VI

THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH

   I. Miss St. Quentin Bears Witness to the Faith that
        is in Her                                             544

  II. Telling How, Once Again, Katherine Calmady Looked
        on Her Son                                            555

 III. Concerning a Spirit in Prison                           566

  IV. Dealing with Matters of Hearsay and Matters
        of Sport                                              575

   V. Telling How Dickie Came to Untie a Certain Tag
        of Rusty, Black Ribbon                                588

  VI. A Litany of the Sacred Heart                            600

 VII. Wherein Two Enemies are Seen to Cry Quits               611

VIII. Concerning the Brotherhood Founded by Richard
        Calmady, and Other Matters of Some Interest           628

  IX. Telling How Ludovic Quayle and Honoria St. Quentin
        Watched the Trout Rise in the Long Water              639

   X. Concerning a Day of Honest Warfare and a Sunset
        Harbinger Not of the Night But of the Dawn            655

  XI. In which Richard Calmady Bids the Long-suffering
        Reader Farewell                                       679




The History of Sir Richard Calmady




BOOK I

THE CLOWN




CHAPTER I

ACQUAINTING THE READER WITH A FAIR DOMAIN AND THE MAKER THEREOF


In that fortunate hour of English history, when the cruel sights and
haunting insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and while, as
yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow
over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil
Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone
house upon the southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which
ranges northward to the confines of Windsor Forest and eastward to the
Surrey Hills. And this he did in no vainglorious spirit, with purpose
of exalting himself above the county gentlemen, his neighbours, and
showing how far better lined his pockets were than theirs. Rather did
he do it from an honest love of all that is ingenious and comely, and
as the natural outgrowth of an inquiring and philosophic mind. For
Denzil Calmady, like so many another son of that happy age, was
something more than a mere wealthy country squire, breeder of beef and
brewer of ale. He was a courtier and traveler; and, if tradition speaks
truly, a poet who could praise his mistress's many charms, or wittily
resent her caprices, in well-turned verse. He was a patron of art,
having brought back ivories and bronzes from Italy, pictures and china
from the Low Countries, and 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 bringeth
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
untrammeled judgment, decide what amongst them is illusory and but as 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 Scotchfirs, 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 race-horses
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 summer-houses, its
gleaming ponds and watercourses, its hawthorn dotted paddocks; its
ancient avenues of elm, of lime, and oak. The same panelings 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 obtruded 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 sugar-loaf 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 gray,
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 aerial 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,--they
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 appears 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 church-yard,--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. Dueling, 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.




CHAPTER II

GIVING THE VERY EARLIEST INFORMATION OBTAINABLE OF THE HERO OF THIS
BOOK


It happened in this way, towards the end of August, 1842.

In the gray of the summer evening, as the sunset faded and the twilight
gathered, spreading itself tenderly over the pastures and
corn-fields,--over the purple-green glooms of the fir forest--over the
open moors, whose surface is scored for miles by the turf-slane of the
cottager and squatter--over the clear brown streams that trickle out of
the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bogs, and gain volume and
vigour as they sparkle away by woodside, and green-lane, and village
street--and over those secret, bosky places, in the heart of the great
common-lands, where the smooth, white stems and glossy foliage of the
self-sown hollies spring up between the roots of the beech trees, where
plovers cry, and stoat and weazel lurk and scamper, while the old
poacher's lean, ill-favoured, rusty-coloured lurcher picks up a
shrieking hare, and where wandering bands of gypsies--those lithe,
onyx-eyed children of the magic East--still pitch their dirty, little,
fungus-like tents around the camp-fire,--as the sunset died and the
twilight thus softly widened and deepened, Lady Calmady found herself,
for the first time during all the long summer day, alone.

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 a 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, phaetons, gigs, traps,
pony-chaises streamed away from Brockhurst House, north, south, 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 was gone. 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. Her 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 in
abeyance, 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.
Katharine'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 was
tempered by the poetic instincts and quick wit which came to her with
her mother's Irish blood, Katherine Ormiston started as well furnished
as 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 point of fact, however, Katherine suffered but
slightly from the poor welcome that greeted her advent in the gray,
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 Sacre 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 gray. This much Katherine had
heard of him from her brother. And having her haughty turns--as what
charming woman has not?--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. And it was a little surprising--possibly a little
mortifying to her--to hear him talking over obscure passages in
Spencer'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 the 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
indeterminate 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 gray-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 traveled 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. And 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
past, 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 a 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 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 grass 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 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 waiting, 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 cried. "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 waterfowl 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?"

Katharine'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, or 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.




CHAPTER III

TOUCHING MATTERS CLERICAL AND CONTROVERSIAL


Brockhurst had rarely appeared more blessed by spacious sunshine and
stately cheerfulness than during the remaining weeks of that summer. A
spirit of unclouded serenity possessed the place, both indoors and out.
If rain fell, it was only at night. And this, as so much else, Julius
March noted duly in his diary.

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 leveler, 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 of 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 traveled 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 running 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.
Modestly, 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 livelong chastity. 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 smallpox, 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.




CHAPTER IV

RAISING PROBLEMS WHICH IT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS HISTORY TO RESOLVE


It was not without a movement of inward thanksgiving that, the
festivities connected with Sir Richard and Lady Calmady's home-coming
being over, Julius March returned to his labours in the Brockhurst
library. Humanity at first hand, whatever its social standing or its
pursuits, was, in truth, always slightly agitating to him. He felt more
at home when dealing with conclusions than with the data that go to
build up those conclusions, with the thoughts of men printed and bound,
than with the urgent raw material from which those thoughts arise.
Revelation, authority--these were still his watchwords; and in face of
them even the harmless spectacle of a country neighbourhood at play,
let alone the spectacle of the human comedy generally, is singularly
confusing.

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 note-book
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 paneling of the walls and bookcases--but one
shade warmer in tone than that of the stone mullions and transomes 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, at 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 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 any one 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 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; and 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 unpleasantly 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 book in disgust.

"_Araignee 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 gray 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 proved all 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 bloody
    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 self-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
Murillo, standing on an easel near by caught the light, starting into
arresting reality. It represented a hideous and misshapen 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 down-stairs 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.

"_Araignee 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 gray flags of the great terrace--its rows 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, gray string-course
running along the house front just beneath. Mademoiselle de Mirancourt,
a small, neat, gray 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 bulldog, 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 wood-cut
representing the arrival of this lady at Brockhurst. Clothed in a
bottle-green bodice--very generously _decolletee_, 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,
inconveniently 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
generations, 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 preordained 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 presentiment 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.




CHAPTER V

IN WHICH JULIUS MARCH BEHOLDS THE VISION OF THE NEW LIFE


He was aroused from these austere, yet, to him, inspiring reflections
by the click of an opening door and the sound of women's voices.
Mademoiselle de Mirancourt paused on the threshold, one hand raised in
quick admiration, the other resting on Lady Calmady's arm.

"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 forever 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
developments of that same story which, though august, were 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
_pieta_, 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.
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 book
shelves lining one side of the room. There should be peace in 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 gray 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 their great devotion, amid that ethereal brightness,
they seemed as two heroic figures--immortal, fairy lovers moving
through the lovely wonder of that fairy-land. 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 any one 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 short-lived, 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 _pieta_, 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 quarreled--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 certain. 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, oh 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.




CHAPTER VI

ACCIDENT OR DESTINY, ACCORDING TO YOUR HUMOUR


On the 18th of October that year, St. Luke's day, a man died, and this
was the manner of his passing.

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 dare say 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 further 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, 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 steeple-chase 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 passageway 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. Thoms 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 anaesthetics had not robbed the
operating-room of half its horrors. The victim went to execution
wide-awake, with no mercy of deadened senses and dulled brain. And so
Katherine had paced the dining-room, hearing at intervals, through the
closed doors, the short peremptory tones of the surgeons, fearing she
heard more and worse sounds than those. They were hurting him, sorely,
sorely, dismembering and disfiguring the dear, living body which she
loved. A tempest of unutterable woe swept over her. Breaking fiercely
away from her brother and Denny--who strove to comfort her--she beat
her poor, lovely head against the wall. But that, so far, had been her
one moment of weakness. Since then she had fought steadily, with a
certain lofty cheerfulness, for the life she so desired to save. The
horror of the second operation had been spared her; but only because it
might but too probably hasten, rather than retard, the approaching
footsteps of death. Mortification had set in, in the bruised and
mangled limb forty-eight hours ago. And now the scent of death was in
the air. The awful presence drew very near. Yet only when doctor and
priest alike rose and went, when her brother moved away, and even the
faithful housekeeper stepped back from the bedside, did Katherine's
mind really grasp the truth. Her well-beloved lay dying; and human
tenderness, human skill, be they never so great, ceased to avail.

She was worn by the long vigil. Her face was colourless. Yet perhaps
Katherine's beauty had never been more rare and sweet than as she sat
there, leaning a little forward in the eagerness of her watchfulness.
The dark circles about her eyes made them look very large and sombre.
The corners of her mouth turned down and her under-lip quivered now and
then, giving her expression a childlike piteousness of appeal. There
was no trace of disorder in her appearance. Her white dressing-gown and
all its pretty ribbons and laces were spotlessly fresh. Her hair was
carefully dressed as usual--high at the back, showing the nape of her
neck, her little ears, and the noble poise of her head. Katherine was
not one of those women who appear to imagine that slovenliness is the
proper exponent of sorrow.

Still, for all her high courage, as the truth came home to her, her
spirit began to falter for the second time. It is comparatively easy to
endure while there is something to be done; but it is almost
intolerable, specially to the young when life is strong in them, merely
to sit by and wait. Katherine's overwrought nerves began to play cruel
tricks upon her, carrying her back in imagination to that other hideous
hour of waiting, in the dining-room, four evenings ago. Again she
seemed to hear the short peremptory tones of the surgeons, and those
worse things--the stifled groan of one in the extremity of physical
anguish, and the grate of a saw. These maddened her with pity, almost
with rage. She feared that now, as then, she might lose her
self-mastery and do some wild and desperate thing. She tried to keep
her attention fixed on the quick irregular rise and fall of the linen
sheet expressing the broad, full curve of the young man's chest, as he
lay flat on his back, his eyes closed, but whether in sleep or in
unconsciousness she did not know. As long as the sheet rose and fell he
was alive at all events, still with her. But she was too exhausted for
any sustained effort of will; and her glance wandered back to, and
followed with agonised comprehension, the formless, motionless
elevation and depression of that same sheet towards the foot of the
bed.

