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+Project Gutenberg's The History of Sir Richard Calmady, by Lucas Malet
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The History of Sir Richard Calmady
+       A Romance
+
+Author: Lucas Malet
+
+Release Date: December 9, 2007 [EBook #23784]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF SIR RICHARD CALMADY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 the sunshine soothing her child.
+
+"You know it's a valuable horse," he remarked, at last, tentatively.
+
+"So much the better. You do not suppose I should care to take that
+which costs me nothing? I am quite willing to pay.--Sleep, my pet,
+so--is that better?--I do not propose to defraud--hush, baby darling,
+hush--Richard's son of any part of his inheritance. Tell Chifney to
+name a price for the Clown, an outside price. He shall have a cheque
+to-morrow, which he is to enter with the rest of the stable
+accounts.--Now go, please. We understand each other clearly, and it is
+growing late.--Poor honey love, what vexes you?--You will shoot the
+Clown, here, before sunset. And, Roger, it must lie where it falls
+to-night. Let some of the men come early to-morrow, with a float. It is
+to go to the kennels."
+
+Ormiston got up, shaking his shoulders as though to rid himself of some
+encumbering weight. He crossed to the fireplace and kicked the logs
+together.
+
+"I don't half like it," he said. "I tell you I don't. It seems such a
+cold-blooded butchery. I can't tell if it's wrong or right. It seems
+merciless. And it is so unlike you, Kitty, to be merciless."
+
+He turned to her as he spoke, and Katherine--her head erect, her eyes
+full of the sombre fire of her profound alienation and revolt--drew her
+hand slowly down over the fine lawn and lace of the baby's long white
+robe, and held it flat against the soles of the child's hidden feet.
+
+"Look at this," she said. "Remember, too, that the delight of my life
+has gone from me, and that I am young yet. The years will be many--and
+Richard is dead. Has much mercy been shown to me, do you think?"
+
+And the young man seeing her, knowing the absolute sincerity of her
+speech, felt a lump rise in his throat. After all, when you have acted
+hangman to your own sister, as he reasoned, it is but a small matter to
+act slaughterman to a horse.
+
+"Very well," he answered, huskily enough. "It shall be as you wish,
+Kitty. Only go back to the sofa, and stay there, please. If I think you
+are watching, I can't be quite sure of myself. Something may go wrong,
+and we don't want a scene which will make talk. This is a business
+which should be got through as quickly and decently as possible."
+
+The sun was but five minutes high, and no longer brightened the
+southern house front, though it spread a ruddy splendour over the
+western range of gables, and lingered about the stacks of slender
+twisted chimneys, and cast long slanting shadows across the lawns and
+carriage drives, before Lady Calmady's waiting drew to a close. From
+the near trees of the elm avenue, and from the wood overhanging the
+pond below the terraced kitchen gardens, came the singing of blackbirds
+and thrushes--whether raised as evening hymn in praise of their
+Creator, or as love-song each to his mate, who shall say? Possibly as
+both, since in simple minds--and that assuredly is matter for
+thankfulness--earthly and heavenly affections are bounded by no harsh
+dividing line. The chorus of song found its way in at the windows of
+Katherine's room--fresh as the spring flowers which filled it, innocent
+of hatred and wrong as the face of the now placid baby, his soft cheeks
+flushed with slumber, as he nestled in against his mother's bosom.
+
+Indeed a long time had passed. Twice Denny had looked in and, seeing
+that quiet reigned, had noiselessly withdrawn. For Katherine, still
+physically weak, drained, moreover, by the greatness of her recent
+emotion, her senses lulled to rest by the warm contact and even
+breathing of the child, had sunk away into a dreamless sleep.
+
+The questioning neigh of a stallion, a scuffle of horse hoofs,
+footsteps approaching round the corner of the house, passing across the
+broad graveled carriage sweep and on to the turf, aroused her. And
+these sounds were so natural, full of vigorous outdoor life and the
+wholesome gladness of it, that for a moment she came near repentance of
+her purpose. But then feeling, as he rested on her arm, her baby's
+shortened, malformed limbs, and thinking of her well-beloved dying,
+maimed and spent, in the fulness of his manhood, her face took on that
+ashen pallor again and all relenting left her. There was a satisfaction
+of wild justice in the act about to be consummated. And Katherine
+raised herself from the pink brocade cushions, and sat erect, her lips
+parted in stern excitement, her forehead contracted in the effort to
+hear, her eyes fixed on the wide, carven, ebony bed and its embroidered
+hangings. The poor Hart had, indeed, ceased to pasture in reposeful
+security before the quaint pavilion, set--for its passing
+refreshment--in the midst of the Forest of This Life. Now it fled,
+desperate, by crooked tangled ways, over rocks, through briars, while
+Care, the Leopard, followed hard behind.
+
+First Roger Ormiston's voice reached her in brief direction, and the
+trainer's in equally brief reply. The horse neighed again--a sound
+strident and virile, the challenge of a creature of perfect muscle, hot
+desire, and proud, quick-coursing blood. Afterwards, an instant's
+pause, and Chifney's voice again,--"So-ho--my beauty--take it
+easy--steady there, steady, good lad," and the slap of his open hand on
+the horse's shoulder straightening it carefully into place. While
+behind and below all this, in sweet incongruous undertone of
+uncontrollable joy, arose the carolling of the blackbirds and thrushes
+praising, according to their humble powers, God, life, and love.
+
+Finally, as climax of the drama, the sharp report of a pistol, ringing
+out in shattering disturbance of the peace of the fair spring evening,
+followed by a dead silence, the birds all scared and dumb--a silence so
+dead, that Katherine Calmady held her breath, almost awed by it, while
+the hissing and crackling of the little flames upon the hearth seemed
+to obtrude as an indecent clamour. This lasted a few seconds. Then the
+noise of a plunging struggle and the muffled thud of something falling
+heavily upon the turf.--
+
+Dr. Knott had been up all night, but his patient, Lord Denier's second
+coachman, would pull through right enough; so he started on his
+homeward journey in a complacent frame of mind. He reckoned it would
+save him a couple of miles, let alone the long hill from Farley Row up
+to Spendle Flats, if on his way back from Grimshott he went by
+Brockhurst House. It is stretching a point, he admitted, to drive under
+even your neighbour's back windows at five o'clock in the morning. But
+the doctor being himself in an unusually amiable attitude, was inclined
+to accredit others with a like share of good temper. Moreover, the
+natural man in him cried increasingly loudly for food and bed.
+
+John Knott was not given to sentimental rhapsodies over the beauties of
+nature. Like other beauties she had her dirty enough moods, he thought.
+Still, in his own half-snarling fashion, he dearly loved this forest
+country in which he had been born and bred, while he was too keen a
+sportsman to be unobservant of any aspect of wind and weather, any
+movement of bird or beast. With the collar of his long drab
+driving-coat turned up about his ears, and the stem of a well-coloured
+meerschaum pipe between his teeth, he sat huddled together in the high,
+swinging gig, with Timothy, the weazel-faced, old groom by his side,
+while the drama of the opening day unfolded itself before his somewhat
+critical gaze. He noted that it would be fine, though windy. In the
+valley, over the Long Water, spread beds of close, white mist. The blue
+of the upper sky was crossed by curved windows of flaky, opalescent
+cloud. In the east, above the dusky rim of the fir woods on the edge of
+the high-lying tableland, stretched a blinding blaze of rose-saffron,
+shading through amber into pale primrose colour above. The massive
+house front, and the walls fencing the three sides of the square
+enclosure before it, with the sexagonal, pepper-pot summer-houses at
+either corner, looked pale and unsubstantial in that diffused,
+unearthly light. At the head of the elm avenue, passing through the
+high, wrought-iron gates and along the carriage drive which skirts the
+said enclosure,--the great, square grass plot on the right hand, the
+red wall of the kitchen gardens on the left,--Dr. Knott had the reins
+nearly jerked out of his hand. The mare started and swerved, grazing
+the off wheel against the brickwork, and stopped, her head in the air,
+her ears pricked, her nostrils dilated showing the red.
+
+"Hullo, old girl, what's up? Seen a ghost?" he said, drawing the whip
+quietly across the hollow of her back.
+
+But the mare only braced herself more stiffly, refusing to move, while
+she trembled and broke into a sudden sweat. The doctor was interested
+and looked about him. He would first find the cause of her queer
+behaviour, and give her a good dressing down afterwards if she deserved
+it.
+
+The smooth, slightly up-sloping lawn was powdered with innumerable
+dewdrops. In the centre of it, neck outstretched, the fine legs doubled
+awkwardly together, the hind quarters and barrel rising, as it lay on
+its side, in an unshapely lump, gray from the drenching dew, was a dead
+horse. Along the top of the further wall a smart and audacious party of
+jackdaws had stationed themselves, with much ruffling of gray, neck
+feathers impudent squeakings and chatter. While a pair of carrion crows
+hopped slowly and heavily about the carcass, flapping up with a stroke
+or two of their broad wings in sudden suspicion, then settling down
+again nearer than before.
+
+"Go to her head, Timothy, and get her by as quietly as you can. I'll be
+after you in a minute, but I'm bound to see what the dickens they've
+been up to here."
+
+As he spoke Dr. Knott hitched himself down from off the gig. He was
+cramped with sitting, and moved forward awkwardly, his footsteps
+leaving a track of dark irregular patches upon the damp grass. As he
+approached, the jackdaws flung themselves gleefully upward from the
+wall, the sun glinting on their glossy plumage as they circled and
+sailed away across the park. But the crow who had just begun work in
+earnest, stood his ground, notwithstanding the warning croak of his
+more timid mate. He grasped the horse's skull with his claws, and tore
+away greedily at the fine skin about the eye-socket with his strong,
+black beak.
+
+"How's this, my fine gentleman, in too much of a hurry this morning to
+wait for the flavour to get into your meat?" John Knott said, as the
+bird rose sullenly at last. "Got a small hungry family at home, I
+suppose, crying 'give, give.' Well, that's taught better men than you,
+before now, not to be too nice, but to snatch at pretty well anything
+they can get."
+
+He came close and stood looking meditatively down at the dead
+race-horse--recognised its long, white-reach face, the colour and make
+of it, while his loose lips worked with a contemptuous yet pitying
+smile.
+
+"So that's the way my lady's taken it, has she?" he said presently. "On
+the whole I don't know that I'm sorry. In some cases much benefit
+unquestionably is derivable from letting blood. This shows she doesn't
+mean to go under if I know her; and that's a mercy, for that poor
+little beggar, the baby's sake."
+
+He turned and contemplated the stately facade of the house. The ranges
+of windows, blind with closed shutters and drawn curtains, in the early
+sunshine gave off their many panes a broad dazzle of white light.
+
+"Poor little beggar," he repeated, "with his forty thousand a year and
+all the rest of it. Such a race to run and yet so badly handicapped!"
+
+He stooped down, examined the horse, found the mark of the bullet.
+
+"Contradictory beings, though, these dear women," he went on. "So
+fanciful and delicate, so sensitive you're afraid to lay a finger on
+them. So unselfish, too, some of them, they seem too good for this old
+rough and tumble of a world. And yet touch 'em home, and they'll show
+an unscrupulous savagery of which we coarse brutes of men should be
+more than half ashamed. God Almighty made a little more than He
+bargained for when He made woman. She must have surprised Him pretty
+shrewdly, one would think, now and then since the days of the apple and
+the snake."
+
+He moved away up the carriage drive, following Timothy, the sweating,
+straining mare, and swinging gig. The carrion crow flapped back, with a
+croak, and dropped on the horse's skull again. Hearing that bodeful
+sound the doctor paused a moment, knocking the ashes out of his pipe,
+and looking round at the bird at its ugly work, set as foreground to
+that pure glory of the sunrise, and the vast noble landscape, misty
+valley, dewy grassland, far ranging hillside crowned with wood.
+
+"The old story," he muttered, "always repeating itself. And it strikes
+one as rather a wasteful, clumsy contrivance, at times. Life forever
+feeding on death--death forever breeding life."
+
+Thus ended the Clown, own brother to Touchstone, of merry name and
+mournful memory, paying the penalty of wholly involuntary
+transgressions. From which ending another era dated at Brockhurst, the
+most notable events of which it is the purpose of the ensuing pages
+duly to set forth.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+THE BREAKING OF DREAMS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+RECORDING SOME ASPECTS OF A SMALL PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
+
+
+It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, says the comfortable proverb.
+Which would appear to be but another manner of declaring that the law
+of compensation works permanently in human affairs. All quantities,
+material and immaterial alike, are, of necessity, stable; therefore the
+loss or defect of one participant must--indirectly, no doubt, yet very
+surely--make for the gain of some other. As of old, so now, the blood
+of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.
+
+Julius March would, how gladly, have been among the martyrs! But the
+lot fell otherwise. And--always admitting the harshness of the
+limitations he had imposed on himself--the martyrdom of those he held
+dearest, did, in fact, work to secure him a measure of content that had
+otherwise been unattainable. The twelve years following the birth of
+Lady Calmady's child were the most fruitful of his life. He filled a
+post no other person could have filled; one which, while satisfying his
+religious sense and priestly ideal of detachment, appeased the cravings
+of his heart and developed the practical man in him. The contemplative
+and introspective attitude was balanced by an active and objective one.
+For he continued to live under his dear lady's roof, seeing her daily
+and serving her in many matters. He watched her, admiring her clear yet
+charitable judgment and her prudence in business. He bowed in reverence
+before her perfect singleness of purpose. He was almost appalled,
+apprehending, now and then, the secret abysses of her womanhood, the
+immensity of her self-devotion, the swing of her nature from quick,
+sensitive shrinking to almost impious pride. Man is the outcome of the
+eternal common sense; woman that of some moment of divine folly.
+Meanwhile the ways of true love are many; and Julius March, thus
+watching his dear lady, discovered, as other elect souls have
+discovered before him, that the way of chastity and silence,
+notwithstanding its very constant heartache, is by no means among the
+least sweet. The entries in his diaries of this period are
+intermittent, concise, and brief--naturally enough, since the central
+figure of Julius's mental picture had ceased, happily for him, to be
+himself.
+
+And not only Katherine's sorrows, but the unselfish action of another
+woman went to make Julius March's position at Brockhurst tenable. A few
+days after Ormiston's momentous interview with his sister, news came of
+Mrs. St. Quentin's death. She had passed hence peacefully in her sleep.
+Knowledge of the facts of poor, little Dickie Calmady's ill-fortune had
+been spared her. For it would be more satisfactory--so Mademoiselle de
+Mirancourt had remarked, not without a shade of irony--that if Lucia
+St. Quentin must learn the sad fact at all, she should do so where _le
+bon Dieu_ Himself would be at hand to explain matters, and so, in a
+degree, set them right.
+
+Early in April Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had gathered together her
+most precious possessions and closed the pretty apartment in the rue de
+Rennes. It had been a happy halting-place on the journey of life. It
+was haunted by well-beloved ghosts. It cost not a little to bid it, the
+neighbouring church of the St. Germain des Pres, where she had so long
+worshipped, and her little _coterie_ of intimate friends, farewell. Yet
+she set forth, taking with her Henriette, the hard-featured, old,
+Breton maid, and _Monsieur Pouf_, the gray, Persian cat,--he protesting
+plaintively from within a large Manilla basket,--and thus accompanied,
+made pilgrimage to Brockhurst. And when Katherine, all the lost joys of
+her girlhood assailing her at sight of her lifelong friend, had broken
+down for once, and, laying her beautiful head on the elder woman's
+shoulder, had sobbed out a question as to when this visit must end,
+Marie de Mirancourt had answered--
+
+"That, most dear one, is precisely as you shall see fit to decide. It
+need not end till I myself end, if you so please."
+
+And when Katherine, greatly comforted yet fearing to be over-greedy of
+comfort, had reasoned with her, reminding her of the difference of
+climate, the different habits of living in that gay, little Paris home
+and this great English country house; reminding her, further, of her so
+often and fondly expressed desire to retire from the world while yet in
+the complete possession of her powers and prepare for the inevitable
+close within the calm and sacred precincts of the convent--the other
+replied almost gaily--
+
+"Ah, my child! I have still a naughty little spirit of experiment in me
+which defiles the barbarities of your climate. While as to the convent,
+it has beckoned so long--let it beckon still! It called first when my
+_fiance_ died,--God rest his soul,--worn out by the hardships he
+endured in the war of La Vendee and I put from me forever all thought
+of marriage. But then my mother, an emigrant here in London, claimed
+all my care. It called me again when she departed, dear saintly being.
+But then there were my brother's sons--orphaned by the guillotine--to
+place. And when I had established them honourably, our beloved Lucia
+turned to me, with her many enchantments and exquisite tragedy of the
+heart. And, now, in my old age I come to you--whom I receive from her
+as a welcome legacy--to remain just so long as I am not a burden to
+you. Second childhood and first should understand one another. We will
+play delightful games together, the dear baby and I. So let the convent
+beckon. For the convent is perhaps, after all, but an impatient
+grasping at the rest of paradise, before that rest is fairly earned. I
+have a good hope that, after all, we give ourselves most acceptably to
+God in thus giving ourselves to His human creatures."