The air of the room seemed to grow more oppressive, the silence to
deepen, and with it the terrible tension of her mind increased.
Suddenly she started to her feet. The logs burning in the grate had
fallen together with a crash, sending a rush of ruddy flame and an
innumerable army of hurrying sparks up the wide chimney. All the
mouldings of the ceiling--all the crossing bars and sinuous lines of
the richly-worked pattern, all the depending bosses and roses of it,
all the foliations of the deep cornice--sprang into bold relief,
outlined, splashed, and stained with living scarlet. And this universal
redness of carpet, curtains, furniture, and now of ceiling, even of
white-draped bed, suggested to Katherine's distracted fancy another
thing--unseen, yet known during her other hour of waiting--namely
blood.

Roused by the crash of the falling logs and the rustle of Katherine's
garments as she sprang up, Richard Calmady opened his eyes. For a few
seconds his glance wavered in vague distress and perplexity. Then as
fuller consciousness returned of how it all was with him, with a slight
lifting of the eyebrows his glance steadied upon Katherine and he
smiled.

"Ah! my poor Kitty," he whispered, "it takes a long time, doesn't it,
this business of dying?"

Katherine's evil fancies vanished. As soon as the demand for action
came she grew calm and sane. The ceiling and sheets were white again
and her mind was clear.

"Are you easy, my dearest?" she asked; "in less pain?"

"No," he said, "no, I'm not in pain. But everything seems to sink away
from me, and I float right out. It's all dream and mist--except--except
just now your face."

Katherine's lips quivered too much for speech. She moved swiftly across
to the what-not at the head of the bed. If he did not suffer, there
could be no selfishness, surely, in trying to keep death at bay for a
little space yet? But, alas, with what grotesquely paltry and
inadequate weapons are all--even the most gallant--reduced to fighting
death at the last! Here, on the one hand, a half wine-glass of
champagne in a china feeding-cup, with a teapot-like spout to it, or a
few spoonfuls of jelly, backed by the passion of a woman's heart. And,
on the other hand, ranged against this pitiful display of absurdly
limited resources,--as the hosts of the Philistines against the little
army of Israel,--resistless laws of nature, incalculably far-reaching
forces, physical and spiritual, the interminable progression of cause
and effect.

Denny joined Lady Calmady at the table. The two women held brief
consultation. Then the housekeeper went round to the farther side of
the bed, and slipping her arm under the pillows gently raised Richard's
head and shoulders, while Katherine kneeling beside him held the spout
of the feeding-cup to his lips.

"Must I? I don't think I can manage it," he said, drawing away slightly
and closing his eyes.

But Katherine persisted.

"Oh! try to drink it," she pleaded, "never mind how little--only try.
Help me to keep you here just as long as I can."

The young man's glance steadied on to her once again, and his eyes and
lips smiled the same faint, wholly gracious smile.

"All right, my beloved," he said. "A little higher, Denny, please."

Not without painful effort and a choking contraction of the throat, he
swallowed a few drops. But the greater part of the draught spilt out
sideways, and would have dribbled down on to the pillows had not
Katherine held her handkerchief to his mouth.

Ormiston, who had been standing at the foot of the bed in the hope of
rendering some assistance, ground his teeth together with a
half-audible imprecation, and went slowly over to the fireplace again.
He had supposed himself as miserable as he well could be before. But
this incident of the feeding-cup was the climax, somehow. It struck him
as an intolerable humiliation and outrage that Richard Calmady,
splendid fellow as he was, gifted, high-bred gentleman, should, of all
men, come to this sorry pass! He was filled with impotent fury. And was
it this pass, indeed, he asked himself, to which every human creature
must needs come one day? Would he, Roger Ormiston, one day, find
himself thus weak and broken; his body--now so lively a source of
various enjoyment--degraded into a pest-house, a mere dwelling-place of
suffering and corruption? The young man gripped the high, narrow
mantel-shelf with both hands and pressed his forehead down between
them. He really had not the nerve to watch what was going forward over
there any longer. It was too painful. It knocked all the manhood out of
him. But for very shame, before those two calm, devoted women, he would
have broken down and wept.

Presently Richard's voice reached him, feeble yet uncomplaining.

"I am so sorry, but you see it's no use, Kitty. The machinery won't
work. Let me lie flat again, Denny, please. That's better, thanks."

Then after a few moments of laboured breathing, he added--

"You mustn't trouble any more, it only disappoints you. We have just
got to submit to fact, my beloved, I've taken my last fence."

Ormiston's shoulders heaved convulsively as he leaned his forehead
against the cold, marble edge of the chimneypiece. His brother-in-law's
words brought the whole dreadful picture up before him. Oh! that cursed
slip and fall, that struggling, plunging, frenzied horse! And how the
horse had plunged and struggled, good God! It seemed as though Chifney,
the grooms, all of them, would never get hold of it or draw Richard out
from beneath the pounding hoofs. And then Ormiston went over his own
share in the business again, lamenting, blaming himself. Yet what more
natural, after all, than that he should have set his affections on the
Clown? Chifney believed in the horse too--a five-year-old brother of
Touchstone, resembling, in his black-brown skin and intelligent,
white-reach face, that celebrated horse; and inheriting--less enviable
distinction--the high shoulders and withers of his sire Camel. If the
Clown did not make a name, Captain Ormiston had sworn, by all the gods
of sport, he would never judge a horse again. And, heaven help us, was
this the ghastly way the Clown's name was to be made then?

The room grew very quiet again, save for a strange gurgling, rattling
sound Richard Calmady made, at times, in breathing. Mrs. Denny had
retired beyond the circle of firelight. And Katherine, having drawn her
chair a little further forward, so that the foot of the bed might be
out of sight, sat holding her husband's hand, softly caressing his
wrist and palm with her finger-tips. Soon the slow movement of her
fingers ceased, while she felt, in quick fear, for the fluttering,
intermittent pulse. Richard's breathing had become more difficult. He
moved his head restlessly and plucked at the sheet with his right hand.
It was a little more than flesh and blood could bear.

Katherine called to him softly under her breath,--"Richard, Dick, my
darling."

"All right, I'm coming."

He opened his eyes wide, as in sudden terror.

"Oh! I say though, what's happened? Where am I?"

Katherine leant down, kissed his hand, caressed it.

"Here, my dearest," she said, "at home, at Brockhurst, with me."

"Ah yes!" he said, "of course, I remember, I'm dying." He waited a
little space, and then, turning his head on the pillow so as to have a
better view of her, spoke again:--"I was floating right out--the
under-tow had got me--it was sucking me down into the deep sea of mist
and dreams. I was so nearly gone--and you brought me back."

"But I wanted you so--I wanted you so," Katherine cried, smitten with
sudden contrition. "I could not help it. Do you mind?"

"You silly sweet, could I ever mind coming back to you?" he asked
wistfully. "Don't you suppose I would much rather stay here at
Brockhurst, at home, with you--than sink away into the unknown?"

"Ah! my dear," she said, swaying herself to and fro in the misery of
tearless grief.

"And yet I have no call to complain," he went on. "I have had thirty
years of life and health. It is not a small thing to have seen the sun,
and to have rejoiced in one's youth. And I have had you"--his face
hardened and his breath came short--"you, most enchanting of women."

"My dear, my dear!" Katherine cried, again bowing her head.

"God has been so good to me here that--I hope it is not presumptuous--I
can't be much afraid of what is to follow. The best argument for what
will be, is what has been. Don't you think so?"

"But you go and I stay," she said. "If I could only go too, go with
you."

Richard Calmady raised himself in the bed, looked hard at her, spoke as
a man in the fulness of his strength.

"Do you mean that? Would you come with me if you could--come through
the deep sea of mist and dreams, to whatever lies beyond?"

For all answer Katherine bent lower, her face suddenly radiant,
notwithstanding its pallor. Sorrow was still so new a companion to her
that she would dare the most desperate adventures to rid herself of its
hateful presence. Her reason and moral sense were in abeyance, only her
poor heart spoke. She laid hold of her husband's hands and clasped them
about her throat.

"Let us go together, take me," she prayed. "I love you, I will not be
left. Closer, Dick, closer."

"Thank God! I am strong enough even yet," he said fiercely, while his
jaw set, and his grasp tightened somewhat dangerously upon her throat.
Katherine looked into his eyes and laughed. The blood was tingling
through her veins.

"Ah! dear love," she panted, "if you knew how delicious it is to be a
little hurt!"

But her ecstasy was short-lived, as ecstasy usually is. Richard Calmady
unclasped his hands and dropped back against the pillows, putting her
away from him with a certain authority.

"My beloved one, do not tempt me," he said, "we must remember the
child. The devil of jealousy is very great, even when one lies, as I do
now, more than half dead." He turned his head away, and his voice
shook. "Ten years hence, twenty years hence, you will be as
beautiful--more so, very likely--than ever. Other men will see you, and
I----"

"You will be just what you were and always have been to me," Katherine
interrupted. "I love you, and shall love."

She answered bravely, taking his hand again and caressing it, while he
looked round and smiled at her. But she grew curiously cold. She
shivered, and had a difficulty in controling her speech. Her new
companion, Sorrow, refused to be tricked and to leave her, and the
breath of sorrow is as sharp as a wind blowing over ice.

"You have made me perfectly content," Richard Calmady said presently.
"There is nothing I would have changed. No hour of day--or night--ah,
my God! my God!--which I could ask to have otherwise." He paused,
fighting a sob which rose in his throat. "Still you are quite
young----"

"So much the worse for me," Katherine said.

"Oh! I don't know about that," he put in quietly. "Anyhow, remember
that you are free, absolutely and unconditionally free. I hold a man a
cur who, in dying, tries to bind the woman he loves."

Katherine shivered. Despair had possession of her.

"Why reason about it?" she asked. "Don't you see that to be bound is
the only comfort I shall have left?"

"My poor darling," Richard Calmady almost groaned.

His own helplessness to help her cut him to the quick. Wealth, and an
inherent graciousness of disposition, had always made it so simple to
be of service and of comfort to those about him. It was so natural to
rule, to decide, to alleviate, to give little trouble to others and
take a good deal of trouble on their behalf, that his present and final
incapacity in any measure to shield even Katherine, the woman he
worshipped, amazed him. Not pain, not bodily disfigurement,--though he
recoiled, as every sane being must, from these,--not death itself,
tried his spirit so bitterly as his own uselessness. All the pleasant,
kindly activities of common intercourse were over. He was removed alike
from good deeds and from bad. He had ceased to have part or lot in the
affairs of living men. The desolation of impotence was upon him.

For a little time he lay very still, looking up at the firelight
playing upon the mouldings of the ceiling, trying to reconcile himself
to this. His mind was clear, yet, except when actually speaking, he
found it difficult to keep his attention fixed. Images, sensations
began to chase each other across his mental field of vision; and his
thought, though definite as to detail, grew increasingly broken and
incoherent, small matters in unseemly fashion jostling great. He
wondered concerning those first steps of the disembodied spirit, when
it has crossed the threshold of death; and then, incontinently, he
passed to certain time-honoured jokes and impertinent follies at Eton,
over which he, and Roger and Major St. Quentin had laughed a hundred
times. They amused him greatly even yet. But he could not linger with
them. He was troubled about the attics of the new lodge, now in
building at the entrance to the east woods. The windows were too small,
and he disliked that blind north gable. There were letters to be
answered too. Lord Fallowfeild wanted to know about something--he could
not remember what--Fallowfeild's inquiries had a habit of being vague.
And through all these things--serious or trivial--a terrible yearning
over Katherine and her baby--the new, little, human life which was his
own life, and which yet he would never know or see. And through all
these things also, the perpetual, heavy ache of those severed nerves
and muscles, flitting pains in the limb of which, though it was gone,
he had not ceased to be aware.--He dozed off, and mortal weakness
closed down on him, floating him out and out into vague spaces. And
then suddenly, once more, he felt a horse under him and gripped it with
his knees. He was riding, riding, whole and vigorous, with the summer
wind in his face, across vast, flowering pastures towards a great light
on the far horizon, which streamed forth, as he knew, from the throne
of Almighty God.

Choking, with the harsh rattle in his throat, he awoke to the actual
and immediate--to the familiar square room and its crimson furnishings,
to Katherine's sweet, pale face and the touch of her caressing fingers,
to some one standing beside her, whom he did not immediately recognise.
It was Roger--Roger worn with watching, grown curiously older. But a
certain exhilaration, born of that strange ride, remained by Richard
Calmady. Both ache of body and distress of mind had abated. He felt a
lightness of spirit; an eagerness, as of one setting forth on a
promised journey, who--not unlovingly, yet with something of
haste--makes his dispositions before he starts.

"Look here, darling," he said, "you'll let the stables go on just as
usual. Chifney will take over the whole management of them. You can
trust him implicitly. And--that is you, Roger, isn't it?--you'll keep
an eye on things, won't you, so that Kitty shall have no bother? I
should like to know nothing was changed at the stables. They've been a
great hobby of mine, and if--if the baby is a boy, he may take after me
and care for them. Make him ride straight, Roger. And teach him to care
for sport for its own sake, dear old man, as a gentleman should, not
for the money that may come out of it."

He waited, struggling for breath, then his hand closed on Katherine's.

"I must go," he said. "You'll call the boy after me, Kitty, won't you?
I want there to be another Richard Calmady. My life has been very
happy, so, please God, the name will bring luck."

A spasm took him, and he tried convulsively to push off the sheet.
Katherine was down on her knees, her right arm under his head, while
with her left hand she stripped the bedclothes away from his chest and
bared his throat.

"Denny, Denny!" she cried, "come--tell me--is this death?"

And Ormiston, impelled by an impulse he could hardly have explained,
crossed the room, dragged back the heavy curtains, and flung one of the
casements wide open.

The soft light of autumn dawn flowed in through the great mullioned
window, quenching the redness of fire and candles, spreading, dim and
ghostly, over the white dress and bowed head of the woman, over the
narrow bed and the form of the maimed and dying man. The freshness of
the morning air, laden with the soothing murmur of the fir forest
swaying in the breath of a mild westerly breeze, laden too with the
moist fragrance of the moorland, of dewy grass, of withered bracken and
fallen leaves, flowed in also, cleansing the tainted atmosphere of the
room. While, from the springy turf of the green ride--which runs
eastward, parallel to the lime avenue--came the thud and suck of hoofs
and the voices of the stable boys, as they rode the long string of
dancing, snorting race-horses out to the training ground for their
morning exercise.

Richard Calmady opened his eyes wide.

"Ah, it's daylight!" he cried, in accents of joyfulness. "I am glad.
Kiss me, my beloved, kiss me.--You dear--yes, once more. I have had
such a queer night. I dreamt I had been fearfully knocked about
somehow, and was crippled, and in pain. It is good to wake, and find
you, and know I'm all right after all. God keep you, my dearest, you
and the boy. I am longing to see him--but not just now--let Denny bring
him later. And tell them to send Chifney word I shall not be out to see
the gallops this morning. I really believe those dreams half frightened
me. I feel so absurdly used up. And then--Kitty, where are you?--put
your arms round me and I'll go to sleep again."

He smiled at her quite naturally and stroked her cheek.

"My sweet, your face is all wet and cold!" he said. "Make Richard a
good boy. After all that is what matters most--Julius will help you----
Ah! look at the sunrise--why--why----"

An extraordinary change passed over him. To Katherine it seemed like
the upward leap of a livid flame. Then his head fell back and his jaw
dropped.




CHAPTER VII

MRS. WILLIAM ORMISTON SACRIFICES A WINE-GLASS TO FATE


Mrs. St. Quentin's health became increasingly fragile that autumn; and
the weight of the sorrow which had fallen upon Brockhurst bowed her to
the earth. Her desire was to go to Lady Calmady, wrap her about with
tenderness and strengthen her in patience. But, though the spirit was
willing, the flesh was weak. Daily she assured Mademoiselle de
Mirancourt that she was better, that she would be able to start for
England in the course of the next week. Yet day after day, week after
week passed by, and still the two ladies lingered in the pretty
apartment of the rue de Rennes. Day by day, and week by week, moreover,
the elder lady grew more feeble, left her bed later in the morning,
sought it earlier at night, finally resigned the attempt to leave it at
all. The keepers of Lucia St. Quentin's house of life trembled,
desire--even of gentle ministries--began to fail, the sound of the
grinding was low. Yet neither she, nor her lifelong friend, nor her
doctor, nor the few intimate acquaintances who were still privileged to
visit her, admitted that she would never go forth on that journey to
England at all; but only on that quite other journey,--upon which
Richard Calmady had already set forth in the fulness of his
manhood,--and upon which, the manifold uncertainties of human existence
notwithstanding, we are, each one of us, so perfectly certain to set
forth at last. Silently they agreed with her to treat her increasing
weakness with delicate stoicism, to speak of it--if at all--merely as a
passing indisposition, so allowing no dreary, lamentable element to
obtrude itself. Sad Mrs. St. Quentin might be, bitterly sad at heart,
perplexed by the rather incomprehensible dealings of God with man. Yet,
to the end, she would remain charming, gently gay even, both out of
consideration for others and a fine self-respect, since she held it the
mark of a cowardly and ignoble nature to let anything squalid appear in
her attitude towards grief, old age, or death.

But Brockhurst she would never see again. The way was too great for
her. And so it came about that when Lady Calmady's child was born,
towards the end of the following March, no more staid and responsible
woman creature of her family was at hand to support her than that
lively, young lady, her brother, William Ormiston's wife.

Meanwhile, the parish of Sandyfield rejoiced. Thomas Caryll, the
rector, had caused the church bells to be rung immediately on receipt
of the good news; while he selected, as text for his Sunday morning
sermon, those words, usually reserved to another and somewhat greater
advent--"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." Good Mr.
Caryll was innocent of the remotest intention of profanity. But his
outlook was circumscribed, his desire to please abnormally large, and
his sense of relative values slight. While that Lady Calmady should
give birth to a son and heir was, after all, a matter of no small
moment--locally considered at all events.

Brockhurst House rejoiced also, yet it did so not without a measure of
trembling. For there had been twenty-four hours of acute anxiety
regarding Katherine Calmady. And even now, on the evening of the second
day, although Dr. Knott declared himself satisfied both as to her
condition and that of the baby, an air of mystery surrounded the large
state-bedroom,--where she lay, white and languid, slowly feeling her
way back to the ordinary conditions of existence,--and the nursery next
door. Mrs. Denny, who had taken possession by right divine of long and
devoted service, not only did not encourage, but positively repulsed
visitors. Her ladyship must not be disturbed. She, the nurse, the baby,
in turn, were sleeping. According to Denny the god of sleep reigned
supreme in those stately, white-paneled chambers, looking away, across
the valley and the long lines of the elm avenue, to the faint blue of
the chalk downs rising against the southern sky.

John Knott had driven over, for the second time that day, in the windy
March sunset. He fell in very readily with Mrs. Ormiston's suggestion
that he should remain to dinner. That young lady's spirits were
sensibly on the rise. It is true that she had wept copiously at
intervals while her sister-in-law's life appeared to be in
danger--keeping at the same time as far from the sick room as the ample
limits of Brockhurst House allowed, and wishing herself a thousand and
one times safe back in Paris, where her devoted and obedient husband
occupied a subordinate post at the English Embassy. But Mrs. Ormiston's
tears were as easily staunched as set flowing. And now, in her capacity
of hostess, with three gentlemen--or rather "two and a half, for you
can't," as she remarked, "count a brother-in-law for a whole one"--as
audience, she felt remarkably cheerful. She had been over to Newlands
during the afternoon, and insisted on Mary Cathcart returning with
her--Mrs. Ormiston was a Desmolyns. The Cathcarts are distantly
connected with that family. And, when the girl had protested that this
was hardly a suitable moment for a visit to Brockhurst, Charlotte
Ormiston had replied, with that hint of a brogue which gave her ready
speech its almost rollicking character:--

"But, my dear child, propriety demands it. I depart myself to-morrow.
And now that we're recovering our tone I daren't be left with such a
houseful of men on my hands any longer. While we were tearing our hair
over poor Kitty's possible demise, and agonising as to the uncertain
sex of the baby, it did not matter. But now even that dear creature,
Saint Julius, is beginning to pick up, and looks less as if his diet
was mouldy peas and his favourite plaything a cat-o'-nine-tails.
Scourge?--Yes, of course, but it's all the same in the application of
the instrument, you know. And then in your secret soul, Mary dear," she
added, not unkindly, "there's no denying it's far from obnoxious to you
to spend a trifle of time in the society of Roger."