+
+Thus did Marie de Mirancourt, for love's sake, condemn herself to
+exile, thereby rendering possible--among other things--Julius's
+continued residence at Brockhurst. For Captain Ormiston had held true
+to his resolve of scorning the delights of idleness, the smiles of
+ladies more kind than wise, and all those other pleasant iniquities to
+which idleness inclines the young and full-blooded, of bidding farewell
+to London and Windsor, and proceeding to "live laborious days" in some
+far country. He had offered to remain indefinitely with Katherine if
+she needed him. But she refused. Let him be faithful to the noble
+profession of arms and make a name for himself therein.
+
+"Brockhurst has ceased to be a place for a soldier," she said. "Leave
+it to women and priests!" And then, repenting of the bitterness of her
+speech, she added:--"Really there is not more work than I can manage,
+with Julius to help me at times. Iles is a good servant if a little
+tediously pompous, and Chifney must see to the stables."--Lady Calmady
+paused, and her face grew hard. But for her husband's dying request,
+she would have sold every horse in the stud, razed the great square of
+buildings to the ground and made the site of it a dunghill. "Work is a
+drug to deaden thought. So it is a kindness to let me have plenty of
+it, dear old man. And I fear, even when the labour of each day is done,
+and Dickie is safe asleep,--poor darling,--I shall still have more than
+enough of time for thought, for asking those questions to which there
+seems no answer, and for desires, vain as they are persistent, that
+things were somehow, anyhow, other than they are!"
+
+Therefore it came about that a singular quiet settled down on
+Brockhurst--a quiet of waiting, of pause, rather than of
+accomplishment. But Julius March, for reasons aforesaid, and
+Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, in virtue of her unclouded faith in the
+teachings of her Church,--which assures its members of the beneficent
+purpose working behind all the sad seeming of this world,--alike
+rejoiced in that. A change of occupations and of interests came
+naturally with the change of the seasons, with the time to sow and
+reap, to plant saplings, to fell timber, to fence, to cut copsing, to
+build or rebuild, to receive rents or remit them, to listen to many
+appeals, to readjust differences, to feed game or to shoot it, to
+bestow charity of meat and fuel, to haul ice in winter to the ice-house
+from the lake. But beyond all this there was little going or coming at
+Brockhurst. The magnates of the countryside called at decent intervals,
+and at decent intervals Lady Calmady returned their civilities. But
+having ceased to entertain, she refused to receive entertainment. She
+shut herself away in somewhat jealous seclusion, defiant of possibly
+curious glances and pitying tongues. Before long her neighbours,
+therefore, came to raise their eyebrows a little in speaking of her,
+and to utter discreet regrets that Lady Calmady, though handsome and
+charming when you saw her, was so very eccentric, adding--"Of course
+every one knows there is something very uncomfortable about the little
+boy!" Then would follow confidences as to the disastrous results of
+popish influences and Romanising tendencies; and an openly expressed
+conviction--more especially on the part of ladies blessed with
+daughters of marriageable age--that it would have been so very much
+better for many people if the late Sir Richard Calmady had looked
+nearer home for a bride.
+
+But these comments did not affect Katherine. In point of fact they
+rarely reached her ears. Alone among her neighbours, Mary Cathcart, of
+the crisp, black hair and gipsy-like complexion, was still admitted to
+some intimacy of intercourse. And the girl was far too loyal either to
+bring in gossip or to carry it out. Brockhurst held the romance of her
+heart. And, notwithstanding the earnest wooing--as the years went
+on--of more than one very eligible gentleman, Brockhurst continued to
+hold it.
+
+Meanwhile the somewhat quaint fixed star around which this whole system
+of planets, large and small, very really revolved, shone forth upon
+them all with a cheerful enough light. For Dickie by no means belied
+the promise of his babyhood. He was a beautiful and healthy little boy,
+with a charming brilliance of colouring, warm and solid in tone. He had
+his mother's changeful eyes, though the blue of them was brighter than
+hers had now come to be. He had her dark eyebrows and eyelashes too,
+and her finely curved lips. While he bore likeness to his father in the
+straight, square-tipped nose and the close-fitting cap of bright, brown
+hair with golden stains in it, growing low in short curling locks on
+the broad forehead and the nape of the neck--expressing the shape of
+the head very definitely, and giving it something of antique nobility
+and grace.
+
+And the little lad's appearance afforded, in these pleasant early days
+at all events, fair index to his temperament. He was gay-natured,
+affectionate, intelligent, full of a lively yet courteous curiosity,
+easily moved to laughter, almost inconveniently fearless and
+experimental; while his occasional thunderbursts of passion cleared off
+quickly into sunshine and blue sky again. For as yet the burden of
+deformity rested upon him very lightly. He associated hardly at all
+with other children, and had but scant occasion to measure his poor
+powers of locomotion against their normal ones. Lady Fallowfeild it is
+true, in obedience to suggestions on the part of her kindly lord and
+master, offered tentatively to import a carriage load--little Ludovic
+Quayle was just the same age as Dickie--from the Whitney nurseries to
+spend the day.
+
+"Good fellow, Calmady. I liked Calmady," Lord Fallowfeild had said to
+her. His conversation, it may be observed, was nothing if not
+interjectional. "Pretty woman, Lady Calmady---terrible thing for her
+being left as she is. Always shall regret Calmady. Very sorry for her.
+Always have been sorry for a pretty woman in trouble. Ought to see
+something of her, my dear. The two estates join, and, as I always have
+said, it's a duty to support your own class. Can't expect the masses to
+respect you unless you show them you're prepared to stand by your own
+class. Just take some of the children over to see Lady Calmady. Pretty
+children, do her good to see them. Rode uncommonly straight did
+Calmady. Terribly upsetting thing his funeral. Never shall forget it.
+Always did like Calmady--good fellow, Calmady. Nasty thing his death."
+
+But Katherine's pen was fertile in excuses to avoid the invasion from
+Whitney. Lady Fallowfeild's small brains and large domestic complacency
+were too trying to her. And that noble lady, it must be owned, was
+secretly not a little glad to have her advances thus firmly, though
+gently, repulsed. For she was alarmed at Lady Calmady's reported
+acquaintance with foreign lands and with books; added to which her
+simple mind harboured much grisly though vague terror concerning the
+Roman Church. Picture all her brood of little Quayles incontinently
+converted into little monks and nuns with shaven heads! How such sudden
+conversion could be accomplished Lady Fallowfeild did not presume to
+explain. It sufficed her that "everybody always said Papists were so
+dreadfully clever and unscrupulous you never could tell what they might
+not do next."
+
+Once, when Dickie was about six years old, Colonel St. Quentin brought
+his young wife and two little girls to stay at Brockhurst. Katherine
+had a great regard for her cousin, yet the visit was never repeated. On
+the flat poor Dick could manage fairly well, his strangely shod feet
+traveling laboriously along in effort after rapidity; his hands hastily
+outstretched now and again to lay hold of door-jamb or table-edge,
+since his balance was none of the securest. But in that delightfully
+varied journey from the nursery, by way of his mother's bed-room, the
+Chapel-Room next door, the broad stair-head,--with its carven
+balusters, shiny oak flooring, and fine landscapes by Claude and
+Hobbema,--the state drawing-room and libraries, to that America of his
+childish dreams, that country of magnificent distances and large
+possibility of discovery, the Long Gallery, he was speedily distanced
+by the three-year-old Betty, let alone her six-year-old sister Honoria,
+a tall, slim, little maiden, daintily high-bred of face and fleet of
+foot as a hind. This was bad enough. But the stairways afforded yet
+more afflicting experiences--the descent of even the widest and
+shallowest flights presented matter of insuperable difficulty; while
+the ascent was only to be achieved by recourse to all-fours, against
+the ignominy of which mode of progression Dickie's soul revolted. And
+so the little boy concluded that he did not care much about little
+girls; and confided to his devoted play-fellow Clara--Mrs. Denny's
+niece and sometime second still-room maid, now promoted, on account of
+her many engaging qualities, to be Dickie's special attendant--that:--
+
+"They went so quick, they always left him behind, and it was not nice
+to be left behind, and it was very rude of them to do it; didn't Clara
+think so?"
+
+And Clara, as in duty and affection bound, not without additional
+testimony in a certain dimness of her pretty, honest, brown eyes, did
+indeed very much think so. It followed, therefore, that Dickie saw the
+St. Quentin family drive away, nurses and luggage complete, quite
+unmoved. And returned with satisfaction and renewed self-confidence to
+the exclusive society of all those dear grown-up people--gentle and
+simple--who were never guilty of leaving him behind; to that of Camp,
+the old, white bulldog, and young Camp, his son and heir, who, if they
+so far forgot themselves as to run away, invariably ran back again and
+apologised, fawning upon him and pushing their broad, ugly, kindly
+muzzles into his hands; and to that of _Monsieur Pouf_, the gray
+Persian cat, who, far from going too quickly, displayed such majestic
+deliberation of movement and admirable dignity of waving fluffed tail,
+that it required much patient coaxing on Dickie's part ever to make him
+leave his cushion by the fire and go at all.
+
+But, with the above-mentioned exception, the little boy's self-content
+suffered but slight disturbance. He took himself very much for granted.
+He was very curious of outside things, very much amused. Moreover, he
+was king of a far from contemptible kingdom; and in the blessed
+ignorance of childhood--that finds pride and honour in things which a
+wider and sadder knowledge often proves far from glad or glorious--it
+appeared to him not unnatural that a king should differ, even to the
+point of some slightly impeding disabilities, from the rank and file of
+his obedient and devoted subjects. For Dickie, happily for him, was as
+yet given over to that wholly pleasant vanity, the aristocratic idea.
+The rough justice of democracy, and the harsh breaking of all purely
+personal and individualistic dreams that comes along with it, for him,
+was not just yet.
+
+And Richard's continued and undismayed acquiescence in his physical
+misfortune was fostered, indirectly, by the captivating poetry of myth
+and legend with which his mind was fed. He had an insatiable appetite
+for stories, and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt was an untiring
+_raconteuse_. On Sunday afternoons upon the terrace, when the park lay
+bathed in drowsy sunshine and sapphire shadows haunted the under edge
+of the great woods, the pretty old lady--her eyes shining with gentle
+laughter, for Marie de Mirancourt's faith had reached the very perfect
+stage in which the soul dares play, even as lovers play, with that it
+holds most sacred--would tell Dickie--the fairy tales of her Church.
+Would tell him of blessed St. Francis and of Poverty, his sweet, sad
+bride; of his sermon to the birds dwelling in the oak groves along
+Tiber valley; of the mystic stigmata, marking as with nail prints his
+hands and feet, and of that indomitable love towards all creatures,
+which found alike in the sun in heaven and the heavy-laden ass,
+brothers and friends. Or she would tell him of that man of mighty
+strength and stature, St. Christopher, who, in the stormy
+darkness,--yielding to its reiterated entreaties,--set forth to bear
+the little child across the wind-swept ford. How he staggered in
+midstream, amazed and terrified under the awful weight of that,
+apparently so light, burden; to learn, on struggling ashore at last,
+that he had borne upon his shoulder no mortal infant, but the whole
+world and the eternal maker of it, Christ Himself.
+
+These and many another wonder tale of Christian miracle did she tell to
+Dickie--he squatting on a rug beside her, resting his curly head
+against her knees, while the pink-footed pigeons hurried hither and
+thither, picking up the handfuls of barley he scattered on the flags,
+and the peacocks sunned themselves with a certain worldly and
+disdainful grace on the hand-rails of the gray balustrades, and young
+Camp, after some wild skirmish in search of sport, flung himself down
+panting, his tongue lolling out of his grinning jaws, by the boy's
+side.
+
+And Katherine, putting aside her cares as regent of Dickie's kingdom
+and the sorrow that lay so chill against her heart, would tell him
+stories too, but of a different order of sentiment and of thought. For
+Katherine was young yet, and her stories were gallant--since her own
+spirit was very brave--or merry, because it delighted her to hear the
+boy laugh. And often, as he grew a little older, she would sit with her
+arm round him, in the keen, winter twilights before the lamps were lit,
+on the broad cushioned bench of the oriel window in the Chapel-Room.
+Outside, the stars grew in number and brightness as the dusk deepened.
+Within, the firelight played over the white-paneled walls, revealing
+fitfully the handsome faces of former Calmadys--short-lived, passing
+hence all unsated with the desperate joys of living--painted by Vandyke
+and Sir Peter Lely, or by Romney and Sir Joshua. Then she would tell
+him not only of Aladdin, of Cinderella, and time-honoured
+Puss-in-Boots, but of Merlin the great enchanter, and of King Arthur
+and his company of noble knights. And of the loves of Sigurd the
+Niblung and Brunhilda the wise and terrible queen, and of their
+lifelong sorrow, and of the fateful treasure of fairy gold which lies
+buried beneath the rushing waters of the Rhine. Or she would tell him
+of those cold, clear, far-off times in the northern sojourning places
+of our race--tell him of the cow Audhumla, alone in the vast plain at
+the very beginning of things, licking the stones crusted over with hoar
+frost and salt, till, on the third day, there sprung from them a
+warrior named Bur, the father of Boer, the father of Odin, who is the
+father of all the gods. She would tell him of wicked Loki too, the
+deceiver and cunning plotter against the peace of heaven. And of his
+three evil children--here Dickie would, for what reason he knew not,
+always feel his mother hold him more closely, while her voice took a
+deeper tone--Fenrir the wolf, who, when Thor sought to bind him, bit
+off the brave god's right hand; and Joermungand the Midgard serpent,
+who, tail in mouth, circles the world; and Hela, the pale queen, who
+reigns in Niflheim over the dim kingdoms of the dead. And of Baldur the
+bright shining god, joy of Asgard, slain in error by Hoeder his blind
+twin-brother; for whom all things on earth--save one--weep, and will
+weep, till in the last days he comes again. And of All-Father Odin
+himself, plucking out his right eye and bartering it for a draught of
+wisdom-giving water from Mirmir's magic well. Again, she would tell him
+of the End--which it must be owned frightened Dickie a little, so that
+he would stroke her cheek, and say softly, "But, mummy, you really are
+sure, aren't you, it won't happen for a good while yet?"--Of Ragnaroek,
+the Twilight of the Gods; of the Fimbul winter, and cheerless sun and
+hurrying, blood-red moon, and all the direful signs which must needs go
+before the last great battle between good and evil.
+
+And through all of these stories, of Christian and heathen origin
+alike, Richard began dimly, almost unconsciously, to trace, recurrent
+as a strain of austere music, the idea--very common to ages less soft
+and fastidious than our own--of payment in self-restraint and labour,
+or in actual bodily pain, loss, or disablement, for all good gained and
+knowledge won.
+
+He found the same idea again when, under the teaching of Julius March,
+he began reading history, and when his little skill in Greek and Latin
+carried him as far as the easier passages of the classic poets. Dick
+was a very apt, if somewhat erratic and inaccurate, scholar. His
+insatiable curiosity drove him forward. He scurried, in childish
+fashion by all shortcuts available, to get at the heart of the
+matter--a habit of mind detestable to pedants, since to them the letter
+is the main object, not the spirit. Happily Julius was ceasing to be a
+pedant, even in matters ecclesiastical. He loved the little boy, the
+mingled charm and pathos of whose personality held him as with a spell.
+With untiring patience he answered, to the best of his ability,
+Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he learned
+even more than he taught, under this fire of cross-examination. He had
+never come intimately in contact with a child's mind before; and
+Dickie's daring speculations and suggestions opened up very surprising
+vistas at times. The boy was a born adventurer; a gaily audacious
+sceptic moreover, notwithstanding his large swallow for romance, until
+his own morsel of reason and sense of dramatic fitness were satisfied.
+
+And so, having once apprehended that idea of payment, he searched for
+justification of it instinctively in all he saw and read. He found it
+again in the immortal story of the siege of Troy, and in the long
+wanderings and manifold trials of that most experimental of
+philosophers, the great Ulysses. He found it too in more modern and
+more authentic history--in the lives of Galileo and Columbus, of Sir
+Walter Raleigh and many another hero and heroine, of whom, because of
+some unusual excellence of spirit or attainment, their fellow-men, and,
+as it would seem, the very gods themselves, have grown jealous, not
+enduring to witness a beauty rivalling or surpassing their own.
+
+The idea was all confused as yet, coloured by childish fancies,
+instinctive merely, not realised. Yet it occupied a very actual place
+in the little boy's mind. He lingered over it silently, caressing it,
+returning to it again and again in half-frightened delight. It lent a
+fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and unsightly
+creatures--to blind worms and slow-moving toads; to trapped cats and
+dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged sea-gull, property of
+Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners, that paced, picking up loathsome
+living in the matter of slugs and snails, about the cabbage beds, all
+the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of the freedom of the sea
+in its wild, pale eyes.
+
+It further provoked Dickie to expend all his not inconsiderable gift of
+draughtsmanship, in the production of long processions of half-human
+monsters of a grotesque and essentially uncomfortable character. He
+scribbled these upon all available pieces of paper, including the
+fly-leaves of Todhunter's Arithmetic, and of his Latin and Greek
+primers. In an evil hour, for the tidiness of his school-books, he came
+across the ballad of "Aiken-Drum," with its rather terrible mixture of
+humour, realism, and the supernatural. From thenceforth for some
+weeks--though he adroitly avoided giving any direct account of the
+origin of these grisly imaginative freaks--many margins were adorned,
+or rather defaced, by fancy portraits of that "foul and stalwart
+ghaist" the Brownie of Badnock.
+
+So did Dickie dwell, through all his childhood and the early years of
+youth, in the dear land of dreams, petted, considered, sheltered with
+perhaps almost cruel kindness, from the keen winds of truth that blow
+forever across the world. Which winds, while causing all to suffer and
+bringing death to the weak and fearful, to the lovers of lies and the
+makers of them, go in the end to strengthen the strong who dare face
+them, and fortify these in the acceptance of the only knowledge really
+worth having--namely, the knowledge that romance is no exclusive
+property of the past, or eternal life of the future, but that both
+these are here immediately and actually for whoso has eyes to see and
+courage to possess.
+
+The fairest dreams are true. Yet it is so ordered that to know that we
+must awake from them. And the awakening is an ugly process enough, too
+often. When Dickie was about thirteen, the awakening began for him. It
+came in time-honoured forms--those of horses and of a woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IN WHICH OUR HERO IMPROVES HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH MANY THINGS--HIMSELF
+INCLUDED
+
+
+It came about in this wise. Roger Ormiston was expected at Brockhurst,
+after an absence of some years. He had served with distinction in the
+Sikh war; and had seen fighting on a grand scale in the battles of
+Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Later, the restless genius of travel had
+taken hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward
+across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and
+looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and
+learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering
+fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible
+beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all
+this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston
+was, to him, as the return of the mighty Ulysses himself.
+
+For a change was coming over the boy. He began to weary of fable and
+cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was
+growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been
+unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this
+increase of stature had come a listlessness and languor which troubled
+Lady Calmady. The boy was sweet-tempered enough, had his hours, indeed,
+of overflowing fun and high spirits. Still he was restless and tired
+easily of each occupation in turn. He developed a disquieting relish
+for solitude; and took to camping-out on one of the broad window-seats
+of the Long Gallery, in company with volumes of Captain Cook's and
+Hakluyt's voyages, old-time histories of sport and natural history; not
+to mention Robinson Crusoe and the merry but doubtfully decent pages of
+Geoffrey Gambado. And his mother noted, not without a sinking of the
+heart, that the window-seat, which in his solitary moods Dickie most
+frequented, was precisely that one of the eastern bay which
+commanded--beyond the smooth, green expanse and red walls of the
+troco-ground--a good view of the grass ride, running parallel with the
+lime avenue, along which the horses from the racing stables were taken
+out and back, morning and evening, to the galloping ground. Then fears
+began to assail Katherine that the boy's childhood, the content and
+repose of it, were nearly past. Small wonder that her heart should
+sink!
+
+On the day of her brother's return, Katherine, after rather anxious
+search, so found Richard. He was standing on the book-strewn
+window-seat. He had pushed open the tall narrow casement and leaned
+out. The April afternoon was fitfully bright. A rainbow spanned the
+landscape, from the Long Water in the valley to the edge of the forest
+crowning the table-land. Here and there showers of rain fell, showing
+white against huge masses of purple cloud piled up along the horizon.
+
+And as Katherine drew near, threading her way carefully between the
+Chinese cabinets, oriental jars, and many quaint treasures furnishing
+the end of the great room, she saw that, along the grass ride, some
+twenty race-horses, came streeling homeward in single file--a long line
+of brown, chestnut, black, and of the raw yellows and scarlets of
+horse-clothing against the delicate green of springing turf and opening
+leaves. Beside them, clad in pepper-and-salt mixture, breeches and
+gaiters complete, Mr. Chifney pricked forward soberly on his handsome
+gray cob. The boys called to one another now and then, admonished a
+fretful horse breaking away from the string. One of them whistled
+shrilly a few bars of that then popular but undistinguished tune, "Pop
+goes the weazel." And Richard craned far out, steadying himself against
+the stone mullion on either side with uplifted hands, heedless alike of
+his mother's presence and of the heavy drops of rain which splattered
+in at the open casement.
+
+"Dickie, Dickie," Katherine called, in swift anxiety. "Be careful. You
+will fall."
+
+She came close, putting her arm round him. "You reckless darling," she
+went on; "don't you see how dangerous the least slip would be?"
+
+The boy straightened himself and looked round at her. His blue eyes
+were alight. All the fitful brightness, all the wistful charm of the
+April evening was in his face.
+
+"But it's the only place where I can see them, and they're such
+beauties," he said. "And I want to see them so much. You know we always
+miss them somehow, mummy, when we go out."
+
+Katherine was off her guard. Three separate strains of feeling
+influenced her just then. First, her growing recognition of the change
+in Richard, of that passing away of childhood which could not but make
+for difficulty and, in a sense, for pain. Secondly, the natural
+excitement of her brother's homecoming, disturbing the monotony of her
+daily life, bringing, along with very actual joy, memories of a past,
+well-beloved yet gone beyond recall. Lastly, the practical and
+immediate fear that Dickie had come uncommonly near tumbling
+incontinently out of the window. And so, being moved, she held the boy
+tightly and answered rather at random, thereby provoking fate.
+
+"Yes, my dearest, I know we always miss them somehow when we go out. It
+is best so. But do pray be more careful with these high windows."
+
+"Oh! I'm all right--I'm careful enough." His glance had gone back to
+where the last of the horses passed out of sight behind the red wall of
+the gardens. "But why is it best so? Ah! they're gone!" he exclaimed.
+
+Katherine sat down on the window-seat, and Richard, clinging on to the
+window-ledge, while she still held him, lowered himself into a sitting
+position beside her.
+
+"Thank you, mummy," he said. And the words cut her. They came so often
+in each day, and always with the same little touch of civil dignity.
+The courtesy of Richard's recognition of help given, failed to comfort
+her for the fact that help was so constantly required. Lady Calmady's
+sense of rebellion arose and waxed strong whenever she heard those
+thanks.
+
+"Mother," he went on, "I want to ask you something. You won't mind?"
+
+"Do I ever mind you questioning me?" Yet she felt a certain tightening
+about her heart.
+
+"Ah, but this is different! I've wanted to for a long while, but I did
+not know if I ought--and yet I did not quite like to ask Auntie Marie
+or Julius. And, of course, one doesn't speak to the servants about
+anything of that sort."
+
+Richard's curly head went up with a fine, little air of pride as he
+said the last few words. His mother smiled at him. There was no doubt
+as to her son's breeding.
+
+"Well, what then?" she said.
+
+"I want to know--you're sure you don't mind--why you dislike the
+horses, and never go to the stables or take me there? If the horses are
+wrong, why do we keep them? And if they're not wrong, why, mother,
+don't you see, we may enjoy them, mayn't we?"
+
+He flushed, looking up at her, spoke coaxingly, merrily, a trifle
+embarrassed by his own temerity, yet keen to prove his point and
+acquire possession of this so coveted joy.
+
+Katherine hesitated. She was tempted to put aside his question with
+some playful excuse. And yet, where was the use? The question must
+inevitably be answered one day; and Katherine, as had been said, was
+moved just now, dumbness of long habit somewhat melted. Perhaps this
+was the appointed time. She drew her arm from around the boy and took
+both his hands in hers.
+
+"My dearest," she said, "our keeping the horses is not wrong. But--one
+of the horses killed your father."
+
+Richard's lips parted. His eyes searched hers.
+
+"But how?" he asked presently.
+
+"He was trying it at a fence, and it came down with him--and trampled
+him."
+
+There was a pause. At last the boy asked rather breathlessly: "Was he
+killed then, mother, at once?"
+
+It had been Katharine's intention to state the facts simply, gravely,
+and without emotion. But to speak of these things, after so long
+silence, proved more trying than she had anticipated. The scene in the
+red drawing-room, the long agony of waiting and of farewell rose up
+before her after all these years with a vividness and poignancy that
+refused to be gain-said.
+
+"No," she answered, "he lived four days. He spoke to me of many things
+he wished to do. And--I have done them all, I think. He spoke to me of
+you----" Katherine closed her eyes. "The boy might care for the
+stables. The boy must ride straight." For the moment she could not look
+at Richard, knowing that which she must see. The irony of those
+remembered words appeared too great.--"But he suffered," she went on
+brokenly, "he suffered--ah! my dear----"
+
+"Mummy, darling mummy, don't look like that!" Dickie cried. He wrenched
+his hands from her grasp and threw his arms impulsively about her neck.
+"Don't--it hurts me. And--and, after all," he added, reasoningly,
+consolingly, "it wasn't one of these horses, you know. They've never
+done anybody any harm. It was an accident. There must always be
+accidents sometimes, mustn't there? And then, you see, it all happened
+long, long ago. It must have, for I don't remember anything about it.
+It must have happened when I was a baby."
+
+"Alas, no," Katherine exclaimed, wrung by the pathos of his innocent
+egoism; "it happened even before then, my dearest, before you were
+born."
+
+With the unconscious arrogance of childhood, Richard had, so far, taken
+his mother's devotion very much as a matter of course. He had never
+doubted that he was, and always had been, the inevitable centre of all
+her interests. So now, her words and her bearing, bringing--in as far
+as he grasped them--the revelation of aspects of her life quite
+independent of his all-important, little self, staggered him. For the
+first time poor Dickie realised that even one's own mother, be she
+never so devoted, is not her child's exclusive and wholly private
+property, but has a separate existence, joys and sorrows apart.
+Instinctively he took his arms from about her neck and backed away into
+the angle of the window-seat, regarding her with serious and somewhat
+startled attention. And, doing so, he for the first time realised
+consciously something more, namely, the greatness of her beauty.
+
+For the years had dealt kindly with Katherine Calmady. Not the great
+sorrows of life, or its great sacrifices, but fretfulness, ignoble
+worries, sordid cares, are that which draw lines upon a woman's face
+and harshen her features. At six and thirty Lady Calmady's skin was
+smooth and delicate, her colour, still clear and softly bright. Her
+hair, though somewhat darker than of old, was abundant. Still she wore
+it rolled up and back from her forehead, showing the perfect oval of
+her face. Her eyes, too, were darker; and the expression of them had
+become profound--the eyes of one who has looked on things which may not
+be told and has chosen her part. Her bosom had become a little fuller;
+but the long, inward curve of her figure below it to the round and
+shapely waist, and the poise of her rather small hips, was lithe and
+free as ever. While there was that enchanting freshness about her which
+is more than the mere freshness of youth or of physical health--which
+would seem, indeed, to be the peculiar dowry of those women who, having
+once known love in all its completeness and its strength, of choice
+live ever afterwards in perfect chastity of act and thought.
+
+And a perception not only of the grace of her person, as she sat
+sideways on the window-seat in her close-fitting, gray gown, with its
+frilled lace collar and ruffles at the wrists, came to Richard now. He
+perceived something of this more intimate and subtle charm which
+belonged to her. He was enthralled by the clear sweetness, as of dewy
+grass newly turned by the scythe, which always clung about her, and by
+the whispering of her silken garments when she moved. A sudden
+reverence for her came upon him, as though, behind her gracious and so
+familiar figure, he apprehended that which belonged to a region
+superior, almost divine. And then he was seized--it is too often the
+fate of worshippers--with jealousy of that past of hers of which he had
+been, until now, ignorant. And yet another emotion shook him, for, in
+thus realising and differentiating her personality, he had grown
+vividly, almost painfully, conscious of his own.
+
+He turned away, laying his cheek against the stone window-ledge, while
+the drops of a passing scud of rain beat in on his hot face.
+
+"Then--then my father never saw me," he exclaimed vehemently. And,
+after a moment's pause, added, "I am glad of that--very glad."
+
+"Ah! But, my dearest," Lady Calmady cried, bewildered and aghast, "you
+don't know what you are saying--think."
+
+Richard kept his face to the splashing rain.
+
+"I don't want to say anything wrong; but," he repeated, "I am glad."
+
+He turned to her, his lips quivering a little, and a desolate
+expression in his eyes, which told Katherine, with only too bitter
+assurance, that his childhood and the repose of it were indeed over and
+gone.
+
+She held out her arms to him in silent invitation, and drew the dear
+curly head on to her bosom.
+
+"You're not displeased with me, mummy?"
+
+"Does this seem as if I was displeased?" she asked.
+
+Then they sat silent once more, Katherine swaying a little as she held
+him, soothing him almost as in his baby days.
+
+"I won't lean out of the window again," he said presently, with a sigh
+of comfort. "I promise that."
+
+"There's a darling. But I am afraid we must go. Uncle Roger will be
+here soon."
+
+The boy raised his head.
+
+"Mother," he said quickly, "will you send Clara, please, to put away
+these books? And may I have Winter to fetch me? I--I'm tired. If you
+don't mind? I don't care to walk."
+
+Yet, since happily at thirteen Richard's moods were still as many and
+changeful as the aspects of that same April day, he enjoyed some
+royally unclouded hours before he--most unwillingly--retired to bed
+that night. For on close acquaintance the great Ulysses proved a very
+satisfactory hero. Roger Ormiston's character had consolidated. It was
+to some purpose that he had put away the pleasant follies of his youth.
+He looked out now with a coolness and patience, born of wide experience,
+upon men and upon affairs. He had ceased to lose either his temper or
+his head. Acquiescing with undismayed and cheerful common sense in
+the fact that life, as we know it, is but a sorry business, and that
+rough things must of necessity be done and suffered every day, he had
+developed an active--though far from morbidly sentimental--compassion
+for the individual, man and beast alike. Not that Colonel Ormiston
+formulated all that, still less held forth upon it. He was content, as
+is so many another Englishman, to be a dumb and practical philosopher--for
+which those who have lived with philosophers of the eloquent sort will
+unquestionably give thanks, knowing, to their sorrow, how often
+handsome speech is but a cloak to hide incapacity of honest doing.
+
+And so, after dinner, under plea of an imperative need of cigars,
+Ormiston had borne Dickie off to the Gun-Room; and there, in the
+intervals of questioning him a little about his tastes and occupations,
+had told him stories many and great. For he wanted to get hold of the
+boy and judge of what stuff he was made. Like all sound and
+healthy-minded men he had an inherent suspicion of the abnormal. He
+could not but fear that persons unusually constituted in body must be
+the victims of some corresponding crookedness of spirit. But as the
+evening drew on he became easy on this point. Whatever Richard's
+physical infirmity, his nature was wholesome enough. Therefore when, at
+close upon ten o'clock, Lady Calmady arrived in person to insist that
+Dickie must go, there and then, straight to bed, she found a pleasant
+scene awaiting her.
+
+The square room was gay with lamplight and firelight, which brought
+into strong relief the pictures of famous horses and trophies of
+old-time weapons--matchlocks, basket-handled swords, and neat
+silver-hilted rapiers, prettiest of toys with which to pink your
+man--that decorated its white-paneled walls.
+
+Ormiston stood with his back to the fire, one heel on the fender, his
+broad shoulders resting against the high chimneypiece, his head bent
+forward as he looked down, in steady yet kindly scrutiny, at the boy.
+His face was tanned by the sun and wind of the long sea voyage--people
+still came home from India by the Cape--till his hair and moustache
+showed pale against his bronzed skin. And to Richard, listening and
+watching from the deep armchair drawn up at right angles to the hearth,
+he appeared as a veritable demigod, master of the secrets of life and
+death--beheld, moreover, through an atmosphere of fragrant tobacco
+smoke, curiously intoxicating to unaccustomed nostrils. Dickie had
+tucked himself into as small a space as possible, to make room for
+young Camp, who lay outstretched beside him. The bull-dog's great
+underhung jaw and pendulous, wrinkled cheeks rested on the arm of the
+chair, as he stared and blinked rather sullenly at the fire--moved and
+choked a little, slipping off unwillingly to sleep, to wake with a
+start, to stare and blink once more. The embroidered _couvre-pieds_,
+which Dickie had spread across him, gathering the top edge of it up
+under the front of his Eton jacket, offered luxurious bedding. But Camp
+was a typical conservative, slow-witted, stubborn against the ingress
+of a new idea. This tall, somewhat masterful stranger must prove
+himself a good man and true--according to bull-dog understanding of
+those terms--before he could hope to gain entrance to that faithful,
+though narrow heart.
+
+Ormiston meanwhile, finely contemptuous of canine criticism, greeted
+his sister cheerily.