Mrs. Ormiston carried her point. It may be stated, in passing, that
this sprightly, young matron was brilliantly pretty, though her facial
angle might be deemed too acute, leaving somewhat to be desired in the
matter of forehead and of chin. She was plump, graceful, and neat
waisted. Her skin was exquisitely white and fine, and a charming colour
flushed her cheeks under excitement. Her hair was always untidy, her
hairpins displaying abnormal activity in respect of escape and
independent action. Her eyes were round and very prominent, suggestive
of highly-polished, brown agates. She was not the least shy or averse
to attracting attention. She laughed much, and practised, as prelude to
her laughter, an impudently, coquettish, little stare. And finally, as
he sat on her right at dinner, her rattling talk and lightness of
calibre generally struck John Knott as rather cynically inadequate to
the demands made by her present position. Not that he underrated her
good nature or was insensible to her personal attractions. But the
doctor was in search of an able coadjutor just then, blessed with a
steady brain and a tongue skilled in tender diplomacies. For there were
trying things to be said and done, and he needed a woman of a fine
spirit to do and say them aright.

"Head like an eft," he said to himself, as course followed course, and,
while bandying compliments with her, he watched and listened. "As soon
set a harlequin to lead a forlorn hope. Well it's to be trusted her
husband's some use for her--that's more than I have anyhow, so the
sooner we see her off the premises the better. Suppose I shall have to
fall back on Ormiston. Bit of a rake, I expect, though in looks he is
so curiously like that beautiful, innocent, young thing upstairs.
Wonder how he'll take it? No mistake, it's a facer!"

Dr. Knott settled himself back squarely in his chair and pushed his
cheese-plate away from him, while his shaggy eyebrows drew together as
he fixed his eyes on the young man at the head of the table.

"A facer!" he repeated to himself. "Yes, the ancients knew what they
were about in these awkward matters. The modern conscience is
disastrously anaemic."

Although it looks on to the terrace, the dining-room at Brockhurst is
among the least cheerful of the living rooms. The tapestry with which
it is hung--representing French hunting scenes, each panel set in a
broad border pattern of birds, fruits and leaves, interspersed with
classic urns and medallions--is worked in neutral tints of brown, blue,
and gray. The chimneypiece, reaching the whole height of the wall, is
of liver-coloured marble. At the period in question, it was still the
fashion to dine at the modestly early hour of six; and, the spring
evenings being long, the curtains had been left undrawn, so that the
dying daylight without and the lamplight within contended rather
mournfully for mastery, while a wild, southeasterly wind, breaking in
gusts against the house front, sobbed at the casements and made a loose
pane, here and there, click and rattle.

And it was in the midst of a notably heavy gust, when dessert had been
served and the servants had left the room, that Captain Ormiston leaned
across the table and addressed his sister-in-law.

The young soldier had been somewhat gloomy and silent during dinner. He
was vaguely anxious about Lady Calmady. The news of Mrs. St. Quentin
was critical, and he cherished a very true affection for his
great-aunt. Had she not been his confidant ever since his first term at
Eton? Had she not, moreover, helped him on several occasions when
creditors displayed an incomprehensibly foolish pertinacity regarding
payment for goods supplied? He was burdened, too, by a prospective
sense of his own uncommon righteousness. For, during the past five
months, while he had been on leave at Brockhurst, assisting Katherine
to master the details of the very various business of the estate,
Ormiston had revised his position and decided on heroic measures of
reform. He would rid himself of debt, forswear expensive London habits,
and those many pleasant iniquities which every great city offers
liberally to such handsome, fine gentlemen as himself. He actually
proposed, just so soon as Katherine could conveniently spare him, to
decline from the splendid inactivity of the Guards, upon the hard work
of some line regiment under orders for foreign service. Ormiston was
quite affected by contemplation of his own good resolutions. He
appeared to himself in a really pathetic light. He would like to have
told Mary Cathcart all about it and have claimed her sympathy and
admiration. But then, she was just precisely the person he could not
tell, until the said resolutions had, in a degree at all events, passed
into accomplished fact! For--as not infrequently happens--it was not so
much a case of being off with the old love before being on with the
new; as being off with the intermediate loves, before being on with the
old one again. To announce his estimable future, was, by implication at
all events, to confess a not wholly estimable past. And so Roger
Ormiston, sitting that night at dinner beside the object of his best
and most honest affections, proved but poor company; and roused
himself, not without effort, to say to his sister-in-law:--

"It's about time to perform the ceremony of the evening, isn't it,
Ella, and drink that small boy's health?"

"By all manner of means. I'm all for the observance of ancient forms
and ceremonies. You can never be sure how much mayn't lie at the bottom
of them, and it's best to be on the safe side of the unseen powers.
You'll agree to that now, Mr. March, won't you?"--She took a grape skin
from between her neat teeth and flicked it out on to her plate.--"So,
for myself," she went on, "I curtsy nine times to the new moon, though
the repeated genuflexion is perniciously likely to give me the
backache; touch my hat in passing to the magpies; wish when I behold a
piebald; and bless my neighbour devoutly if he sneezes."

At the commencement of this harangue she met her brother-in-law's
rather depreciative scrutiny with her bold little stare--in his present
mood Ormiston found her vivacity tedious, though he was usually willing
enough to laugh at her extravagancies--then she whipped Julius in with
a side glance, and concluded with her round eyes set on Dr. Knott's
rough-hewn and weather-beaten countenance.

"I'm afraid you are disgracefully superstitious, Mrs. Ormiston," the
latter remarked.

She was a feather-headed chatterbox, he reflected; but her chatter
served to occupy the time. And the doctor was by no means anxious the
time should pass too rapidly. He felt slightly self-contemptuous; but
in good truth he would be glad to put away some few glasses of sound
port before administering the aforementioned facer to Captain Ormiston.

"Superstitious?" she returned. "Well I trust my superstition is not
chronic, but nicely intermittent like all the rest of my many virtues.
Charity begins at home, you know, and I would not like to keep any of
the poor, dear creatures on guard too long for fear of tiring them out.
But I give every one of them a turn, Dr. Knott, I assure you."

"And that's more than most of us do," he said, smiling rather savagely.
"The majority of my acquaintance have a handsome power of
self-restraint in the practice of virtue."

"And I'm the happy exception! Well, now that's an altogether pretty
speech," Mrs. Ormiston cried, laughing. "But to return to the matter in
hand, to this hero of a baby---- I dote on babies, Dr. Knott. I've one
of my own of six months old, and she's a charming child I assure you."

"I don't doubt that for an instant, having the honour of knowing her
mother. Couldn't be otherwise than charming if she tried," the doctor
said, reaching out his hand again to the decanter.

Mrs. Ormiston treated him to her little stare, and then looked round
the table, putting up one plump, bare arm as she pushed in a couple of
hairpins.

"Ah! but she's a real jewel of a child," she said audaciously. "She's
the comfort of my social existence. For she doesn't resemble me in the
least, and therefore my reputation's everlastingly safe, thanks to her.
Why, before the calumniating thought has had time to arise in your
mind, one look in that child's face will dissipate it, she's so
entirely the image of her father."

There was a momentary silence, but for the sobbing of the gale and
rattling of the casements. Then Captain Ormiston broke into a rather
loud laugh. Even if they sail near the wind, you must stand by the
women of your family.

"Come, that will do, I think, Ella," he said. "You won't beat that
triumphant bull in a hurry."

"But, my dear boy, so she is. Even at her present tender age, she's the
living picture of your brother William."

"Oh! poor William," Roger said hastily.

He turned to Mary Cathcart. The girl had blushed up to the roots of her
crisp, black hair. She did not clearly understand the other woman's
speech, nor did she wish to do so. She was admirably pure-minded. But
like all truly pure-minded persons, she carried a touchstone that made
her recoil, directly and instinctively, from that which was of doubtful
quality. The twinkle in Dr. Knott's gray eyes, as he sipped his port,
still more the tone of Roger Ormiston's laugh, she did understand
somehow. And this last jarred upon her cruelly. It opened the
flood-gates of doubt which Mary--like so many another woman in respect
of the man she loves--had striven very valiantly to keep shut. All
manner of hints as to his indiscretions, all manner of half-told tales
as to his debts, his extravagance, which rumour had conveyed to her
unwilling ears, seemed suddenly to gather weight and probability,
viewed in the moral light--so to speak--of that laugh. Great loves
mature and deepen under the action of sorrow and the necessity to
forgive; yet it is a shrewdly bitter moment, when the heart of either
man or woman first admits that the god of its idolatry has, after all,
feet of but very common clay. Her head erect, her eyes moist, Mary
turned to Julius March and asked him of the welfare of a certain
labourer's family that had lately migrated from Newlands to Sandyfield.
But Ormiston's voice broke in upon the inquiries with a determination
to claim her attention.

"Miss Cathcart," he said, "forgive my interrupting you. I can tell you
more about the Spratleys than March can. They're all right. Iles has
taken the man on as carter at the home-farm, and given the eldest boy a
job with the woodmen. I told him to do what he could for them as you
said you were interested in them. And now, please, I want you to drink
my small nephew's health."

The girl pushed forward her wine-glass without speaking; and as he
filled it Ormiston added in a lower tone:--

"He, at all events, unlike some of his relations, is guiltless of
foolish words or foolish actions. I don't pretend to share Ella's
superstitions, but some people's good wishes are very well worth
having."

Unwillingly Mary Cathcart raised her eyes. Her head was still carried a
little high and her cheeks were still glowing. Her god might not be of
pure gold throughout--such gods rarely are unfortunately--yet she was
aware she still found him a very worshipful kind of deity.

"Very well worth having," he repeated. "And so I should like that poor
little chap to have your good wishes, Miss Cathcart. Wish him all
manner of nice things, for his mother's sake as well as his own.
There's been a pretty bad run of luck here lately, and it's time it
changed. Wish him better fortune than his forefathers. I'm not
superstitious, as I say, but Richard Calmady's death scared one a
little. Five minutes beforehand it seemed so utterly improbable. And
then one began to wonder if there could be any truth in the old legend.
And that was ugly, you know."

Dr. Knott glanced at the speaker sharply.--"Oh! that occurred to you,
did it?" he said.