+
+"You're bound to give us a little law to-night, Kitty," he said,
+holding out his hand to her. "We won't break rules and indulge in
+unbridled license as to late hours again, will we, Dick? But, you see,
+we've both been doing a good deal, one way and another, since we last
+met, and there were arrears of conversation to make up."--He smiled
+very charmingly at Lady Calmady, and his fingers closed firmly on her
+hand.--"We've been getting on famously, notwithstanding our long
+separation." He looked down at Richard again. "Fast friends, already,
+and mean to remain so, don't we, old chap?"
+
+Thereupon Lady Calmady's soul received much comfort. Her pride was
+always on the alert, fiercely sensitive concerning Richard. And the joy
+of this meeting had, till now, an edge of jealous anxiety to it. If
+Roger did not take to the boy, then--deeply though she loved him--Roger
+must go. For the same elements were constant in Katherine Calmady. Not
+all the discipline of thirteen years had tamed the hot blood in her
+which made her order out the Clown for execution. But as Ormiston
+spoke, her face softened, her eyes grew luminous and smiled back at him
+with an exquisite gladness. The soft gloom of her black velvet dress
+emphasised the warm, golden whiteness of her bare shoulders and arms.
+Ormiston seeing her just then, understanding something of the drama of
+her thought, was moved from his habitual cool indifference of bearing.
+
+"Katherine," he said, "do you know you take one rather by surprise.
+Upon my word you're more beautiful than ever."
+
+And Richard's clear voice rang out eagerly from the depths of the big
+chair--
+
+"Yes--yes--isn't she, Uncle Roger--isn't she--delicious?"
+
+The man's smile broadened almost to laughter.
+
+"You young monkey," he said very gently; "so you have discovered that
+fact already, have you? Well, so much the better. It's a safe basis to
+start from; don't you think so, Kitty?"
+
+But Lady Calmady drew away her hand. The blood had rushed into her face
+and neck. Her beauty, now, for so long, had seemed a negligible
+quantity, a thing that had outlasted its need and use--since he who had
+so rejoiced in it was dead. What is the value of ever so royal a crown
+when the throne it represents has fallen to ruin? And yet, being very
+much a woman, those words of praise came altogether sweetly to
+Katherine from the lips of her brother and her son. She moved away,
+embarrassed, not quite mistress of herself, sat down on the arm of
+Richard's chair, leaned across him and patted the bull-dog--who raised
+his heavy head with a grunt, and slapped Dickie smartly in the stomach
+with his tail, by way of welcome.
+
+"You dear foolish creatures," she said, "pray talk of something more
+profitable. I am growing old, and, in some ways, I am rather thankful
+for it. All the same, Dickie, darling, you positively must and shall go
+to bed."
+
+But Colonel Ormiston interrupted her. He spoke with a trace of
+hesitation, turning to the fireplace and flicking the ash off the end
+of his cigar.
+
+"By the bye, Katherine, how's Mary Cathcart? Have you seen her lately?"
+
+"Yes, last week."
+
+"Then she's not gone the way of all flesh and married?"
+
+"No," Lady Calmady answered. She bent a little lower, tracing out the
+lines on the dog's wrinkled forehead with her finger. "Several men have
+asked her to marry. But there is only one man in the world, I fancy,
+whom Mary would ever care to marry--poor Camp, did I tickle you?--and
+he, I believe, has not asked her yet."
+
+"Ah! there," Ormiston exclaimed quickly, "you are mistaken."
+
+"Am I?" Katherine said. "I have great faith in Mary. I suppose she was
+too wise to accept even him, being not wholly convinced of his love."
+
+Lady Calmady raised her eyes. Ormiston looked very keenly at her. And
+Richard, watching them, felt his breath come rather short with
+excitement, for he understood that his mother was speaking in riddles.
+He observed, moreover, that Colonel Ormiston's face had grown pale for
+all its sunburn.
+
+"And so," Katherine went on, "I think the man in question had better be
+quite sure of his own heart before he offers it to Mary Cathcart
+again."
+
+Ormiston flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. He came and stood
+in front of Richard.
+
+"Look here, old chap," he said, "what do you say to our driving over to
+Newlands to-morrow? You can set me right if I've forgotten any of the
+turns in the road, you know. And you and Miss Cathcart are great chums,
+aren't you?"
+
+"Mother, may I go?" the boy asked.
+
+Lady Calmady kissed his forehead.
+
+"Yes, my dearest," she said. "I will trust you and Uncle Roger to take
+care of each other for once. You may go."
+
+The immediate consequence of all which was, that Richard went to bed
+that night with a brain rather dangerously active and eyes rather
+dangerously bright. So that when sleep at last visited him, it came
+burdened with dreams, in which the many impressions and emotions of the
+day took altogether too lively a part, causing him to turn restlessly
+to and fro, and throw his arms out wide over the cool linen sheets and
+pillow.
+
+For there was new element in Dickie's dreams to-night:--namely, a
+recurrent distress of helplessness and incapacity of movement, and
+therefore of escape, in the presence of some on-coming multitudinous
+terror. He was haunted, moreover, by a certain stanza of the ballad of
+Chevy Chase. It had given him a peculiar feeling, sickening yet
+fascinating, ever since he could remember first to have read it, a
+feeling which caused him to dread reading it beforehand, yet made him
+turn back to it again and again. And to-night, sometimes Richard was
+himself, sometimes his personality seemed merged in that of
+Witherington, the crippled fighting-man, of whose maiming and deadly
+courage that stanza tells. And the battle was long and fierce, as from
+out a background of steeple-shaped, honey-combed rocks and sparse trees
+with large golden leaves--like those on the panels of the great,
+lacquered cabinets in the Long Gallery--innumerable hordes of fanatic
+Chinamen poured down on him, a hideous bedizenment of vermilion
+war-devils painted on their blue tunics and banners and shields. And
+he, Richard,--or was it he, Witherington?--alone facing them all,--they
+countless in number, always changing yet always the same. From under
+their hard, upturned hats, a peacock feather erect in each, the cruel,
+oblique-eyed, impassive faces stared at him. They pressed him back and
+back against the base of a seven-storied pagoda, the wind bells of
+which jangled far above him from the angles of its tiers of fluted
+roofs. And the sky was black and polished. Yet it was broad, glaring
+daylight, every object fearfully distinct. And he was fixed there,
+unable to get away because--yes, of course, he was Witherington, so
+there was no need of further explanation of that inability of escape.
+
+And still, at the same time, he could see Chifney on the handsome gray
+cob, trotting soberly along the green ride, beside the long string of
+race-horses coming home from exercise. The young leaves were fragile
+and green now, not sparse and metallic, and the April rain splashed in
+his face. He tried to call out to Tom Chifney, but the words died in
+his throat. If they would only put him on one of those horses! He knew
+he could ride, and so be safe and free. He called again. That time his
+voice came. They must hear. Were they not his own servants, after all,
+and his own horses--or would be soon, when he was grown up? But neither
+the trainer, nor the boys so much as turned their heads; and the living
+ribbon of brown and chestnut swept on and away out of sight. No one
+would heed him, no one would hearken to his cry.
+
+Once his mother and some man, whom he knew yet did not know, passed by
+him hand in hand. She wore a white dress, and smiled with a look of
+ineffable content. Her companion was tall, gracious in bearing and
+movement, but unsubstantial, a luminous shadow merely. Richard could
+not see his face. Yet he knew the man was of near kin to him. And to
+them he tried to speak. But it was useless. For now he was not Richard
+any more. He was not even Witherington, the crippled fighting-man of
+the Chevy Chase ballad. He was--he was the winged sea-gull, with wild,
+pale eyes, hiding--abject yet fierce--among the vegetable beds in the
+Brockhurst kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of
+snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston, calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle
+insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered up and looked at the bird, and it
+crawled away among the cabbages ignominiously, covered with the shame
+of its incompleteness and its fallen estate.
+
+And then from out the honey-combed rocks, under the black, polished
+sky, the blue tunicked Chinamen swept down on Richard again with the
+maddening horror of infinite number. They crushed in upon him, nearer
+and nearer, pressing him back against the wall of that evil pagoda. The
+air was hot and musky with their breath and thick with the muffled roar
+of their countless footsteps. And they came right in on him, trampling
+him down, suffocating, choking him with the heat of them and the dead
+weight.
+
+Shouting aloud--as it seemed to him--in angry terror, the boy woke. He
+sat up trembling, wet with perspiration, bewildered by the struggle and
+the wild phantasmagoria of his dream. He pulled open the neck of his
+nightshirt, leaned his head against the cool brass rail of the back of
+the bedstead, while he listened with growing relief to the rumble of
+the wind in the chimney, and the swish of the rain against the
+casements, and watched the narrow line of light under the door of his
+mother's room.
+
+Yes, he was Richard Calmady, after all, here in his own sheltered
+world, among those who had loved and served him all his life. Nothing
+hurtful could reach him here, nothing of which he need be afraid. There
+was no real meaning in that ugly dream.
+
+And then Dickie paused a moment, still sitting up in the warm darkness,
+pressing his hands down on the mattress on either side to keep himself
+from slipping. For involuntarily he recalled the feeling which had
+prompted his declaration that he was glad his father had never seen
+him; recalled his unwillingness to walk, lest he should meet Ormiston
+unexpectedly; recalled the instinct which, even during that glorious
+time in the Gun-Room, had impelled him to keep the embroidered
+_couvre-pieds_ carefully over his legs and feet. And, recalling these
+things, poor Dickie arrived at conclusions regarding himself which he
+had happily avoided arriving at before. For they were harsh
+conclusions, causing him to cower down in the bed, and bury his face in
+the pillows to stifle the sound of the tearing sobs which would come.
+
+Alas! was there not only too real a meaning in that same ugly dream and
+that shifting of personality? He understood, while his body quivered
+with the anguish of it, that he had more in common with, and was
+nearer, far nearer, to the maimed fighting-man of the old ballad, even
+to the poor seagull robbed of its power of flight, than to all those
+dear people whose business in life it seemed to pet and amuse him, and
+to minister to his every want--to the handsome soldier uncle, whose
+home-coming had so excited him, to Julius March, his indulgent tutor,
+to Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, his delightful companion, to Clara, his
+obedient playfellow, to brown-eyed Mary Cathcart, and even to his
+lovely mother herself!
+
+Thus did the bitter winds of truth, which blow forever across the
+world, first touch Richard Calmady, cutting his poor boyish pride as
+with a whip. But he was very young. And the young, mercifully, know no
+such word as the inevitable; so that the wind of truth is ever tempered
+for them--the first smart of it over--by the sunshine of ignorant and
+unlimited hope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CONCERNING THAT WHICH, THANK GOD, HAPPENS ALMOST EVERY DAY
+
+
+The merry spring sky was clear, save in the south where a vast
+perspective of dappled cloud lay against it, leaving winding rivers of
+blue here and there, as does ribbed sand for the incoming tide. As the
+white gate of the inner park--the gray unpainted palings ranging far
+away to right and left--swung to behind them, and Henry the groom,
+after a smart run, clambered up into his place again beside Camp on the
+back seat of the double dog-cart, Richard's spirits rose. Straight
+ahead stretched out the long vista of that peculiar glory of
+Brockhurst, its avenue of Scotch firs. The trunks of them, rough-barked
+and purple below, red, smooth and glistering above, shot up some thirty
+odd feet--straight as the pillars of an ancient temple--before the
+branches, sweeping outward and downward, met, making a whispering,
+living canopy overhead, through which the sunshine fell in tremulous
+shafts, upon the shining coats and gleaming harness of the horses, upon
+Ormiston's clear-cut, bronzed face and upright figure, and upon the
+even, straw-coloured gravel of the road. The said road is raised by
+about three feet above the level of the land on either side. On the
+left, the self-sown firs grow in close ranks. The ground below them is
+bare but for tussocks of coarse grass and ruddy beds of fallen fir
+needles. On the right, the fir wood is broken by coppices of
+silver-stemmed birches, and spaces of heather--that shows a
+purple-brown against the gray of the reindeer moss out of which it
+springs. Tits swung and frolicked among the tree-tops, and a jay flew
+off noisily with a flash of azure wing-coverts and volley of harsh
+discordant cries.
+
+The rapid movement, the moist, pungent odour of the woodland, the
+rhythmical trot of the horses, the rattle of the splinter-bar chains as
+the traces slackened going downhill, above all the presence of the man
+beside him, were pleasantly stimulating to Richard Calmady. The boy was
+still a prey to much innocent enthusiasm. It appeared to him, watching
+Ormiston's handling of the reins and whip, there was nothing this man
+could not do, and do skilfully, yet all with the same easy unconcern.
+Indeed, the present position was so agreeable to him that Dickie's
+spirits would have risen to an unusual height, but for a certain
+chastening of the flesh in the shape of the occasional pressure of a
+broad strap against his middle, which brought him unwelcome remembrance
+of recent discoveries it was his earnest desire to ignore, still better
+to forget.
+
+For just at starting there had been a rather bad moment. Winter, having
+settled him on the seat of the dog-cart, was preparing to tuck him in
+with many rugs, when Ormiston said--
+
+"Look here, dear old chap, I've been thinking about this, and upon my
+word you don't seem to me very safe. You see this is a different matter
+to your donkey-chair, or the pony-carriage. There's no protection at
+the side, and if the horses shied or anything--well, you'd be in the
+road. And I can't afford to spill you the first time we go out
+together, or there'd be a speedy end of all our fun."
+
+Richard tried to emulate his uncle's cool indifference, and take the
+broad strap as a matter of course. But he was glad the tongue of the
+buckle slipped so directly into place; and that Henry's attention was
+engaged with the near horse, which fretted at standing; and that
+Leonard, the footman, was busy making Camp jump up at the back; and
+that his mother, who had been watching him from the lowest of the wide
+steps, turned away and went up to the flight to join Julius March
+standing under the gray arcade. As the horses sprang forward,
+clattering the little pebbles of the drive against the body of the
+carriage, and swung away round the angle of the house, Katherine came
+swiftly down the steps again smiling, kissing her hand to him. Still,
+the strap hurt--not poor Dickie's somewhat ill-balanced body, to which
+in truth it lent an agreeable sense of security, but his, just then,
+all too sensitive mind. So that, notwithstanding a fine assumption of
+gaiety, as he kissed his hand in return, he found the dear vision of
+his mother somewhat blurred by foolish tears which he had resolutely to
+wink away.
+
+But now that disquieting incident was left nearly ten minutes behind.
+The last park gate and its cluster of mellow-tinted thatched cottages
+was past. Not only out-of-doors and all the natural exhilaration of it,
+but the spectacle of the world beyond the precincts of the park--into
+which world he, in point of fact, so rarely penetrated--wooed him to
+interest and enjoyment. To Dickie, whose life through his mother's
+jealous tenderness and his own physical infirmity had been so
+singularly circumscribed, there was an element, slightly pathetic, of
+discovery and adventure in this ordinary afternoon drive.
+
+He did not want to talk. He was too busy simply seeing, everything food
+for those young eyes and brain so greedy of incident and of beauty. He
+sat upright and stared at the passing show.--At the deep lane, its
+banks starred with primroses growing in the hollows of the gnarled
+roots of oaks and ash trees. At Sandyfield rectory, deep-roofed,
+bow-windowed, the red walls and tiles of it half smothered in ivy and
+coton-easter. At the low, squat-towered, Georgian church, standing in
+its acre of close-packed graveyard, which is shadowed by yew trees and
+by the clump of three enormous Scotch firs in the rectory garden
+adjoining. At the Church Farm, just beyond--a square white house, the
+slated roofs of it running up steeply to a central block of chimneys,
+it having, in consequence, somewhat the effect of a monster
+extinguisher. At the rows of pale, wheat stacks, raised on granite
+straddles; at the prosperous barns, yards, and stables, built of wood
+on brick foundations, that surround it, presenting a mass of rich,
+solid colour and of noisy, crowded, animal life. At the fields, plough
+and pasture, marked out by long lines of hedgerow trees, broken by
+coppices--these dashed with tenderest green--stretching up and back to
+the dark purple-blue range of the moorland. At scattered cottages, over
+the gates of whose gardens gay with daffodils and polyanthus, groups of
+little girls and babies, in flopping sunbonnets and scanty lilac
+pinafores, stared back at the passing carriage, and then bobbed the
+accustomed curtsy. In the said groups were no boys, save of infant
+years. The boys were away shepherding, or to plough, or bird-minding.
+For as yet education was free indeed--in the sense that you were free
+to take it, or leave it, as suited your pocket and your fancy.
+
+Richard stared too at the pleasant, furze-dotted commons, spinning away
+to right and left as the horses trotted sharply onward--commons whereon
+meditative donkeys endured rather than enjoyed existence, after the
+manner of their kind; and prodigiously large families of yellow-gray
+goslings streeled after the flocks of white geese, across spaces of
+fresh sprung grass around shallow ponds, in which the blue and dapple
+of the sky was reflected. He stared at Sandyfield village too--a
+straight street of detached houses, very diverse in colour and in
+shape, standing back, for the most part, amid small orchards and
+gardens that slope gently up from the brook, which last, backed, here
+by a row of fine elms, there by one of Lombardy poplars, borders the
+road. Three or four shops, modest in size as they are ambitious in the
+variety of objects offered for sale in them, advance their windows
+boldly. So does the yellow-washed inn, the Calmady arms displayed upon
+its swinging sign-board. A miller's tented waggon, all powdery with
+flour, and its team of six horses, brave with brass harness and bells,
+a timber-carriage, and a couple of spring-carts, were drawn up on the
+half-moon of gravel before the porch; while, from out the open door,
+came a sound of voices and odour of many pipes and much stale beer.
+
+And Richard had uninterrupted leisure to bestow on all this seeing, for
+his companion, Colonel Ormiston, was preoccupied and silent. Once or
+twice he looked down at the boy as though suddenly remembering his
+presence and inquired if he was "all right." But it was not until they
+had crossed the long, white-railed bridge, at the end of Sandyfield
+street--which spans not only the little brown river overhung by
+black-stemmed alders, but a bit of marsh, reminiscent of the ancient
+ford, lush with water grasses, beds of king-cups, and broad-leaved
+docks--not until then did Colonel Ormiston make sustained effort at
+conversation. Beyond the bridge the road forks.
+
+"Left to Newlands, isn't it?" he asked sharply.
+
+Then, as the carriage swept round the turn, he woke up from his long
+reverie; waking Richard up also, from his long dream of mere seeing, to
+human drama but dimly apprehended close there at his side.
+
+"Oh, well, well!" the man exclaimed, throwing back his head in sharp
+impatience, as a horse will against the restraint of the bearing-rein.
+He raised his eyebrows, while his lips set in a smile the reverse of
+gay. Then he looked down at Richard again, an unwonted softness in his
+expression.
+
+"Been happy?" he said. "Enjoyed your drive? That's right. You
+understand the art of being really good company, Dick."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Allowing other people to be just as bad company as they like."
+
+"I--I don't see how you could be bad company," Dickie said, flushing at
+the audacity of his little compliment.
+
+"Don't you, dear old chap? Well, that's very nice of you. All the same,
+I find, at times, I can be precious bad company to myself."
+
+"Oh! but I don't see how," the boy argued, his enthusiasm protesting
+against all possibility of default in the object of it. Richard wanted
+to keep his hands down,--unconsciousness, if only assumed, told for
+personal dignity--but in the agitation of protest, spite of himself, he
+laid hold of the top edge of that same chastening strap. "It must be so
+awfully jolly to be like you--able to do everything and go everywhere.
+There must be such a lot to think about."
+
+The softness was still upon Ormiston's face. "Such a lot?" he said. "A
+jolly lot too much, believe me, very often, Dick."
+
+He looked away up the copse-bordered road, over the ears of the
+trotting horses.
+
+"You've read the story of Blue Beard and that unpleasant locked-up room
+of his, where the poor little wives hung all of a row? Well, I'm sorry
+to say, Dick, most men when they come to my age have a room of that
+sort. It's an inhospitable place. One doesn't invite one's friends to
+dine and smoke there. At least no gentleman does. I've met one or two
+persons who set the door open and rather gloried in inviting
+inspection--but they were blackguards and cads. They don't count. Still
+each of us is obliged to go in there sometimes himself. I tell you it's
+anything but lively. I've been in there just now."
+
+The dappled cloud creeping upward from the southern horizon veiled the
+sun, the light of which grew pale and thin. The scent of the larch
+wood, on the right, hung in the air. Richard's eyes were wide with
+inquiry. His mind suffered growing-pains, as young minds of any
+intellectual and poetic worth needs must. The possibility of moral
+experience, incalculable in extent as that golden-gray outspread of
+creeping, increasing vapour overhead, presented itself to him. The
+vastness of life touched him to fear. He struggled to find a limit,
+clothing his effort in childish realism of statement.
+
+"But in that locked-up room, Uncle Roger, you can't have dead
+women--dead wives."
+
+Ormiston laughed quietly.
+
+"You hit out pretty straight from the shoulder, master Dick," he said.
+"Happily I can reassure you on one point. All manner of things are hung
+up in there--some ugly--almost all ugly, now, to my eyes, though some
+of them had charming ways with them once upon a time. But, I give you
+my word, neither ugly nor charming, dead nor alive, are there any
+wives."
+
+The boy considered a moment, then said stoutly, "I wouldn't go in there
+again. I'd lock the door and throw away the key."
+
+"Wait till your time comes! You'll find that is precisely what you
+can't do."
+
+"Then I'd fetch them out, once and for all, and bury them."
+
+The carriage had turned in at the lodge gate. Soon a long, low, white
+house and range of domed conservatories came into view.
+
+"Heroic remedies!" Ormiston remarked, amused at the boy's vehemence.
+"But no doubt they do succeed now and then. To tell you the truth,
+Dick, I have been thinking of something of the kind myself. Only I'm
+afraid I shall need somebody to help me in carrying out so extensive a
+funeral."
+
+"Anybody would be glad enough to help you," Richard declared, with a
+strong emphasis on the pronoun.
+
+"Ah! but the bother is anybody can't help one. Only one person in all
+this great rough and tumble of a world can really help one. And often
+one finds out who that person is a little bit too late. However, here
+we are. Perhaps we shall know more about it all in the next half hour,
+if these good people are at home."
+
+In point of fact the good people in question were not at home.
+Ormiston, holding reins and whip in one hand, felt for his card-case.
+
+"So we've had our journey for nothing you see, Dick," he said.
+
+And to Richard the words sounded regretful. Moreover, the drama of this
+expedition seemed to him shorn of its climax. He knew there should be
+something more, and pushed for it.
+
+"You haven't asked for Mary," he said. "And I thought we came on
+purpose to see Mary. She won't like us to go away like this. Do ask."
+
+Colonel Ormiston's expression altered, hardened. And Richard, in his
+present hypersensitive state, remembered the cool scrutiny bestowed on
+the winged sea-gull of his dream last night. This man had seemed so
+near him just now, while they talked. Suddenly he became remote again,
+all understanding of him shut away by that slight insolence of bearing.
+Still he did as Richard prayed him. Miss Cathcart was at home. She had
+just come in from riding.
+
+"Tell her Sir Richard Calmady is here, and would like, if he may, to
+see her."
+
+Without waiting for a reply, Ormiston unbuckled that same chastening
+strap silently, quickly. He got down and, coming round to the farther
+side of the carriage, lifted Richard out; while Camp, who had jumped
+off the back seat, stood yawning, whining a little, shaking his heavy
+head and wagging his tail in welcome on the door-step. With the
+bull-dog close at his heels, Ormiston carried the boy into the house.
+
+The inner doors were open, and, up the long, narrow, pleasantly
+fresh-tinted drawing-room, Mary Cathcart came to meet them. The folds
+of her habit were gathered up in one hand. In the other she carried a
+bunch of long-stalked, yellow and scarlet tulips. Her strong, supple
+figure stood out against the young green of the lawns and shrubberies,
+seen through the French windows behind her. She walked carefully, with
+a certain deliberation, thanks to her narrow habit and top-boots. The
+young lady carried her thirty-one years bravely. Her irregular features
+and large mouth had always been open to criticism. But her teeth, when
+her lips parted, were white and even, and her brown eyes frankly honest
+as ever.
+
+"Why, Dickie dear, it is simply glorious to have you and Camp paying
+visits on your own account."--Her speech broke into a little cry, while
+her fingers closed so tightly on the tulips that the brittle stalks
+snapped, and the gay-coloured bells of them hung limply, some falling
+on to the carpet about her feet. "Roger--Colonel Ormiston--I didn't
+know you were home--were here!" Her voice was uncontrollably glad.
+
+Still carrying the boy, Ormiston stood before her, observing her
+keenly. But he was no longer remote. His insolence, which, after all,
+may have been chiefly self-protective, had vanished.
+
+"I'm very sorry--I mean for those poor tulips. I came to pay my
+respects to Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart, and not finding them was preparing
+to drive humbly home again. But----" Certainly she carried her years
+well. She looked absurdly young. The brown and rose-red of her
+complexion was clear as that of the little maiden who had fought with,
+and overcome, and kissed the rough Welsh pony refusing the grip by the
+roadside long ago. The hint of a moustache emphasised the upturned
+corners of her mouth--but that was rather captivating. Her eyes danced,
+under eyelids which fluttered for the moment. She was not beautiful,
+not a woman to make men run mad. Yet the comeliness of her body, and
+the spirit to which that body served as index, was so unmistakably
+healthful, so sincere, that surely no sane man, once gathering her into
+his arms, need ask a better blessing.--"But," Ormiston went on, still
+watching her, "nothing would satisfy Dick but he must see you. With
+many injunctions regarding his safety, Katherine made him over to me
+for the afternoon. I'm on duty, you see. Where he goes, I'm bound to go
+also--even to the destruction of your poor tulips."
+
+Miss Cathcart made no direct answer.
+
+"Sit here, Dickie," she said, pointing to a sofa.
+
+"But you don't really mind our coming in, do you?" he asked, rather
+anxiously.
+
+The young lady placed herself beside him, drew his hand on to her knee,
+patted it gently.
+
+"Mind? No; on the whole, I don't think I do mind very much. In fact, I
+think I should probably have minded very much more if you had gone away
+without asking for me."
+
+"There, I told you so, Uncle Roger," the boy said triumphantly. Camp
+had jumped up on to the sofa too. He put his arm comfortably around the
+dog's neck. It was as well to acquire support on both sides, for the
+surface of the glazed chintz was slippery, inconveniently unsustaining
+to his equilibrium. "It's an awfully long time since I've seen Mary,"
+he continued, "more than three weeks."
+
+"Yes, an awfully long time," Ormiston echoed, "more than six years."
+
+"Dear Dickie," she said; "how pretty of you! Do you always keep count
+of my visits?"
+
+"Of course I do. They were about the best things that ever happened,
+till Uncle Roger came home."
+
+Forgetting herself, Mary Cathcart raised her eyes to Ormiston's in
+appeal. The boy's little declaration stirred all the latent motherhood
+in her. His fortunes at once passed so very far beyond, and fell so far
+short of, the ordinary lot. She wondered whether, and could not but
+trust that, this old friend and newcomer was not too self-centred, too
+hardened by ability and success to appreciate the intimate pathos of
+the position. Ormiston read and answered her thought.
+
+"Oh! we are going to do something to change all that," he said
+confidently. "We are going to enlarge our borders a bit; aren't we,
+Dick? Only, I think, we should manage matters much better if Miss
+Cathcart would help us, don't you?"
+
+Richard remembering the locked-up room of evil contents and that
+proposal of inclusive funeral rites, gave this utterance a wholly
+individual application. His face grew bright with intelligence. But,
+greatly restraining himself, he refrained from speech. All that had
+been revealed to him in confidence, and so his honour was engaged to
+silence.
+
+Ormiston pulled forward a chair and sat down by him, leaning forward,
+his hands clasped about one knee, while he gazed at the tulips
+scattered on the floor.
+
+"So tell Miss Cathcart we all want her to come over to Brockhurst just
+as often as she can," he continued, "and help us to make the wheels go
+round a little faster. Tell her we've grown very old, and discreet, and
+respectable, and that we are absolutely incapable of doing or saying
+anything foolish or naughty, which she would object to--and----"
+
+But Richard could restrain himself no longer. "Why don't you tell her
+yourself, Uncle Roger?"
+
+"Because, my dear old chap, a burnt child fears the fire. I tried to
+tell Miss Cathcart something once, long ago. She mayn't remember----"
+
+"She does remember," Mary said quietly, looking down at Richard's hand
+and patting it as it lay on her lap.
+
+"But she stopped me dead," Ormiston went on. "It was quite right of
+her. She gave the most admirable reasons for stopping me. Would you
+care to hear them?"
+
+"Oh! don't, pray don't," Mary murmured. "It is not generous."
+
+"Pardon me, your reasons were absolutely just--true in substance and in
+fact. You said I was a selfish, good-for-nothing spendthrift, and
+so----"
+
+"I was odious," she broke in. "I was a self-righteous little
+Pharisee--forgive me----"
+
+"Why--there's nothing to forgive. You spoke the truth."
+
+"I don't believe it," Richard cried, in vehement protest.
+
+"Dickie, you're a darling," Mary Cathcart said.
+
+Colonel Ormiston left off nursing his knee, and leaned a little further
+forward.
+
+"Well then, will you come over to Brockhurst very often, and help us to
+make the wheels go round, and cheer us all up, and do us no end of
+good, though--I am a selfish, good-for-nothing spendthrift? You see I
+run through the list of my titles again to make sure this transaction
+is fair and square and above-board."
+
+A silence followed, which appeared to Richard protracted to the point
+of agitation. He became almost distressingly conscious of the man's
+still, bronzed, resolute face on the one hand, of the woman's mobile,
+vivid, yet equally resolute face on the other, divining far more to be
+at stake than he had clear knowledge of. Tired and excited, his
+impatience touched on anger.
+
+"Say yes, Mary," he cried impulsively, "say yes. I don't see how
+anybody can want to refuse Uncle Roger anything."
+
+Miss Cathcart's eyes grew moist. She turned and kissed the boy.
+
+"I don't think--perhaps--Dickie, that I quite see either," she answered
+very gently.
+
+"Mary, you know what you've just said?" Ormiston's tone was stern. "You
+understand this little comedy? It means business. This time you've got
+to go the whole hog or none."
+
+She looked straight at him, and drew her breath in a long half-laughing
+sigh.
+
+"Oh, dear me! what a plague of a hurry you are in!" she said.
+"Well--then--then--I suppose I must--it is hardly a graceful
+expression, but it is of your choosing, not of mine--I suppose I must
+go the whole hog."
+
+Roger Ormiston rose, treading the fallen tulips under foot. And
+Richard, watching him, beheld that which called to his remembrance, not
+the hopeless and impotent battle under the black polished sky of his
+last night's dream, but the gallant stories he had heard, earlier last
+night, of the battles of Sobraon and Chillianwallah, of the swift
+dangers of sport, and large daring of travel. Here he beheld--so it
+seemed to his boyish thought--the aspect of a born conqueror, of the
+man who can serve and wait long for the good he desires, and who
+winning it, lays hold of it with fearless might. And this, while
+causing Richard an exquisite delight of admiration, caused him also a
+longing to share those splendid powers so passionate that it amounted
+to actual pain.
+
+Mary Cathcart's hand slid from under his hand. She too rose to her
+feet.
+
+"Then you have actually cared for me all along, all these years,"
+Ormiston declared in fierce joy.
+
+"Of course--who else could I care for? And--and--you've loved me,
+Roger, all the while?"
+
+And Ormiston answered "Yes,"--speaking the truth, though with a
+difference. There had been interludes that had contributed somewhat
+freely to the peopling of that same locked-up room. But it is possible
+for a man to love many times, yet always love one woman best.
+
+All this, however, Dickie did not know. He only knew they dazzled
+him--the man triumphantly strong, the woman so bravely glad. He could
+not watch them any longer. He went hot all over, and his heart beat. He
+felt strangely desolate too. They were far away from him in thought, in
+fact, though so close by. Dickie shut his eyes, put his arms round the
+bull-dog, pressed his face hard against the faithful beast's shoulder;
+while Camp, stretching his short neck to the uttermost, nuzzled against
+him and essayed to lick his cheek.
+
+Thus did Richard Calmady gain yet further knowledge of things as they
+are.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+WHICH SMELLS VERY VILELY OF THE STABLE
+
+
+April softened into May, and the hawthorns were in blossom before
+Richard passed any other very note-worthy milestone on the road of
+personal development. Then, greatly tempted, he committed a venial sin;
+received prompt and coarse chastisement; and, by means of the said
+chastisement, as is the merciful way of the Eternal Justice, found
+unhoped of emancipation.
+
+It happened thus. As the spring days grew warm Mademoiselle de
+Mirancourt failed somewhat. The darkness and penetrating chill of the
+English winter tried her, and this year her recuperative powers seemed
+sadly deficient. A fuller tide of life had pulsed through Brockhurst
+since Colonel Ormiston's arrival. The old stillness was departing, the
+old order changing. With that change Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had no
+quarrel, since, to her serene faith, all that came must, of necessity,
+come through a divine ordering and in conformity to a divine plan. Yet
+this more of activity and of movement strained her. The weekly drive
+over to Westchurch, to hear mass at the humble Catholic chapel tucked
+away in a side street, sorely taxed her strength. She returned
+fortified, her soul ravished by that heavenly love, which, in pure and
+innocent natures, bears such gracious kinship to earthly love. Yet in
+body she was outworn and weary. On such occasions she would rally
+Julius March, not without a touch of malice, saying:--
+
+"Ah! _tres cher ami_, had you only followed the ever blessed footsteps
+of those dear Oxford friends of yours and entered the fold of the true
+Church, what fatigue might you not now spare me--let alone the
+incalculable advantages to your own poor, charming, fatally darkened
+soul!"
+
+While Julius--who, though no less devout than of yore, was happily less
+fastidiously sensitive--would reply:--
+
+"But, dearest lady, had I followed the footsteps of my Oxford friends,
+remember I should not be at Brockhurst at all."