"Bless me! why, it occurred to everybody," Ormiston answered
impatiently. "Some idiot raked the story up, and it was canvassed from
one end of the county to the other last autumn till it made me fairly
sick."

"Poor boy!" cried Mrs. Ormiston, "and what is this wonderful story that
so nauseates him, Dr. Knott?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you," the doctor answered slowly. A nervous
movement on the part of Julius March had attracted his attention. "I
have never managed to get hold of the story as a whole, but I should
like to do so uncommonly."

Julius pushed back his chair, and groped hurriedly for the dinner
napkin which had slipped to the ground from his knees. The subject of
the conversation agitated him. The untidy, little chap-books, tied
together with the tag of rusty ribbon, had lain undisturbed in the
drawer of his library table ever since the--to him--very memorable
evening, when, kneeling before the image of the stricken Mother and the
dead Christ, he had found the man's heart under the priest's cassock
and awakened to newness of life. Much had happened since then; and
Julius had ranged himself, accepting, open-eyed, the sorrows and
alleviations of the fate he had created for himself. But to-night he
was tired. The mental and emotional strain of the last few days had
been considerable. Moreover, John Knott's presence always affected him.
The two men stood, indeed, at opposing poles of thought--the one
spiritual and ideal, the other material and realistic. And, though he
struggled against the influence, the doctor's rather brutal common
sense and large knowledge of physical causes, gained a painful
ascendency over his mind at close quarters. Knott, it must be owned,
was slightly merciless to his clerical acquaintances. He loved to bait
them, to impale them on the horns of some moral or theological dilemma.
And it was partly with this purpose of harrying and worrying, that he
continued now:--

"Yes, Mrs. Ormiston, I should like to hear the story just as much as
you would. And--it strikes me, if he pleased, Mr. March could tell it
to us. Suppose you ask him to!"

Promptly the young lady fell upon Julius, regardless of Ormiston's
hardly concealed displeasure.

"Oh! you bad man, what are you doing," she cried, "trying to conceal
thrilling family legends from the nearest relatives? Tell us all about
it, if you know, as Dr. Knott declares you do. I dote on terrifying
stories--don't you, Mary?--that send the cold shivers all down my back.
And if they deal with the history of my nearest and dearest, why,
there's an added charm to them. Now, Mr. March, we're all attention.
Stand and deliver, and make it all just as bad as you can."

"I am afraid I am not an effective _improvisatore_" he replied; "and
the subject, if you will pardon my saying so, seems to me too intimate
for mirth. A curse is supposed to rest on this place. The owners of
Brockhurst die young and by violent means."

"We know that already, and look to you to tell us something more, Mr.
March," Dr. Knott said dryly.

Julius was slightly nettled at the elder man's tone and manner. He
answered with an accentuation of his usual refinement of enunciation
and suavity of manner.

"There is a term to the curse, a saviour who, according to the old
prediction, has the power, should he also have the will, to remove it
altogether."

"Oh, really, is that so! And when does this saviour put in an
appearance?" the doctor asked again.

"That is not revealed."

Julius would very gladly have said nothing further. But Dr. Knott's
expression was curiously intent and compelling, as he sat fingering the
stem of his wine-glass. All the ideality of Julius's nature rose in
protest against the half-sneering rationalism he seemed to read in that
expression. Mrs. Ormiston, who had an hereditary racial appreciation of
anything approaching a fight, turned her round eyes first on one
speaker and then on the other provokingly, inciting them to more
declared hostilities, while she bit her lips in her effort to avoid
spoiling sport by untimely laughter or speech.

"But unhappily," Julius proceeded, yielding under protest to these
opposing forces, "the saviour comes in so questionable a shape, that I
fear, whenever the appointed time may be, his appearance will only be
welcomed by the discerning few."

"That's a pity," Dr. Knott said. He paused a minute, passed his hand
across his mouth. "Still, if we are to believe the Bible, and other
so-called, sacred histories, it's been the way of saviours from the
beginning to try the faith of ordinary mortals by presenting themselves
under rather queer disguises." He paused again, drawing in his wide
lips, moistening them with his tongue. "But since you evidently know
all about it, Mr. March, may I make bold to inquire in what special
form of fancy dress the saviour in question is reported as likely to
present himself?"

"He comes as a child of the house," Julius answered, with dignity. "A
child who in person--if I understand the wording of the prophecy
aright--is half angel, half monster."

John Knott opened his mouth as though to give passage to some very
forcible exclamation. Thought better of it and brought his jaws
together with a kind of grind. His heavy figure seemed to hunch itself
up as in the recoil from a blow.

"Curious," he said quietly. Yet Julius, looking at him, could have
fancied that his weather-beaten face went a trifle pale.

But Mrs. Ormiston, in the interests of a possible fight, had contained
herself just as long as was possible. Now she clapped her hands, and
broke into a little scream of laughter.

"That's just the most magnificently romantic thing I ever heard," she
cried. "Come now, this requires further investigation. What's our baby
like, Dr. Knott? I've seen nothing but an indistinguishable mass of
shawls and flannels. Have we, by chance, got an angelic monstrosity
up-stairs without being aware of it?"

"Charlotte!" Roger Ormiston called out sternly. The young man looked
positively dangerous. "This conversation has gone quite far enough. I
agree with March, it may all be stuff and nonsense, not worth a second
thought, still it isn't a thing to joke about."

"Very well, dear boy, be soothed then," she returned, making a little
grimace and putting her head on one side coquettishly. "I'll be as
solemn as nine owls. But you must excuse a momentary excitement. It's
all news to me, you know. I'd no notion Katherine had married into such
a remarkable family. I'm bound to learn a little more. Do you believe
it's possible at all, Dr. Knott, now tell me?"

"The fulfilment of prophecy is rather a wide and burning question to
embark on," he said. "With Captain Ormiston's leave, I think we'd
better go back to the point we started from and drink the little
gentleman's health. I have my patient to see again, and it is getting
rather late."

The lady addressed, laughed, held up her glass, and stared round the
table with a fine air of bravado, looking remarkably pretty.

"Fire away, Roger, dear fellow," she said. "We're loaded, and ready."

Thus admonished, Ormiston raised his glass too. But his temper was not
of the sweetest, just then; he spoke forcedly.

"Here's to the boy," he said; "good luck, and good health, and," he
added hastily, "please God he'll be a comfort to his mother."

"Amen," Julius said softly.

Dr. Knott contemplated the contents of his glass, for a moment, whether
critically or absently it would have been difficult to decide. But all
the harshness had gone out of his face, and his loose lips worked into
a smile pathetic in quality.

"To the baby.--And I venture to add a clause to your invocation of that
heartless jade, Dame Fortune. May he never lack good courage and good
friends. He will need both."

Julius March set down his wine untasted. He had received a very
disagreeable impression.

"Come, come, it appears to me, we are paying these honours in a most
lugubrious spirit," Mrs. Ormiston broke in. "I wish the baby a long
life and a merry one, in defiance of all prophecies and traditions
belonging to his paternal ancestry. Go on, Mr. March, you're shamefully
neglecting your duty. No heel taps."

She threw back her head showing the whole of her white throat, drained
her glass and then flung it over her shoulder. It fell on the black,
polished boards, beyond the edge of the carpet, shivered into a hundred
pieces, that lay glittering, like scattered diamonds in the lamplight.
For the day had died altogether. Fleets of dark, straggling cloud
chased each other across spaces of pallid sky, against the earthward
edge of which dusky tree-tops strained and writhed in the force of the
tearing gale.

Ella Ormiston rose laughing from her place at table.

"That's the correct form," she said, "it ensures the fulfilment of the
wish. You ought all to have cast away your glasses regardless of
expense. Come, Mary, we will remove ourselves. Mind and bid me good-bye
before you go, Dr. Knott, and report on Lady Calmady. It's probably the
last time you'll have the felicity of seeing me. I'm off at cockcrow
to-morrow morning."




CHAPTER VIII

ENTER A CHILD OF PROMISE


After closing the door behind the two ladies, Ormiston paused by the
near window and gazed out into the night. The dinner had been, in his
opinion, far from a success. He feared his relation to Mary Cathcart
had retrograded rather than progressed. He wished his sister-in-law
would be more correct in speech and behaviour. Then he held the
conversation had been in bad taste. The doctor should have abstained
from pressing Julius with questions. He assured himself, again, that
the story was not worth a moment's serious consideration; yet he
resented its discussion. Such discussion seemed to him to tread hard on
the heels of impertinence to his sister, to her husband's memory, and
to this boy, born to so excellent a position and so great wealth. And
the worst of it was, that like a fool, he had started the subject
himself!

"The wind's rising," he remarked at last. "You'll have a rough drive
home, Knott."

"It won't be the first one. And my beauty's of the kind which takes a
lot of spoiling."

The answer did not please the young man. He sauntered across the room
and dropped into his chair, with a slightly insolent demeanour.

"All the same, don't let me detain you," he said, "if you prefer seeing
Lady Calmady at once and getting off."

"You don't detain me," Dr. Knott answered. "I'm afraid that it's just
the other way about, and that I must detain you, Captain Ormiston, and
that on rather unpleasant business."

Julius March had risen to his feet. "You--you have no fresh cause for
anxiety about Lady Calmady?" he said hurriedly.

The doctor glanced up at the tall, spare, black figure and dark,
sensitive face with a half-sneering, half-pitying smile.

"Oh no, no!" he replied; "Lady Calmady's going on splendidly. And it is
to guard, just as far as we can, against cause for anxiety later, that
I want to speak to Captain Ormiston now. We've got to be prepared for
certain contingencies. Don't you go, Mr. March. You may as well hear
what I've to say. It will interest you particularly, I fancy, after one
or two things you have told us to-night!"

"Sit down, Julius, please."--Ormiston would have liked to maintain that
same insolence of demeanour, but it gave before an apprehension of
serious issues. He looked hard at the doctor, cudgeling his brains as
to what the latter's enigmatic speech might mean--divined, put the idea
away as inadmissible, returned to it, then said angrily:--"There's
nothing wrong with the child, of course?"

Dr. Knott turned his chair sideways to the table and shaded his face
with his thick, square hand.

"Well, that depends on what you call wrong," he slowly replied.

"It's not ill?" Ormiston said.

"The baby's as well as you or I--better, in fact, than I am, for I am
confoundedly touched up with gout. Bear that in mind, Captain
Ormiston--that the child is well, I mean, not that I am gouty. I want
you to definitely remember that, you and Mr. March."