+
+"Clearly, then, everything is well ordered," she would say, folding her
+fragile hands upon her embroidery frame, "since it is altogether
+impossible we could do without you. Yet I regret for your soul. It is
+so capable of receiving illumination. You English--even the most
+finished among you--remain really deplorably stubborn, and nevertheless
+it is my fate perpetually to set my affections upon one or other of
+you."
+
+It followed that Katherine devoted much of her time to Mademoiselle de
+Mirancourt, walked slowly beside her up and down the sunny, garden
+paths sheltered by the high, red walls whereon the clematis and jasmine
+began to show for flower; or took her for quiet, little drives within
+the precincts of the park. They spoke much of Lucia St. Quentin, of
+Katherine's girlhood, and of those pleasant days in Paris long ago. And
+this brought soothing and comfort, not only to the old lady, but to the
+young lady also--and of soothing and comfort the latter stood in need
+just now.
+
+For it is harsh discipline even to a noble woman, whose life is still
+strong in her, to stand by and see another woman but a few years her
+junior entering on those joys which she has lost,--marriage, probably
+motherhood as well. Roger Ormiston's and Mary Cathcart's love-making
+was restrained and dignified. But the very calm of their attitude
+implied a security of happiness passing all need of advertisement. And
+Katherine was very far from grudging them this. She was not envious,
+still less jealous. She did not want to take anything of theirs; but
+she wanted, she sorely wanted, her own again. A word, a look, a certain
+quickness of quiet laughter, would pierce her with recollection. Once
+for her too, below the commonplaces of daily detail, flowed that same
+magic river of delight. But the springs of it had gone dry. Therefore
+it was a relief to be alone with Mademoiselle de Mirancourt--virgin and
+saint--and to speak with her of the days before she had sounded the
+lovely depths of that same magic flood--days when she had known of its
+existence only by the mirage, born of the dazzle of its waters, which
+plays over the innocent vacant spaces of a young girl's mind.
+
+It was a relief even, though of sterner quality, to go into the red
+drawing-room on the ground floor and pace there, her hands clasped
+behind her, her proud head bowed, by the half hour together. If
+personal joy is dead past resurrection, there is bitter satisfaction in
+realising to the full personal pain. The room was duly swept, dusted,
+casements set open to welcome breeze and sunshine, fires lighted in the
+grate. But no one ever sat there. It knew no cheerfulness of social
+intercourse. The crimson curtains and covers had become faded. They
+were not renewed. The furniture, save for the absence of the narrow
+bed, stood in precisely the same order as on the night when Sir Richard
+Calmady died. It was pushed back against the walls. And in the wide
+empty way between the two doors, Katherine paced, saturating all her
+being with thoughts of that which was, and must remain, wholly and
+inalienably her own--namely, her immense distress.
+
+And in this she took the more comfort, because something else, until
+now appearing wholly her own, was slipping a little away from her.
+Dickie's health had improved notably in the last few weeks. His
+listlessness had vanished, while his cheeks showed a wholesome warmth
+of colour. But his cry was ever. "Mother, Uncle Roger's going to such a
+place. He says he'll take me. I can go, can't I?" Or, "Mother, Mary's
+going to do such a thing. She says she'll show me how. She may, mayn't
+she?" And Katherine's answer was always "Yes." She grudged the boy none
+of his new-found pleasures, rejoiced indeed to see him interested and
+gay. Yet to watch the new broom, which sweeps so clean, is rarely
+exhilarating to those that have swept diligently with the old one. The
+nest had held her precious fledgling so safely till now; and this
+fluttering of wings, eager for flight, troubled her somewhat. Not only
+was Dickie's readiness to be away from her a trifle hard to bear; but
+she knew that disappointment, of a certainty, lay in wait for him, and
+that each effort towards wider action would but reveal to him how
+circumscribed his powers actually were.
+
+Meanwhile, however, Richard enjoyed himself recklessly, almost
+feverishly, in the attempt to disprove the teaching of that ugly dream,
+and keep truth at bay. There had been further drives, and the
+excitement of witnessing a forest fire--only too frequent in the
+Brockhurst country when the sap is up, and the easterly wind and May
+sun have scorched all moisture from the surface of the moorland. He and
+Mary had bumped over fir roots and scuttled down bridle-paths in the
+pony-carriage, to avoid the rush of flame and smoke; had skirmished
+round at a hand gallop, in search of recruits to reinforce Ormiston,
+and Iles, and a small army of beaters, battling against the blazing
+line that threatened destruction to the fir avenue. Now and again, with
+a mighty roar, which sent Dickie's heart into his mouth, great tongues
+of flame, clear as topaz and ruby in the steady sunshine, would leap
+upwards, converting a whole tall fir into a tree of fire, while the
+beaters running back, grimed with smoke and sweat, took a moment's
+breathing-space in the open.
+
+There had been more peaceful pastimes as well--several days' fishing,
+enchanting beyond the power of language to describe. The clear
+trout-stream meandering through the rich water-meadows; the herds of
+cattle standing knee-deep in the grass, lazily chewing the cud and
+switching their tails at the cloud of flies; the birds and wild
+creatures haunting the streamside; the long dreamy hours of gentle
+sport, had opened up to Dickie a whole new world of romance. His
+donkey-chair had been left at the yellow-washed mill beneath the grove
+of silvery-leaved, ever-rustling, balsam poplars. And thence, while
+Ormiston and Mary sauntered slowly on ahead, the men--Winter in mufti,
+oblivious of plate-cleaning and cellarage, and the onerous duties of
+his high estate, Stamp, the water-bailiff, and Moorcock, one of the
+under-keepers--had carried him across the great green levels. Winter
+was an old and tried friend, and it was somewhat diverting to behold
+him in this novel aspect, affable and chatty with inferiors,
+displaying, moreover, unexpected knowledge in the mysteries of the
+angler's craft. The other two men--sharp-featured, their faces ruddy as
+summer apples, merry-eyed, clad in velveteen coats, that bulged about
+the pockets, and wrinkled leather gaiters reaching halfway up the
+thigh--charmed Richard, when his first shyness was passed. They were
+eager to please him. Their talk was racy. Their laughter ready and
+sincere. Did not Stamp point out to him a water-ouzel, with impudently
+jerking tail, dipping and wading in the shallows of the stream? Did not
+Moorcock find him a water-rail's nest, hidden in a tuft of reeds and
+grass, with ten, yellowish, speckled eggs in it? And did not both men
+pluck him handfuls of cowslips, of tawny-pink avens, and of mottled,
+snake-headed fritillaries, and stow them away in the fishing-baskets
+above the load of silver-and-red spotted trout?
+
+Mary had protested Dickie could throw a fly, if he had a light enough
+rod. And not only did he throw a fly, but at the fourth or fifth cast a
+fish rose, and he played it--with skirling reel and much advice and
+most complimentary excitement on the part of the whole good
+company--and brought it skilfully within range of Stamp's landing-net.
+Never surely was trout spawned that begot such bliss in the heart of an
+angler! As, with panting sides and open gills, this three-quarter-pound
+treasure of treasures flopped about on the sunny stream bank all the
+hereditary instinct of sport spoke up clearly in Dickie. The boy--such
+is youthful masculine human nature--believed he understood at last why
+the world was made! At dressing-time he had his sacred fish carried on
+a plate up to his room to show Clara; and, but for strong remonstrance
+on the part of that devoted handmaiden, would have kept it by his
+bedside all night, so as to assure himself at intervals, by sense of
+touch--let alone that of smell--of the adorable fact of its veritable
+existence.
+
+But all this, inspiring though it was, served but as prelude to a more
+profoundly coveted acquaintance--that with the racing-stable. For it
+was after this last that Dickie still supremely longed--the more so, it
+is to be feared, because it was, if not explicitly, yet implicitly
+forbidden. A spirit of defiance had entered into him. Being granted the
+inch, he was disposed to take the ell. And this, not in conscious
+opposition to his mother's will; but in protest, not uncourageous,
+against the limitations imposed on him by physical misfortune. The
+boy's blood was up, and consequently, with greater pluck than
+discretion, he struggled against the intimate, inalienable enemy that
+so marred his fate. And it was this not ignoble effort which culminated
+in disobedience.
+
+For driving back one afternoon, later than usual,--Ormiston had met
+them, and Mary and he had taken a by-path home through the woods,--the
+pony-carriage, turned along the high level road beside the lake, going
+eastward, just as the string of race-horses, coming home from exercise,
+passed along it coming west. Richard was driving, Chaplin, the second
+coachman, sitting in the dickey at the back of the low carriage. He
+checked the pony, and his eyes took in the whole scene--the blue-brown
+expanse of the lake dotted with water-fowl, on the one hand, the
+immense blue-brown landscape on the other, ranging away to the faint
+line of the chalk downs in the south; the downward slope of the park,
+to the great square of red stable buildings in the hollow; the horses
+coming slowly towards him in single file. Cawing rooks streamed back
+from the fallow-fields across the valley. Thrushes and blackbirds
+carolled. A wren, in the bramble brake close by, broke into sharp sweet
+song. The recurrent ring of an axe came from somewhere away in the fir
+plantations, and the strident rasping of a saw from the wood-yard in
+the beech grove near the house.
+
+Richard stared at that oncoming procession. Half-way between him and
+the foremost of the horses the tan ride branched off, and wound down
+the hillside to the stables. The boy set his teeth. He arrived at a
+desperate decision,--touched up the pony, drove on.
+
+Chaplin leaned forward, addressing him, over the back of the seat.
+
+"Better wait here, hadn't we, Sir Richard? They'll turn off in a
+minute."
+
+Richard did not look round. He tried to answer coldly, but his voice
+shook.
+
+"I know. That's why I am going on."
+
+There was a silence save for the cawing of the rooks, ring of the axe,
+and grinding of wheels on the gravel. Chaplin, responsible, correct,
+over five-and-thirty, and fully intending to succeed old Mr. Wenham,
+the head coachman, on the latter's impending retirement from active
+service, went very red in the face.
+
+"Excuse me, but I have my orders, Sir Richard," he said.
+
+Dickie still looked straight ahead.
+
+"Very well," he answered, "then perhaps you'd better get out and walk
+on home."
+
+"You know I'm bound not to leave you, sir," the man said.
+
+Dickie laughed a little in uncontrollable excitement. He was close to
+them now. The leading horse was just moving off the main road, its
+shadow lying long across the turf. How was it possible to give way with
+the prize within reach?--"You can go or stay Chaplin, as you please. I
+mean to speak to Chifney. I--I mean to see the stables."
+
+"It's as much as my place is worth, sir."
+
+"Oh! bother your place!" the boy cried impetuously.--Dear heart alive,
+how fine they were as they filed by! That chestnut filly, clean made as
+a deer, her ears laid back as she reached at the bit; and the brown,
+just behind her--"I mean, I mean you needn't be afraid, Chaplin--I'll
+speak to her ladyship. I'll arrange all that. Go to the pony's head."
+
+At the end of the long string of horses came the trainer--a
+square-built, short-necked man, sanguine complexioned and clean shaven.
+Of hair, indeed, Mr. Chifney could only boast a rim of carroty-gray
+stubble under the rim of the back of his hard hat. His right eye had
+suffered damage, and the pupil of it was white and viscous. His lips
+were straight and purplish in colour. He raised his hat and would have
+followed on down the slope, but Dickie called to him.
+
+As he rode up an unwonted expression came over Mr. Chifney's shrewd,
+hard-favoured face. He took off his hat and sat there, bare-headed in
+the sunshine, looking down at the boy, his hand on his hip.
+
+"Good-day, Sir Richard," he said. "Anything I can do for you?"
+
+"Yes, yes," Dickie stammered, all his soul in his eyes, his cheeks
+aflame, "you can do just what I want most. Take me down, Chifney, and
+show me the horses."
+
+Here Chaplin coughed discreetly behind his hand. But that proved of
+small avail, save possibly in the way of provocation. For socially
+between the racing and house stables was a great gulf fixed; and Mr.
+Chifney could hardly be expected to recognise the existence of a man in
+livery standing at a pony's head, still less to accept direction from
+such a person. Servants must be kept in their place--impudent, lazy
+enough lot anyhow, bless you! On his feet the trainer had been known to
+decline to moments of weakness. But in the saddle, a good horse under
+him, he possessed unlimited belief in his own judgment, fearing neither
+man, devil, nor even his own meek-faced wife with pink ribbons in her
+cap. Moreover, he felt such heart as he had go out strangely to the
+beautiful, eager boy gazing up at him.
+
+"Nothing 'ud give me greater pleasure in life, Sir Richard," he said,
+"if you're free to come. We've waited a long time, a precious long
+time, sir, for you to come down and take a look at your horses."
+
+"I'd have been to see them sooner. I'd have given anything to see them.
+I've never had the chance, somehow."
+
+Chifney pursed up his lips, and surveyed the distant landscape with a
+very meaning glance. "I dare say not, Sir Richard. But better late than
+never, you know; and so, if you are free to come----"
+
+Again Chaplin coughed.
+
+"Free to come? Of course I am free to come," Dickie asserted, his pride
+touched to arrogance. And Mr. Chifney looked at him, an approving
+twinkle in his sound eye.
+
+"I agree, Sir Richard. Quite right, sir, you're free, of course."
+
+Stolen waters are sweet, says the proverb. And to Richard Calmady, his
+not wholly legitimate experience of the next hour was sweet indeed. For
+there remains rich harvest of poetry in all sport worth the name, let
+squeamish and sentimental persons declaim against it as they may.
+Strength and endurance, disregard of suffering have a permanent appeal
+and value, even in their coarsest manifestations. No doubt the noble
+gentlemen of the neighbourhood, who "lay at Brockhurst two nights" on
+the occasion of Sir Denzil's historic house-warming, to witness the
+mighty bear-baiting, were sensible of something more in that somewhat
+disgusting exhibition, than the mere gratification of brutal instincts,
+the mere savage relish for wounds and pain and blood. And to Sir
+Denzil's latest descendant the first sight of the training-stable--as
+the pony-carriage came to a standstill alongside the grass plot in the
+centre of the great, graveled square--offered very definite and
+stirring poetry of a kind.
+
+On three sides the quadrangle was shut in by one-storied, brick
+buildings, the woodwork of doors and windows immaculate with white
+paint. Behind, over the wide archway,--closed fortress-like by heavy
+doors at night,--were the head-lad's and helpers' quarters. On either
+side, forge and weighing-room, saddler's and doctor's shop. To right
+and left a range of stable doors, with round swing-lights between each;
+and, above these, the windows of hay and straw lofts and of the boys'
+dormitories. In front were the dining-rooms and kitchens, and the
+trainer's house--a square clock tower, carrying an ornate gilt vane,
+rising from the cluster of red roofs. Twenty years had weathered the
+raw of brick walls, and painted the tiling with all manner of orange
+and rusty-coloured lichens; yet the whole place was admirably spick and
+span, free of litter. Many cats, as Dickie noted, meditated in sunny
+corners, or prowled in the open with truly official composure. Over all
+stretched a square of bluest sky, crossed by a skein of
+homeward-wending rooks. While above the roofs, on either side the
+archway, the high-lying lands of the park showed up, broken, here and
+there, by clumps of trees.
+
+Mr. Chifney slipped out of the saddle.--"Here boy, take my horse," he
+shouted to a little fellow hurrying across the yard. "I'm heartily glad
+to see you, Sir Richard," he went on. "Now, if you care, as your
+father's son can't very well be off caring, for horses----"
+
+"If I care!" echoed Dickie, his eyes following the graceful chestnut
+filly as she was led in over the threshold of her stable.
+
+"I like that. That'll do. Chip of the old block after all," the trainer
+said, with evident relish. "Well then, since you do care for horses as
+you ought to, Sir Richard, we'll just make you free of this
+establishment. About the most first-class private establishment in
+England, sir, though I say it that have run the concern pretty well
+single-handed for the best part of the last fifteen years--make you
+free of it right away, sir. And, look you, when you've got hold, don't
+you leave hold."
+
+"No, I won't," Dickie said stoutly.
+
+Mr. Chifney was in a condition of singular emotion, as he wrapped
+Richard's rug about him and bore him away into the stables. He even
+went so far as to swear a little under his breath; and Chifney was a
+very fairly clean-mouthed man, unless members of his team of twenty and
+odd naughty boys got up to some devilry with their charges. He carried
+Richard as tenderly as could any woman, while he tramped from stall to
+stall, loose-box to loose-box, praising his racers, calling attention
+to their points, recounting past prowess, or prophesying future
+victories.
+
+And the record was a fine one; for good luck had clung to the
+masterless stable, as Lady Calmady's bank-books and ledgers could
+testify.
+
+"Vinedresser by Red Burgundy out of Valeria--won two races at the
+Newmarket Spring Meeting the year before last. Lamed himself somehow in
+the horse-box coming back--did nothing for eighteen months--hope to
+enter him for some of the autumn events."--Then later:--"Sahara, by
+North African out of Sally-in-our-Alley. Beautiful mare? I believe you,
+Sir Richard. Why she won the Oaks for you. Jack White was up. Pretty a
+race as ever I witnessed, and cleverly ridden. Like to go up to her in
+the stall? She's as quiet as a lamb. Catch hold of her head, boy."
+
+And so Dick found himself seated on the edge of the manger, the
+trainer's arm round him, and the historic Sahara snuffing at his jacket
+pockets.
+
+Then they crossed the quadrangle to inspect the colts and fillies,
+where glories still lay ahead.
+
+"Verdigris by Copper King out of Valeria again. And if he doesn't make
+a name I'll never judge another horse, sir. Strain of the old
+Touchstone blood there. Rather ugly? Yes, they're often a bit ugly that
+lot, but devilish good uns to go. You ask Miss Cathcart about them.
+Never met a lady who'd as much knowledge as she has of a horse. The
+Baby, by Punch out of Lady Bountiful. Not much good, I'm afraid. No
+grip, you see, too contracted in the hoofs. Chloroform by Sawbones out
+of sister to Castinette."
+
+And so forth, an endless repetition of genealogies, comments, anecdotes
+to which Dickie lent most attentive ear. He was keen to learn, his
+attention was on the stretch. He was in process of initiation, and
+every moment of the sacred rites came to him with power and value. Yet
+it must be owned that he found the lessening of the strain on his
+memory and attention not wholly unwelcome when Mr. Chifney, sitting
+beside him on the big, white-painted cornbin opposite Diplomacy's
+loose-box, began to tell him of the old times when he--a little fellow
+of eight to ten years of age--had been among the boys in his cousin,
+Sam Chifney's famous stable at Newmarket. Of the long, weary traveling
+before the days of railways, when the horses were walked by highroad
+and country lane, ankle deep in mud, from Newmarket to Epsom; and after
+victory or defeat, walked by slow stages all the way home again. Of
+how, later, he had migrated to Doncaster; but, not liking the
+"Yorkshire tykes," had got taken on in some well-known stables upon the
+Berkshire downs.
+
+"And it was there, Sir Richard," he said, "I met your father, and we
+fancied each other from the first. And he asked me to come to him.
+These stables were just building then. And here I've been ever since."
+
+Mr. Chifney stared down at the clean red quarries of the stable floor,
+and tapped his neat gaiters with the switch he held in his hand.
+
+"Rum places, racing stables," he went on, meditatively; "and a lot of
+rum things go on in 'em, one way and another, as you'll come to know.
+And it ain't the easiest thing going, I tell you, to keep your hands
+clean. Ungrateful business a trainer's, Sir Richard--wearing
+business--shortens a man's temper and makes him old before his time.
+Out by four o'clock on summer mornings, minding your cattle and keeping
+your eye on those shirking blackguards of boys. No real rest, sir, day
+or night. Wearing business--studying all the meetings and entering your
+horses where you've reason to reckon they've most chance. And if your
+horse wins, the jockey gets all the praise and the petting. And if it
+fails the trainer gets all the blame. Yes, it's wearing work. But,
+confound it all, sir," he broke out hotly, "there's nothing like it on
+the face of God's earth. Horses--horses--horses--why the very smell of
+the bedding's sweeter than a bunch of roses. Love 'em? I believe you.
+And you'll love 'em too before you've done."
+
+He turned and gripped Dickie hard by the shoulder.
+
+"For we'll make a thorough-paced sportsman of you yet, Sir Richard," he
+said, "God bless you--danged if we don't."
+
+Which assertion Mr. Chifney repeated at frequent intervals over his
+grog that evening, as he sat, not in the smart dining-room hung round
+with portraits of Vinedresser and Sahara and other equine notabilities,
+but in the snug, little, back parlour looking out on to the yard. Mrs.
+Chifney was a gentle, pious woman, with whom her husband's profession
+went somewhat against the grain. She would have preferred a nice
+grocery, or other respectable, uneventful business in a country town,
+and dissipation in the form of prayer rather than of race-meetings. But
+as a slender, slightly self-righteous, young maiden she had fallen very
+honestly and completely in love with Tom Chifney. So there was nothing
+for it but to marry him and regard the horses as her appointed cross.
+She nursed the boys when they were sick or injured, intervened fairly
+successfully between their poor, little backs and her husband's
+all-too-ready ash stick; and assisted Julius March in promoting their
+spiritual welfare, even while deploring that the latter put his faith
+in forms and ceremonies rather than in saving grace. Upon the trainer
+himself she exercised a gently repressive influence.
+
+"We won't swear, Mr. Chifney," she remarked mildly now.
+
+"Swear! It's enough to make the whole bench of bishops swear to see
+that lad."
+
+"I did see him," Mrs. Chifney observed.
+
+"Yes, out of window. But you didn't carry him round, and hear him
+talk--knowledgeable talk as you could ask from one of his age. And
+watch his face--as like as two peas to his father's."
+
+"But her ladyship's eyes," put in Mrs. Chifney.
+
+"I don't know whose eyes they are, but I know he can use 'em. It was as
+pretty as a picture to see how he took it all."
+
+Chifney tossed off the remainder of his tumbler of brandy and water at
+a gulp.
+
+"Swear," he repeated, "I could find it in my heart to swear like hell.
+But I can find it in my heart to do more than that. I can forgive her
+ladyship. By all that's----"
+
+"Thomas, forgiveness and oaths don't go suitably together."
+
+"Well, but I can though, and I tell you, I do," he said solemnly. "I
+forgive her.--Shoot the Clown! by G--! I beg your pardon, Maria;--but
+upon my soul, once or twice, when I had him in my arms to-day, I felt I
+could have understood it if she'd had every horse shot that stood in
+the stable."
+
+He held the tumbler up against the lamp. But it was quite empty.
+
+"Uncommon glad she didn't though, poor lady, all the same," he added,
+parenthetically, as he set it down on the table again. "What do you
+say, Maria--about time we toddled off to bed?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+IN WHICH DICKIE IS INTRODUCED TO A LITTLE DANCER WITH BLUSH-ROSES IN
+HER HAT
+
+
+"Her ladyship's inquired for you more than once, sir." This from Winter
+meeting the pony-carriage and the returning prodigal at the bottom of
+the steps.
+
+The sun was low. Across the square lawn--whereon the Clown had found
+death some thirteen years before--peacocks led home their hens and
+chicks to roost within the two sexagonal, pepper-pot summer-houses that
+fill in the angles of the red-walled enclosure. The pea-fowl stepped
+mincingly, high-shouldered, their heads carried low, their long necks
+undulating with a self-conscious grace. Dickie's imagination was aglow
+like that rose-red sunset sky. The virile sentiment of all just heard
+and seen, and the exultation of admitted ownership were upon him. He
+felt older, stronger, more secure of himself than ever before. He
+proposed to go straight to his mother and confess. In his present mood
+he entertained no fear but that she would understand.
+
+"Is Lady Calmady alone?" he asked.
+
+"Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart are with her, Sir Richard." Winter leant down,
+loosening the rug. His usual, undemonstrative speech took on a
+loftiness of tone. "Mrs. William Ormiston and her daughter have driven
+over with Mrs. Cathcart."--The butler was not without remembrance of
+that dinner on the day following Dickie's birth. Socially he had never
+considered Lady Calmady's sister-in-law quite up to the Brockhurst
+level.
+
+Richard leaned back, watching the mincing peacocks. It was so fair here
+out of doors. The scent of the may hung in the air. The flame of the
+sunset bathed the facade of the stately house. No doubt it would be
+interesting to see new people, new relations; but he really cared to
+see no one just now, except his mother. From her he wanted to receive
+absolution, so that, his conscience relieved of the burden of his
+disobedience, he might revel to the full in the thought of the
+inheritance upon which--so it seemed to him--he had to-day entered.
+Still, in his present humour, Dickie's sense of _noblesse oblige_ was
+strong.
+
+"I suppose I've got to go in and help entertain everybody," he
+remarked.
+
+"Her ladyship'll think something's wrong, Sir Richard, and be anxious
+if you stay away."
+
+The boy held out his arms. "All right then, Winter," he said.
+
+Here Chaplin again gave that admonitory cough. Richard, his face
+hardening to slight scorn, looked at him over the butler's shoulder.
+
+"Oh! You need not be uneasy, Chaplin. When I say I'll do a thing, I
+don't forget."
+
+Which brief speech caused the butler to reflect, as he bore the boy
+across the hall and up-stairs, that Sir Richard was coming to have an
+uncommonly high manner about him, at times, considering his age.
+
+An unwonted loudness of conversation filled the Chapel-Room. It was
+filled also by the rose-red light of the sunset streaming in through
+the curve of the oriel-window. This confused and dazzled Richard
+slightly, entering upon it from the silence and sober clearness of the
+stair-head. A shrill note of laughter.--Mr. Cathcart's voice saying, "I
+felt it incumbent upon me to object, Lady Calmady. I spoke very plainly
+to Fallowfeild."--Julius March's delicately refined tones, "I am afraid
+spirituality is somewhat deficient in that case."--Then the high
+flute-like notes of a child, rising clearly above the general murmur,
+"_Ah! enfin--le voila, Maman. C'est bien lui, n'est-ce pas?_" And with
+that, Richard was aware of a sudden hush falling upon the assembled
+company. He was sensible every one watched him as Winter carried him
+across the room and set him down in the long, low armchair near the
+fireplace. Poor Dickie's self-consciousness, which had been so
+agreeably in abeyance, returned upon him, and a red, not of the sunset,
+dyed his face. But he carried his head proudly. He thought of Chifney
+and the horses. He refused to be abashed.
+
+And Ormiston, breaking the silence, called to him cheerily:--
+
+"Hello, old chap, what have you been up to? You gave Mary and me the
+slip."
+
+"I know I did," the boy answered bravely. "How d'ye do, Mrs. Cathcart?"
+as the latter nodded and smiled to him--a large, gentle, comfortable
+lady, uncertain in outline, thanks to voluminous draperies of black
+silk and black lace. "How d'ye do, sir?" this to Mr. Cathcart--a tall,
+neatly-made man, but for a slight roundness of the shoulders. Seeing
+him, there remained no doubt as to whence Mary inherited her large
+mouth; but matter for thankfulness that she had avoided further
+inheritance. For Mr. Cathcart was notably plain. Small eyes and snub
+nose, long lower jaw, and gray forward-curled whiskers rendered his
+appearance unfortunately simian. He suggested a caricature; but one,
+let it be added, of a person undeniably well-bred.
+
+"My darling, you are very late," Katherine said. Her back was towards
+her guests as she stooped down arranging the embroidered rug across
+Dickie's feet and legs. Laying his hand on her wrist he squeezed it
+closely for a moment.
+
+"I--I'll tell you all about that presently, mummy, when they're gone.
+I've been enjoying myself awfully--you won't mind?"
+
+Katherine smiled. But, looking up at her, it appeared to Richard that
+her face was very white, her eyes very large and dark, and that she was
+very tall and, somehow, very splendid just then. And this fed his
+fearlessness, fed his young pride, even as, though in a more subtle and
+exquisite manner, his late experience of the racing-stable had fed
+them. His mother moved away and took up her interrupted conversation
+with Mr. Cathcart regarding the delinquencies of Lord Fallowfeild.
+Richard looked coolly round the room.
+
+Every one was there--Julius, Mary, Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, while
+away in the oriel-window Roger Ormiston stood talking to a pretty,
+plump, very much dressed lady, who chattered, laughed, stared, with
+surprising vivacity. As Dickie looked at her she stared back at him
+through a pair of gold eye-glasses. Against her knee, that rosy light
+bathing her graceful, little figure, leant a girl about Dickie's own
+age. She wore a pale pink and blue frock, short and outstanding in the
+skirts. She also wore a broad-brimmed, white hat, with, a garland of
+blush-roses around the crown of it. The little girl did not stare. She
+contemplated Richard languidly, yet with sustained attention. Her
+attitude and bearing were attractive. Richard wanted to see her close,
+to talk to her. But to call and ask her to come to him was awkward. And
+to go to her--the boy grew a little hot again--was more awkward still.
+
+Mrs. Ormiston dropped her gold eye-glasses into her lap.
+
+"It really is ten thousand pities when these things happen in the wrong
+rank of life," she said. "Rightly placed they might be so profitable."
+
+"For goodness sake, be careful, Ella," Ormiston put in quickly.
+
+"Oh! My dear creature, don't be nervous. Everybody's attending to
+everybody else, and if they did hear they wouldn't understand. I'm one
+of the fortunate persons who are supposed never to talk sense and so I
+can say what I like." Mrs. Ormiston gave her shrill little laugh. "Oh!
+there are consolations, depend upon it, in a well-sustained reputation
+for folly!"
+
+The laugh jarred on Richard. He decided that he did not quite like his
+aunt Charlotte Ormiston. All the same he wished the charming, little
+girl would come to him.
+
+"But to return. It's a waste. To some poor family it might have been a
+perfect fortune. And I hate waste. Perhaps you have never discovered
+that?"
+
+Ormiston let his glance rest on the somewhat showy figure.
+
+"I doubt if William has discovered it either," he remarked.
+
+"Oh! as to your poor brother William, heaven only knows what he has or
+has not discovered!--Now, Helen, this conversation becomes undesirable.
+You've asked innumerable questions about your cousin. Go and make
+acquaintance with him. I'm the best of mothers of course, but, at
+times, I really can do quite well without you."
+
+Now surely this was a day of good fortune, for again Dickie had his
+desire. And a most surprisingly pretty, little desire it
+proved--seductive even, deliciously finished in person and in manner.
+The boy gazed at the girl's small hands and small, daintily shod feet,
+at the small, lovely, pink and white face set in a cloud of
+golden-brown hair, at the innocent, blue eyes, at the mouth with
+upturned corners to it. Richard was not of age to remark the eyes were
+rather light in colour, the lips rather thin. The exquisite refinement
+of the girl's whole person delighted him. She was delicate as a
+miniature, as a figure carved in ivory. She was like his Uncle Roger,
+when she was silent and still. She was like--oh, poor Dick!--some
+bright glancing, small, saucy bird when she spoke and her voice had
+those clear, flute tones in it.
+
+"Since you did not come to me, I had to come to you," she said. "I have
+wanted so much to see you. I had heard about you at home, in Paris."
+
+"Heard about me?" Dickie repeated, flattered and surprised. "But won't
+you sit down. Look--that little chair. I can reach it."
+
+And leaning sideways he stretched out his hand. But his finger-tips
+barely touched the top rail. Richard flushed. "I'm awfully sorry," he
+said, "but I am afraid--it isn't heavy--I must let you get it
+yourself."
+
+The girl, who had watched him intently, her hands clasped, gave a
+little sigh. Then the corners of her mouth turned up as she smiled. A
+delightful dimple showed in her right cheek.
+
+"But, of course," she replied, "I will get it."
+
+She settled herself beside him, folded her hands, crossed her feet,
+exposing a long length of fine, open-work, silk stocking.
+
+"I desired enormously to see you," she continued. "But when you came in
+I grew shy. It is so with one sometimes."
+
+"You should use your influence, Lady Calmady," Mr. Cathcart was saying.
+"Unquestionably the condition of the workhouse is far from
+satisfactory. And Fallowfeild is too lenient. That _laisser-aller_
+policy of his threatens to land us in serious difficulties. The place
+is insanitary, and the food is unnecessarily poor. I am not an advocate
+for extravagance, but I cannot bear to see discomfort which might be
+avoided. Fallowfeild is the most kind-hearted of men, but he has a
+fatal habit of believing what people tell him. And those workhouse
+officials have got round him. The whole matter ought to be subjected to
+the strictest investigation."
+
+"It is very nice of you to have wanted so much to see me," Dickie said.
+His eyes were softly bright.
+
+"Oh! but one always wants to see those who are talked about. It is a
+privilege to have them for one's relations."
+
+"But--but--I'm not talked about?" the boy put in, somewhat startled.
+
+"But certainly. You are so rich. You have this superb _chateau_. You
+are"--she put her head on one side with a pretty, saucy, birdlike
+movement--"_enfin_," she said, "I had the greatest curiosity to make
+your acquaintance. I shall tell all my young friends at the convent
+about this visit. I promised them that, as soon as mamma said we should
+probably come here. The good sisters also are interested. I shall
+recount a whole history of this beautiful castle, and of you, and
+your----"
+
+She paused, clasped her hands, looking away at her mother, then
+sideways at Richard, bowing her little person backwards and forwards,
+laughing softly all the while. And her laughing face was
+extraordinarily pretty under the shade of her broad-brimmed hat.
+
+"It is a great misfortune we stay so short a time," she continued. "I
+shall not see the half of all that I wish to see."
+
+Then an heroic plan of action occurred to Richard. The daring
+engendered by his recent act of disobedience was still active in him.
+He was in the humour to attempt the impossible. He longed, moreover, to
+give this delectable little person pleasure. He was willing even to
+sacrifice a measure of personal dignity in her service.
+
+"Oh! but if you care so much, I--I will show you the house," he said.