"Well, then, what on earth is the matter?" Ormiston asked sharply. "You
don't mean to imply it is injured in any way, deformed?"

Dr. Knott let his hand drop on the table. He nodded his head. Ormiston
perceived, and it moved him strangely, that the doctor's eyes were wet.

"Not deformed," he answered. "Technically you can hardly call it that,
but maimed."

"Badly?"

"Well, that's a matter of opinion. You or I should think it bad enough,
I fancy, if we found ourselves in the same boat." He settled himself
back in his chair.--"You had better understand it quite clearly," he
continued, "at least as clearly as I can put it to you. There comes a
point where I cannot explain the facts but only state them. You have
heard of spontaneous amputation?"

Across Ormiston's mind came the remembrance of a litter of puppies he
had seen in the sanctum of the veterinary surgeon of his regiment. A
lump rose in his throat.

"Yes, go on," he said.

"It is a thing that does not happen once in most men's experience. I
have only seen one case before in all my practice and that was nothing
very serious. This is an extraordinary example. I need not remind you
of Sir Richard Calmady's accident and the subsequent operation?"

"Of course not--go on," Ormiston repeated.

"In both cases the leg is gone from here," the doctor continued, laying
the edge of his palm across the thigh immediately above the knee. "The
foot is there--that is the amazing part of it--and, as far as I can
see, is well formed and of the normal size; but so embedded in the
stump that I cannot discover whether the ankle-joint and bones of the
lower leg exist in a contracted form or not."

Ormiston poured himself out a glass of port. His hand shook so that the
lip of the decanter chattered against the lip of the glass. He gulped
down the wine and, getting up, walked the length of the room and back
again.

"God in heaven," he murmured, "how horrible! Poor Kitty, how utterly
horrible!--Poor Kitty."

For the baby, in his own fine completeness, he had as yet no feeling
but one of repulsion.

"Can nothing be done, Knott?" he asked at last.

"Obviously nothing."

"And it will live?"

"Oh! bless you, yes! It'll live fast enough if I know a healthy infant
when I see one. And I ought to know 'em by now. I've brought them into
the world by dozens for my sins."

"Will it be able to walk?"

"Umph--well--shuffle," the doctor answered, smiling savagely to keep
back the tears.

The young man leaned his elbows on the table, and rested his head on
his hands. All this shocked him inexpressibly--shocked him almost to
the point of physical illness. Strong as he was he could have fainted,
just then, had he yielded by ever so little. And this was the boy whom
they had so longed for then! The child on whom they had set such fond
hopes, who was to be the pride of his young mother, and restore the so
rudely shaken balance of her life! This was the boy who should go to
Eton, and into some crack regiment, who should ride straight, who was
heir to great possessions!

"The saviour has come, you see, Mr. March, in as thorough-paced a
disguise as ever saviour did yet," John Knott said cynically.

"He had better never have come at all!" Ormiston put in fiercely, from
behind his hands.

"Yes--very likely--I believe I agree," the doctor answered. "Only it
remains that he has come, is feeding, growing, stretching, and
bellowing too, like a young bull-calf, when anything doesn't suit him.
He is here, very much here, I tell you. And so we have just got to
consider how to make the best of him, both for his own sake and for
Lady Calmady's. And you must understand he is a splendid, little
animal, clean skinned and strong, as you would expect, being the child
of two such fine young people. He is beautiful,--I am old-fashioned
enough, perhaps scientific enough, to put a good deal of faith in that
notion,--beautiful as a child only can be who is born of the passion of
true lovers."

He paused, looking somewhat mockingly at Julius.

"Yes, love is an incalculably great, natural force," he continued. "It
comes uncommonly near working miracles at times, unconscious and rather
deplorable miracles. In this case it has worked strangely against
itself--at once for irreparable injury and for perfection. For the
child is perfect, is superb, but for the one thing."

"Does my sister know?" Ormiston asked hoarsely.

"Not yet; and, as long as we can keep the truth from her, she had
better not know. We must get her a little stronger, if we can, first.
That woman, Mrs. Denny, is worth her weight in gold, and her weight's
not inconsiderable. She has her wits about her, and has contrived to
meet all difficulties so far."

Ormiston sat in the same dejected attitude.

"But my sister is bound to know before long."

"Of course. When she is a bit better, she'll want to have the baby to
play with, dress and undress it and see what the queer little being is
made of. It's a way young mothers have, and a very pretty way too. If
we keep the child from her she will grow suspicious, and take means to
find out for herself, and that won't do. It must not be. I won't be
responsible for the consequences. So as soon as she asks a definite
question, she must have a definite answer."

The young man looked up quickly.

"And who is to give the answer?" he said.

"Well, it rests chiefly with you to decide that. Clearly she ought not
to hear this thing from a servant. It is too serious. It needs to be
well told--the whole kept at a high level, if you understand me. Give
Lady Calmady a great part and she will play it nobly. Let this come
upon her from a mean, wet-nurse, hospital-ward sort of level, and it
may break her. What we have to do is to keep up her pluck. Remember we
are only at the beginning of this business yet. In all probability
there are many years ahead. Therefore this announcement must come to
Lady Calmady from an educated person, from an equal, from somebody who
can see all round it. Mrs. Ormiston tells me she leaves here to-morrow
morning?"

"Mrs. Ormiston is out of the question anyhow," Roger exclaimed rather
bitterly.

Here Julius March, who had so far been silent, spoke; and in speaking
showed what manner of spirit he was of. The doctor agitated him,
treated him, moreover, with scant courtesy. But Julius put this aside.
He could afford to forget himself in his desire for any possible
mitigation of the blow which must fall on Katherine Calmady. And,
listening to his talk, he had, in the last quarter of an hour, gained
conviction not only of this man's ability, but of his humanity, of his
possession of the peculiar gentleness which so often, mercifully, goes
along with unusual strength. As the coarse-looking hand could soothe,
touching delicately, so the hard intellect and rough tongue could, he
believed, modulate themselves to very consoling and inspiring
tenderness of thought and speech.

"We have you, Dr. Knott," he said. "No one, I think, could better break
this terrible sorrow to Lady Calmady, than yourself."

"Thank you--you are generous, Mr. March," the other answered cordially;
adding to himself,--"Got to revise my opinion of the black coat. Didn't
quite deserve that after the way you've badgered him, eh, John Knott?"

He shrugged his big shoulders a little shamefacedly.

"Of course, I'd do my best," he continued. "But you see ten to one I
shan't be here at the moment. As it is I have neglected lingering
sicknesses and sudden deaths, hysterical girls, croupy children, broken
legs, and all the other pretty little amusements of a rather large
practice, waiting for me. Suppose I happen to be twenty miles away on
the far side of Westchurch, or seeing after some of Lady Fallowfeild's
numerous progeny engaged in teething or measles? Lady Calmady might be
kept waiting, and we cannot afford to have her kept waiting in this
crisis."

"I wish to God my aunt, Mrs. St. Quentin, was here!" Ormiston
exclaimed. "But she is not, and won't be, alas."

"Well, then, who remains?"

As the doctor spoke he pressed his fingers against the edge of the
table, leaned forward, and looked keenly at Ormiston. He was extremely
ugly just then, ugly as the weather-worn gargoyle on some mediaeval
church tower; but his eyes were curiously compelling.

"Good heavens! you don't mean that I've got to tell her!" Ormiston
cried.

He rose hurriedly, thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked a
little unsteadily across to the window, crunching the shining pieces of
Mrs. Ormiston's sacrificial wine-glass under foot. Outside the night
was very wild. In the colourless sky stars reeled among the fleets of
racing cloud. The wind hissed up the grass slopes and shouted among the
great trees crowning the ridge of the hill. The prospect was not
calculated to encourage. Ormiston turned his back on it. But hardly
more encouraging was the sombre, gray-blue-walled room. The vision of
all that often returned to him afterwards in very different scenes--the
tall lamps, the two men, so strangely dissimilar in appearance and
temperament, sitting on either side the dinner-table with its fine
linen and silver, wines and fruits, waiting silently for him to speak.

"I can't tell her," he said, "I can't. Damn it all, I tell you, Knott,
I daren't. Think what it will be to her! Think of being told that about
your own child!" Ormiston lost control of himself. He spoke violently.
"I'm so awfully fond of her and proud of her," he went on. "She's
behaved so splendidly ever since Richard's death, laid hold of all the
business, never spared herself, been so able and so just. And now the
baby coming, and being a boy, seemed to be a sort of let up, a reward
to her for all her goodness. To tell her this horrible thing will be
like doing her some hideous wrong. If her heart has to be broken, in
common charity don't ask me to break it."

There was a pause. He came back to the table and stood behind Julius
March's chair.

"It's asking me to be hangman to my own sister," he said.

"Yes, I know it is a confoundedly nasty piece of work. And it's rough
on you, very rough. Only, you see, this hanging has to be put
through--there's the nuisance. And it is just a question whether your
hand won't be the lightest after all."

Again silence obtained, but for the rush and sob of the gale against
the great house.

"What do you say, Julius?" Ormiston demanded at last.

"I suppose our only thought is for Katherine--for Lady Calmady?" he
said. "And in that case I agree with Dr. Knott."

Roger took another turn to the window, stood there awhile struggling
with his natural desire to escape from so painful an embassy.

"Very well, if you are not here, Knott, I undertake to tell her," he
said at last. "Please God, she mayn't turn against me altogether for
bringing her such news. I'll be on hand for the next few days, and--you
must explain to Denny that I am to be sent for whenever I am wanted.
That's all,--I suppose we may as well go now, mayn't we?"

Julius knelt at the faldstool, without the altar rails of the chapel,
till the light showed faintly through the grisaille of the
stained-glass windows and outlined the spires and carven canopies of
the stalls. At first his prayers were definite, petitions for mercy and
grace to be outpoured on the fair, young mother and her, seemingly, so
cruelly afflicted child; on himself, too, that he might be permitted to
stay here, and serve her through the difficult future. If she had been
sacred before, Katherine was rendered doubly sacred to him now. He
bowed himself, in reverential awe, before the thought of her martyrdom.
How would her proud and naturally joyous spirit bear the bitter pains
of it? Would it make, eventually, for evil or for good? And then--the
ascetic within him asserting itself, notwithstanding the widening of
outlook produced by the awakening of his heart--he was overtaken by a
great horror of that which we call matter; by a revolt against the
body, and those torments and shames, mental, moral, and physical, which
the body brings along with it. Surely the dualists were right? It was
unregenerate, a thing, if made by God, yet wholly fallen away from Him
and given over to evil, this fleshly envelope wherein the human soul is
seated, and which, even in the womb, may be infected by disease or
rendered hideous by mutilation? Then, as the languor of his long vigil
overcame him, he passed into an ecstatic contemplation of the state of
that same soul after death, clothed with a garment of incorruptible and
enduring beauty, dwelling in clear, luminous spaces, worshipping among
the ranks of the redeemed, beholding its Lord God face to face.

John Knott, meanwhile, after driving home beneath the reeling stars,
through the roar of the forest and shriek of the wind across the open
moors, found an urgent summons awaiting him. He spent the remainder of
that night, not in dreams of paradise and of spirits redeemed from the
thraldom of the flesh, but in increasing the population of this
astonishing planet, by assisting to deliver a scrofulous, half-witted
shrieking servant-girl of twins--illegitimate--in the fusty atmosphere
of a cottage garret, right up under the rat-eaten thatch.




CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH KATHERINE CALMADY LOOKS ON HER SON


More than a week elapsed before Ormiston was called upon to redeem his
promise. For Lady Calmady's convalescence was slow. An apathy held her,
which was tranquillising rather than tedious. She was glad to lie still
and rest. She found it very soothing to be shut away from the many
obligations of active life for a while; to watch the sunlight, on fair
days, shift from east by south to west, across the warm fragrant room;
to see the changing clouds in the delicate spring sky, and the
slow-dying crimson and violet of the sunset; to hear the sudden hurry
of falling rain, the subdued voices of the women in the adjoining
nursery, and, sometimes, the lusty protestations of her baby when--as
John Knott had put it--"things didn't suit him." She felt a little
jealous of the comely, young wet-nurse, a little desirous to be more
intimately acquainted with this small, new Richard Calmady, on whom all
her hopes for the future were set. But immediately she was very
submissive to the restrictions laid by Denny and the doctor upon her
intercourse with the child. She only stood on the threshold of
motherhood as yet. While the inevitable exhaustion, following on the
excitement of her spring and summer of joy, her autumn of bitter
sorrow, and her winter of hard work, asserted itself now that she had
time and opportunity for rest.

The hangings and coverlet of the great, ebony, half-tester bed were
lined with rose silk, and worked, with many coloured worsteds on a
white ground, in the elaborate Persian pattern so popular among
industrious ladies of leisure in the reign of good Queen Anne. It may
be questioned whether the parable, wrought out with such patience of
innumerable stitches, was closely comprehensible or sympathetic to the
said ladies; since a particularly wide interval, both of philosophy and
practice, would seem to divide the temper of the early eighteenth
century from that of the mystic East. Still the parable was there,
plain to whoso could read it; and not perhaps, rather pathetically,
without its modern application.

The Powers of Evil, in the form of a Leopard, pursue the soul of man,
symbolised by a Hart, through the Forest of This Life. In the midst of
that same forest stands an airy, domed pavilion, in which--if so be it
have strength and fleetness to reach it--the panting, hunted creature
may, for a time, find security and repose. Above this resting-place the
trees of the forest interlace their spreading branches, loaded with
amazing leaves and fruit; while companies of rainbow-hued birds,
standing very upright upon nothing in particular, entertain themselves
by holding singularly indigestible looking cherries and mulberries in
their yellow beaks.

And so, Katherine, resting in dreamy quiet within the shade of the
embroidered curtains, was even as the Hart pasturing in temporary
security before the quaint pavilion. The mark of her bereavement was
upon her sensibly still--would be so until the end. Often in the night,
when Denny had at last left her, she would wake suddenly and stretch
her arms out across the vacant space of the wide bed, calling softly to
the beloved one who could give no answer; and then recollecting, would
sob herself again to sleep. Often too, as Ormiston's step sounded
through the Chapel-Room when he came to pay her those short, frequent
visits, bringing the clean freshness of the outer air along with him,
Katherine would look up in a wondering gladness, cheating herself for
an instant with unreasoning delight--look up, only to know her sorrow,
and feel the knife turn in the wound. Nevertheless these days made, in
the main, for peace and healing. On more than one occasion she
petitioned that Julius March should come and read to her, choosing, as
the book he should read from, Spencer's _Faerie Queene_. He obeyed, in
manner calm, in spirit deeply moved. Katherine spoke little. But her
charm was great, as she lay, her eyes changeful in colour as a moorland
stream, listening to those intricate stanzas, in which the large hope,
the pride of honourable deeds, the virtue, the patriotism, the
masculine fearlessness, the ideality, the fantastic imagination, of the
English Renaissance so nobly finds voice. They comforted her mind, set
by instinct and training to welcome all splendid adventures of romance,
of nature, and of faith. They carried her back, in dear remembrance, to
the perplexing and enchanting discoveries which Richard Calmady's visit
to Ormiston Castle--the many-towered, gray house looking eastward
across the unquiet sea--had brought to her. And specially did they
recall to her that first evening--even yet she grew hot as she thought
of it--when the supposed gentleman-jockey, whom she had purposed
treating with gay and reducing indifference, proved not only fine
scholar and fine gentleman, but absolute and indisputable master of her
heart.

Dr. Knott came to see her, too, almost daily--rough, tender-hearted,
humorous, dependable, never losing sight, in his intercourse with her,
of the matter in hand, of the thing which immediately is.

Thus did these three men, each according to his nature and capacity,
strive to guard the poor Hart, pasturing before the quaint pavilion,
set--for its passing refreshment--in the midst of the Forest of This
Life, and to keep, just so long as was possible, the pursuing Leopard
at bay. Nevertheless the Leopard gained, despite of their faithful
guardianship--which was inevitable, the case standing as it did.

For one bright afternoon, about three o'clock, Mrs. Denny arrived in
the gun-room, where Ormiston sat smoking, while talking over with
Julius the turf-cutting claims of certain squatters on Spendle
Flats---arrived, not to summon the latter to further readings of the
great Elizabethan poet, but to say to the former:--

"Will you please come at once, sir? Her ladyship is sitting up. She is
a little difficult about the baby--only, you know, sir, if I can say it
with all respect, in her pretty, teasing way. But I am afraid she must
be told."

And Roger rose and went--sick at heart. He would rather have faced an
enemy's battery, vomiting out shot and shell, than gone up the broad,
stately staircase, and by the silent, sunny passageways, to that
fragrant, white-paneled room.

On the stands and tables were bowls full of clear-coloured spring
flowers--early primrose, jonquil, and narcissus. A wood-fire burned
upon the blue-and-white tiled hearth. And on the sofa, drawn up at
right angles to it, Katherine sat, wrapped in a gray, silk
dressing-gown bordered with soft, white fur. She flushed slightly as
her brother came in, and spoke to him with an air of playful apology.

"I really don't know why you should have been dragged up here, just
now, dear old man," she said. "It is some fancy of Denny's. I'm afraid
in the excess of her devotion she makes me rather a nuisance to you.
And now, not contented with fussing about me, she has taken to being
absurdly mysterious about the baby----"

She stopped abruptly. Something in the young man's expression and
bearing impressed her, causing her to stretch out her hands to him in
swift fear and entreaty.

"Oh, Roger!" she cried, "Roger--what is it?"

And he told her, repeating, with but a few omissions, the statement
made to him by the doctor ten days ago. He dared not look at her while
he spoke, lest seeing her should unnerve him altogether.

Katherine was very still. She made no outcry. Yet her very stillness
seemed to him the more ominous, and the horror of the recital grew upon
him. His voice sounded to him unnaturally loud and harsh in the
surrounding quiet. Once her silken draperies gave a shuddering
rustle--that was all.

At last it was over. At last he dared to look at her. The colour and
youthful roundness had gone out of her face. It was gray as her dress,
fixed and rigid as a marble mask. Ormiston was overcome with a
consuming pity for her and with a violence of self-hatred. Hangman, and
to his own sister--in truth, it seemed to him to have come to that! He
knelt down in front of her, laying hold of both her knees.

"Kitty, can you ever forgive me for telling you this?" he asked
hoarsely.

Even in this extremity Katherine's inherent sweetness asserted itself.
She would have smiled, but her frozen lips refused. Her eyelids
quivered a little and closed.

"I have nothing to forgive you, dear," she said. "Indeed, it is good of
you to tell me, since--since so it is."

She put her hands upon his shoulders, gripping them fast, and bowed her
head. The little flames crackled, dancing among the pine logs and the
silk of her dress rustled as her bosom rose and fell.

"It won't make you ill again?" Roger asked anxiously.

Katherine shook her head.

"Oh, no!" she said, "I have no more time for illness. This is a thing
to cure, as a cautery cures--to burn away all idleness and
self-indulgent, sick room fancies. See, I am strong, I am well."

She stood up, her hands slipping down from Ormiston's shoulders and
steadying themselves on his hands as he too rose. Her face was still
ashen, but purpose and decision had come into her eyes.

"Do this for me," she said, almost imperiously. "Go to Denny, tell her
to bring me the baby. She is to leave him with me. And tell her, as she
loves both him and me,--as she values her place here at
Brockhurst,--she is not to speak."

As he looked at her Ormiston turned cold. She was terrible just then.

"Katherine," he said quickly, "what on earth are you going to do?"

"No harm to my baby in any case--you need not be alarmed. I am quite to
be trusted. Only I cannot be reasoned with or opposed, still less
condoled with or comforted, yet. I want my baby, and I must have him,
here, alone, the doors shut--locked if I please." Her lips gave, the
corners of her mouth dropped. And watching her Ormiston swore a little
under his breath. "We have something to say to each other, the baby and
I," she went on, "which no one else may hear. So do what I ask you,
Roger. And come back--I may want you--in about an hour, if I do not
send for you before."

Alone with her child, Lady Calmady moved slowly across and bolted both
the nursery and the chapel-room doors. Then she drew a low stool up in
front of the fire and sat down, laying the infant upon her lap. It was
a delicious, dimpled creature, with a quantity of silky golden-brown
hair, that curled in a tiny crest along the top of its head. It was but
half awake yet, the rounded cheeks pink with the comfort of food and
slumber. And as the beautiful, young mother, bending that set, ashen
face of hers above it, laid the child upon her knees, it stretched,
clenching soft baby fists and rubbing them into its blue eyes.

Katherine unwrapped the shawls, and took off one small garment after
another--delicate gossamer-like things of fine flannel, lawn and lace,
such as women's fingers linger over in the making with tender joy. Once
her resolution failed her. She wrapped the half-dressed child in its
white shawls again, rose from her place and walked over to the sunny
window, carrying it in the hollow of her arm--it staring up, meanwhile,
with the strange wonder of baby eyes, and cooing, as though holding
communication with gracious presences haunting the moulded ceiling
above. Katherine gazed at it for a few seconds. But the little
creature's serene content, its absolute unconsciousness of its own evil
fortune, pained her too greatly. She went back, sat down on the stool
again, and completed the task she had set herself.

Then, the baby lying stark naked on her lap, she studied the fair,
little face, the penciled eyebrows and fringed eyelids,--dark like her
own,--the firm, rounded arms, the rosy-palmed hands, their dainty
fingers and finger-nails, the well-proportioned and well-nourished
body, without smallest mark or blemish upon it, sound, wholesome, and
complete. All these she studied long and carefully, while the dancing
glow of the firelight played over the child's delicate flesh, and it
extended its little arms in the pleasant warmth, holding them up, as in
act of adoration, towards those gracious unseen presences, still,
apparently, hovering above the flood of instreaming sunshine against
the ceiling overhead. Lastly she turned her eyes, with almost dreadful
courage, upon the mutilated, malformed limbs, upon the feet--set right
up where the knee should have been, thus dwarfing the child by a fourth
of his height. She observed them, handled, felt them. And as she did
so, her mother-love, which, until now, had been but a part and
consequence--since the child was his gift, the crown and outcome of
their passion, his and hers--of the great love she bore her husband,
became distinct from that, an emotion by itself, heretofore unimagined,
pervasive of all her being. It had none of the sweet self-abandon, the
dear enchantments, the harmonising sense of safety and repose which
that earlier passion had. This was altogether different in character,
and made quite other demands on mind and heart. For it was fierce,
watchful, anxious, violent with primitive instinct; the roots of it
planted far back in that unthinkable remoteness of time, when the
fertile womb of the great earth mother began to bring forth the first
blind, simple forms of those countless generations of living creatures
which, slowly differentiating themselves, slowly developing, have
peopled this planet from that immeasurable past to the present hour.
Love between man and woman must be forever young, even as Eros, Cupid,
Krishna, are forever youthful gods. But mother-love is of necessity
mature, majestic, ancient from the stamp of primal experience which is
upon it.

And so, at this juncture, realising that which her motherhood meant,
her immaturity, her girlhood fell away from Katherine Calmady. Her life
and the purpose of it moved forward on another plane.

She bent down and solemnly kissed the unlovely, shortened limbs, not
once or twice, but many times, yielding herself up with an almost
voluptuous intensity to her own emotion. She clasped her hands about
her knees, so that the child might be enclosed, overshadowed, embraced
on all sides by the living defenses of its mother's love. Alone there,
with no witnesses, she brooded over it, crooned to it, caressed it with
an insatiable hunger of tenderness.

"And yet, my poor pretty, if we had both died, you and I, ten days
ago," she murmured, "how far better. For what will you say to me when
you grow older--to me who have brought you, without any asking or will
of yours, into a world in which you must always be at so cruel a
disadvantage? How will you bear it all when you come to face it for
yourself, and I can no longer shield you and hide you away as I can do
now? Will you have fortitude to endure, or will you become sour,
vindictive, misanthropic, envious? Will you curse the hour of your
birth?"

Katherine bowed her proud head still lower.

"Ah! don't do that, my darling," she prayed in piteous entreaty, "don't
do that. For I will share all your trouble, do share it even now,
beforehand, foreseeing it, while you still lie smiling unknowing of
your own distress. I shall live through it many times, by day and
night, while you live through it only once. And so you must be
forbearing towards me, my dear one, when you come----"

She broke off abruptly, her hands fell at her sides, and she sat
rigidly upright, her lips parted, staring blankly at the dancing
flames.

In repeating Dr. Knott's statement Ormiston had purposely abstained
from all mention of Richard Calmady's accident and its tragic sequel.
He could not bring himself to speak to Katherine of that. Until now,
dominated by the rush of her emotion, she had only recognised the bare
terrible fact of the baby's crippled condition, without attempting to
account for it. But, now, suddenly the truth presented itself to her.
She understood that she was herself, in a sense, accountable--that the
greatness of her love for the father had maimed the child.

As she realised the profound irony of the position, a blackness of
misery fell upon Katherine. And then, since she was of a strong,
undaunted spirit, an immense anger possessed her, a revolt against
nature which could work such wanton injury, and against God, who, being
all-powerful, could sit by and permit it so to work. All the
foundations of faith and reverence were, for the time being, shaken to
the very base.

She gathered the naked baby up against her bosom, rocking herself to
and fro in a paroxysm of rebellious grief.

"God is unjust!" she cried aloud. "He takes pleasure in fooling us. God
is unjust!"




CHAPTER X

THE BIRDS OF THE AIR TAKE THEIR BREAKFAST


Ormiston's first sensation on reentering his sister's room was one of
very sensible relief. For Katherine leaned back against the pink
brocade cushions in the corner of the sofa, with the baby sleeping
peacefully in her arms. Her colour was more normal too, her features
less mask-like and set. The cloud which had shadowed the young man's
mind for nearly a fortnight lifted. She knew; therefore, he argued, the
worst must be over. It was an immense gain that this thing was fairly
said. Yet, as he came nearer and sat down on the sofa beside her,
Ormiston, who was a keen observer, both of horses and women, became
aware of a subtle change in Katherine. He was struck--he had never
noticed it before--by her likeness to her--and his--father, whose
stern, high-bred, clean-shaven face and rather inaccessible bearing and
manner impressed his son, even to this day, as somewhat alarming.
People were careful not to trifle with old Mr. Ormiston. His will was
absolute in his own house, with his tenants, and in the great
iron-works--almost a town in itself--which fed his fine fortune. While
from his equals--even from his fellow-members of that not over-reverent
or easily impressible body, the House of Commons--he required and
received a degree of deference such as men yield only to an unusually
powerful character. And there was now just such underlying energy in
Katherine's expression. Her eyes were dark, as a clear midnight sky is
dark, her beautiful lips compressed, but with concentration of purpose,
not with weakness of sorrow. The force of her motherhood had awakened
in Katherine a latent, titanic element. Like "Prometheus Bound,"
chained to the rock, torn, her spirit remained unquelled. For good or
evil--as the event should prove--she defied the gods.

And something of all this--though he would have worded it very
differently in the vernacular of passing fashion--Ormiston perceived.
She was unbroken by that which had occurred, and for this he was
thankful. But she was another woman to her who had greeted him in
pretty apology an hour ago. Yet, even recognising this, her first words
produced in him a shock of surprise.

"Is that horse, the Clown, still at the stables?" she asked.

Ormiston thrust his hands into his pockets; and sitting on the edge of
the sofa with his knees apart, stared down at the carpet. The mention
of the Clown always cut him, and raised in him a remorseful anger. Yes
she was like his father, going straight to the point, he thought. And,
in this case, the point was acutely painful to him personally.
Ormiston's moral courage had been severely taxed, and he had a fair
share of the selfishness common to man. It was all very well, but he
wished to goodness she had chosen some other subject than this. Yet he
must answer.

"Yes," he said; "Willy Taylor has been leading the gallops for the
two-year-olds on him for the last month."--He paused. "What about the
Clown?"

"Only that I should be glad if you would tell Chifney he must find some
other horse to lead the gallops."

Ormiston turned his head.

"I see--you wish the horse sold," he said, over his shoulder.

Katherine looked down at the sleeping baby, its round head, crowned by
that delicious crest of silky hair, cuddled in against her breast. Then
she looked in her brother's eyes full and steadily.

"No," she answered. "I don't want it sold, I want it shot, by you,
here, to-night."

"By Jove!" the young man exclaimed, rising hastily and standing in
front of her.

Katherine gazed up at him, and held the child a little closer to her
breast.

"I have been alone with my baby. Don't you suppose I see how it has
come about?" she asked.

"Oh, damn it all!" Ormiston cried. "I prayed, at least, you might be
spared thinking of that."

He flung himself down on the sofa again--while the baby clenching its
tiny fist, stretched and murmured in its sleep--and bowed himself
together, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

"I'm at the bottom of it. It's all my fault," he said. "I am haunted by
the thought of that day and night, for if ever one man loved another I
loved Richard. And yet if I hadn't been so cursedly keen about the
horse all this might never have happened. Oh! if you only knew how
often I've wished myself dead since that ghastly morning. You must hate
me, Kitty. You've cause enough. Yet how the deuce could I foresee what
would come about?"

For the moment Katherine's expression softened. She laid her left hand
very gently on his bowed head.

"I could never hate you, dear old man," she said. "You are innocent of
Richard's death. But this last thing is different." Her voice became
fuller and deeper in tone. "And whether I am equally innocent of his
child's disfigurement, God only knows--if there is a God, which
perhaps, just now, I had better doubt, lest I should blaspheme too
loudly, hoping my bitter words might reach His hearing."

Yet further disturbed in the completeness of it's comfort, as it would
seem, by the seriousness of her voice, the baby's mouth puckered. It
began to fret. Katherine rose and stood rocking it, soothing it--a
queenly young figure in her clinging gray and white draperies, which
the instreaming sunshine touched, as she moved, to a delicate warmth of
colour.

"Hush, my pretty lamb," she crooned--and then softly yet fiercely to
Ormiston, "You understand, I wish it. The Clown is to be shot."

"Very well," he answered.

"Sleep--what troubles you, my precious," she went on. "I want it done,
now, at once.--Hush, baby, hush.--The sun shall not go down upon my
wrath, because my wrath shall be somewhat appeased before the sunset."

Katherine swayed with a rhythmic motion, holding the baby a little away
from her in her outstretched arms.

"Tell Chifney to bring the horse up to the square lawn, here, right in
front of the house.--Hush, my kitty sweet.--He is to bring the horse
himself. None of the stable boys or helpers are to come. It is not to
be an entertainment, but an execution. I wish it done quietly."

"Very well," Ormiston repeated. He hesitated, strong protest rising to
his lips, which he could not quite bring himself to utter. Katherine,
the courage and tragedy of her anger, dominated him as she moved to and
fro in t

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