+
+"Will you?" she cried. "You and I alone together. But that is precisely
+what I want. It would be ravishing."
+
+Poor Dickie's heart misgave him slightly; but he summoned all his
+resolution. He threw off the concealing rug.
+
+"I--I walk very slowly, I'm afraid," he said rather huskily, looking up
+at her, while in his expression appeal mingled pathetically with
+defiant pride.
+
+"But, so much the better," she replied. "We shall be the longer
+together. I shall have the more to observe, to recount."
+
+She was on her feet. She hovered round him, birdlike, intent on his
+every movement.
+
+Meanwhile the sound of conversation rose continuous. Lady Calmady,
+calling to Julius, had moved away to the great writing-table in the
+farther window. Together they searched among a pile of papers for a
+letter of Dr. Knott's embodying his scheme of the new hospital at
+Westchurch. Mr. Cathcart stood by, expounding his views on the subject.
+
+"Of course a considerable income can be derived from letters of
+recommendation," he was saying, "in-patient and out-patient tickets.
+The clergy come in there. They cannot be expected to give large
+donations. It would be unreasonable to expect that of them."
+
+Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, Mrs. Cathcart, and Mary had drawn their
+chairs together. The two elder ladies spoke with a subdued enthusiasm,
+discussing pleasant details of the approaching wedding, which promised
+the younger lady so glad a future. Mrs. Ormiston chattered; while
+Ormiston, listening to her, gazed away down the green length of the elm
+avenue, beyond the square lawn and pepper-pot summer-houses, and pitied
+men who made such mistakes in the matter of matrimony as his brother
+William obviously had. The rose of the sunset faded in the west. Bats
+began to flit forth, hawking against the still warm house-walls for
+flies.
+
+And so, unobserved, Dickie slipped out of the security of his armchair,
+and rose to that sadly deficient full height of his. He was nervous,
+and this rendered his balance more than ever uncertain. He shuffled
+forward, steadying himself by a piece of furniture here and there in
+passing, until he reached the wide open space before the door on to the
+stair-head. And it required some fortitude to cross this space, for
+here was nothing to lay hold of for support.
+
+Little Helen Ormiston had kept close beside him so far. Now she drew
+back, leaving him alone. Leaning against a table, she watched his
+laborious progress. Then a fit of uncontrollable laughter took her. She
+flew half-way across to the oriel-window, her voice ringing out clear
+and gay, though broken by bursts of irrepressible merriment.
+
+"_Regardez, regardez donc, Maman! Ma bonne m'avait dit qu'il etait un
+avorton, et que ce serait tres amusant de le voir. Elle m'a conseiller
+de lui faire marcher_."
+
+She darted back, and clapping her hands upon the bosom of her charming
+frock, danced, literally danced and pirouetted around poor Dickie.
+
+"_Moi, je ne comprenais pas ce que c'etait qu'un avorton_," she
+continued rapidly. "_Mais je comprends parfaitement maintenant. C'est
+un monstre, n'est-ce pas, Maman_?"
+
+She threw back her head, her white throat convulsed by laughter.
+
+"_Ah! mon Dieu, qu'il est drole_!" she cried.
+
+Silence fell on the whole room, for sight and words alike were
+paralysing in their grotesque cruelty. Ormiston was the first to speak.
+He laid his hand somewhat roughly on his sister-in-law's shoulder.
+
+"For God's sake, stop this, Ella," he said. "Take the girl away. Little
+brute," he added, under his breath, as he went hastily across to poor
+Dick.
+
+But Lady Calmady had been beforehand with him. She swept across the
+room, flinging aside the dainty, dancing figure as she passed. All the
+primitive fierceness, the savage tenderness of her motherhood surged up
+within her. Katherine was in the humour to kill just then, had killing
+been possible. She was magnificently regardless of consequences,
+regardless of conventionalities, regardless of every obligation save
+that of sheltering her child. She cowered down over Richard, putting
+her arms about him, knew--without question or answer--that he had heard
+and understood. Then gathering him up against her, she stood upright,
+facing them all, brother, sister, old and tried friends, a terrible
+expression in her eyes, the boy's face pressed down upon her shoulder.
+For the moment she appeared alienated from, and at war with, even
+Julius, even Marie de Mirancourt. No love, however faithful, could
+reach her. She was alone, unapproachable, in her immense anger and
+immense sense of outrage.
+
+"I will ask you to go," she said to her sister-in-law,--"to go and take
+your daughter with you, and to enter this house no more."
+
+Mrs. Ormiston did not reply. Even her chatter was for the moment
+stilled. She pressed a handkerchief against the little dancer's
+forehead, and it was stained with blood.
+
+"Ah! she is a wicked woman!" wailed the child. "She has hurt me. She
+threw me against the table. _Maman quel malheur ca se verra. Il y aura
+certainement une cicatrice_!"
+
+"Nonsense," Ormiston said harshly. "It's nothing, Kitty, the merest
+scratch."
+
+"Yes, my dear, we will have the carriage at once,"--this from Mr.
+Cathcart to his wife. The incident, from all points of view, shocked
+his sense of decency. Immediate retirement became his sole object.
+
+Lady Calmady moved away, carrying the boy. She trembled a little. He
+was heavy. Moreover, she sickened at the sight of blood. But little
+Helen Ormiston caught at her dress, looked up at her.
+
+"I hate you," she said, hissing the words out with concentrated passion
+between her pretty even teeth. "You have spoilt me. I will hate you
+always, when I grow up. I will never forget."
+
+Alone in the great state-bedroom next door, a long time elapsed before
+either Richard or Katherine spoke. The boy leaned back against the sofa
+cushions, holding his mother's hand. The casements stood wide open, and
+little winds laden with the scent of the hawthorns in the park wandered
+in, gently stirring the curtains of the ebony bed, so that the trees of
+the Forest of This Life thereon embroidered appeared somewhat
+mournfully to wave their branches, while the Hart fled forward and the
+Leopard, relentless in perpetual pursuit, followed close behind. There
+was a crunching of wheels on the gravel, a sound of hurried farewells.
+Then in a minute or two more the evening quiet held its own again.
+
+Suddenly Dickie flung himself down across Katherine's lap, his poor
+body shaken by a tempest of weeping.
+
+"Mother, I can't bear it--I can't bear it," he sobbed. "Tell me, does
+everybody do that?"
+
+"Do what, my own precious?" she said, calm from very excess of sorrow.
+Later she would weep too in the dark, lying lonely in the cold comfort
+of that stately bed.
+
+"Laugh at me, mother, mock at me?" and his voice, for all that he tried
+to control it, tore at his throat and rose almost to a shriek.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+DEALING WITH A PHYSICIAN OF THE BODY AND A PHYSICIAN OF THE SOUL
+
+
+History repeats itself, and to Katherine just now came most unwelcome
+example of such repetition. She had foreseen that some such crisis must
+arise as had arisen. Yet when it arose, the crisis proved none the less
+agonising because of that foreknowledge. Two strains of feeling
+struggled within her. A blinding sorrow for her child, a fear of and
+shame at her own violence of anger. Katherine's mind was of an
+uncompromising honesty. She knew that her instinct had, for a space at
+least, been murderous. She knew that, given equal provocation, it would
+be murderous again.
+
+And this was, after all, but the active, objective aspect of the
+matter. The passive and subjective aspect showed danger also. In her
+extremity Katherine's soul cried out for God--for the sure
+resting-place only to be found by conscious union of the individual
+with the eternal will. But such repose was denied her. For her anger
+against God, even while thus earnestly desiring Him, was even more
+profound than her anger against man. The passion of those terrible
+early days when her child's evil fortune first became known to
+her--held in abeyance all these years by constant employment and the
+many duties incident to her position--returned upon her in its first
+force. To believe God is not, leaves the poor human soul homeless,
+sadly desolate, barren in labour as is a slave. But the sorrow of such
+belief is as a trifle beside the hideous fear that God is careless and
+unjust, that virtue is but a fond imagination of all-too-noble human
+hearts, that the everlasting purpose is not good but evil continually.
+And, haunted by such fears, Katherine once again sat in outer darkness.
+All gracious things appeared to her as illusions; all gentle delights
+but as passing anodynes with which, in his misery, man weakly tries to
+deaden the pain of existence for a little space. She suffered a
+profound discouragement.
+
+And so it seemed to her but as part of the cruel whole when history
+repeated itself yet further, and Dr. Knott, pausing at the door of
+Richard's bedroom, turned and said to her:--
+
+"It will be better, you know, Lady Calmady, to let him face it alone.
+He'll feel it less without you. Winter can give me all the assistance I
+want." Then he added, a queer smile playing about his loose
+lips:--"Don't be afraid. I'll handle him very gently. Probably I shan't
+hurt him at all--certainly not much."
+
+"Ah!" Katherine said, under her breath.
+
+"You see it is done by his own wish," John Knott went on.
+
+"I know," she answered.
+
+She respected and trusted this man, entertained for him,
+notwithstanding his harsh speech and uncouth exterior, something akin
+to affection. Yet remembering the part he had played in the fate of the
+father, it was very dreadful to her that he should touch the child. And
+Dr. Knott read her thought. He did not resent it. It was all natural
+enough! From his heart he was sorry for her, and would have spared her
+had that been possible. But he discriminated very clearly between
+primary and secondary issues, never sacrificing, as do feeble and
+sentimental persons, the former to the latter. In this case the boy had
+a right to the stage, and so the mother must stand in the wings. John
+Knott possessed a keen sense of values in the human drama which the
+exigencies of his profession so perpetually presented to him. He waited
+quietly, his hand on the door-handle, looking at Katherine from under
+his rough eyebrows, silently opposing his will to hers.
+
+Suddenly she turned away with an impatient gesture.
+
+"I will not come with you," she said.
+
+"You are right."
+
+"But--but--do you think you can really do anything to help him, to make
+him happier?" Katherine asked, a desperation in the tones of her voice.
+
+"Happier? Yes, in the long run, because certainty of whatever kind,
+even certainty of failure, makes eventually for peace of mind."
+
+"That is a hard saying."
+
+"This is a hard world." Dr. Knott looked down at the floor, shrugging
+his unwieldy shoulders. "The sooner we learn to accept that fact the
+better, Lady Calmady. I know it is sharp discipline, but it saves time
+and money, let alone disappointment.--Now as to all these elaborate
+contrivances I've brought down from London, they're the very best of
+their kind. But I am bound to own the most ingenious of such
+arrangements are but clumsy remedies for natural deficiency. Man hasn't
+discovered how to make over his own body yet, and never will. The
+Almighty will always have the whip-hand of us when it comes to dealing
+with flesh and blood. All the same we've got to try these legs and
+things----"
+
+Katherine winced, pressing her lips together. It was brutal, surely, to
+speak so plainly? But John Knott went on quietly, commiserating her
+inwardly, yet unswerving in common sense.
+
+"Try 'em every one, and so convince Sir Richard one way or the other.
+This is a turning-point. So far his general health has been remarkably
+good, and we've just got to set our minds to keeping it good. He must
+not fret if we can help it. If he frets, instead of developing into the
+sane, manly fellow he should, he may turn peevish, Lady Calmady, and
+grow up a morbid, neurotic lad, the victim of all manner of brain-sick
+fancies--become envious, spiteful, a misery to others and to himself."
+
+"It is necessary to say all this?" Katherine asked loftily.
+
+Dr. Knott's eyes looked very straight into hers, and there were tears
+in them.
+
+"Indeed, I believe it is," he replied, "or, trust me, I wouldn't say
+it. I take no pleasure in giving pain at this time of day, whether
+mental or physical. All I want is to spare pain. But one must sacrifice
+the present to the future, at times, you know--use the knife to save
+the limb. Now I must go to my patient. It isn't fair to keep him
+waiting any longer. I'll be as quick as I can. I suppose I shall find
+you here when I've finished?"
+
+As he opened the door Dr. Knott's heavy person showed in all its
+ungainliness against the brightness of sunlight flooding Dickie's room.
+And to Katherine he seemed hideous just then--inexorable in his great
+common sense, in the dead weight of his personality and of his will, as
+some power of nature. He was to her the incarnation of things as they
+are,--not things as they should be, not things as she so passionately
+desired they might be. He represented rationalism as against miracle,
+intellect as against imagination, the bitter philosophy of experience
+as against that for which all mortals so persistently cry out--namely,
+the all-consoling promise of extravagant hope. As with chains he bound
+her down to fact. Right home on her he pressed the utter futility of
+juggling with the actual. From the harsh truth that, neither in matters
+practical nor spiritual is any redemption without shedding of blood he
+permitted her no escape.
+
+And all this Katherine's clear brain recognised and admitted, even
+while her poor heart only rebelled the more madly. To be convinced is
+not to be reconciled. And so she turned away from that closed door in a
+veritable tempest of feeling, and went out into the Chapel-Room. It was
+safer, her mind and heart thus working, to put a space between herself
+and that closed door.
+
+Just then Julius March crossed the room, coming in from the stair-head.
+The austere lines of his cassock emphasised the height and emaciation
+of his figure. His appearance offered a marked contrast to that of the
+man with whom Katherine had just parted. His occupation offered a
+marked contrast also. He carried a gold chalice and paten, and his head
+was bowed reverentially above the sacred vessels. His eyes were
+downcast, and the dull pallor of his face and his long thin hands was
+very noticeable. He did not look round, but passed silently, still as a
+dream, into the chapel. Katherine paced the width of the great room,
+turned and paced back and forth again some half-dozen times, before he
+emerged from the chapel door. In her present humour she did not want
+him, yet she resented his abstraction. The physician of the soul, like
+the physician of the body, appeared to her lamentably devoid of power
+to sustain and give comfort at the present juncture.
+
+This, it so happened, was one of those days when the mystic joy of his
+priestly office held Julius March forcibly. He had ministered to
+others, and his own soul was satisfied. His expression was exalted, his
+short-sighted eyes were alive with inward light. Tired and worn, there
+was still a remarkable suavity in his bearing. He had come forth from
+the holy of holies, and the vision beheld there dwelt with him yet.
+
+Meanwhile, brooding storm sat on Katherine's brow, on her lips, dwelt
+in her every movement. And something of this Julius perceived, for his
+devotion to her was intact, as was his self-abnegation. Throughout all
+these years he had never sought to approach her more closely. His
+attitude had remained as delicately scrupulous, untouched by
+worldliness, or by the baser part of passion, as in the first hour of
+the discovery of his love. Her near presence gave him exquisite
+pleasure; but, save when she needed his assistance in some practical
+matter, he refused to indulge himself by passing much time in her
+society. Abstinence still remained his rule of life. But just now,
+strong with the mystic strength of his late ministrations, and
+perceiving her troubled state, he permitted himself to remain and pace
+beside her.
+
+"You have been out all day?" Katherine said.
+
+"Yes, I stayed on to the end with Rebecca Light. They sent for me early
+this morning. She passed away very peacefully in that little attic at
+the new lodge looking out into the green heart of the woods."
+
+"Ah! It's simple enough to die," Katherine said, "being old. The
+difficult thing is to live, being still young."
+
+"Has my absence been inconvenient? Have you wanted me?" Julius
+asked.--Those quiet hours spent in the humble death-chamber suddenly
+appeared to him as an act of possible selfishness.
+
+"Oh no!" she answered bitterly. "Why should I want you? Have I not sent
+Roger and Mary away? Am I not secretly glad dear Marie de Mirancourt is
+just sufficiently poorly to remain in her room? When the real need
+comes--one learns that among all the other merciless lessons--one is
+best by oneself."
+
+For a while, only the whisper of Lady Calmady's skirts, the soft, even
+tread of feet upon the thick carpet. Then she said, almost sharply:--
+
+"Dr. Knott is with Richard."
+
+"Ah! I understand," Julius murmured.
+
+But Lady Calmady took up his words with a certain heat.
+
+"No, you do not understand. You none of you understand, and that is why
+I am better by myself. Mary and Roger in their happiness, dear Marie in
+her saintly resignation, and you"--Katherine turned her head, smiled at
+him in lovely scorn--"you, my dear Julius, of all men, what should you
+know of the bitter pains of motherhood, you who are too good to be
+quite human, you who regard this world merely as the antichamber of
+paradise, you, whose whole affection is set on your Church--your
+God--how should you understand? Between my experience and yours there
+is a very wide interval. How can you know what I suffer--you who have
+never loved."
+
+Under the stress of her excitement Katherine's pace quickened. The
+whisper of her skirts grew to a soft rush. Julius kept beside her. His
+head was bent reverently, even as over the sacred vessels he had so
+lately carried.
+
+"I too have loved," he said at last.
+
+Katherine stopped short, and looked at him incredulously.
+
+"Really, Julius?" she said.
+
+Raising his head, he looked back at her. This avowal gave him a strange
+sense of completeness and mastery. So he allowed his eyes to meet
+Katherine's, he allowed himself to reckon with her grace and beauty.
+
+"Very really," he answered.
+
+"But when?"
+
+"Long ago--and always."
+
+"Ah!" she said. Her expression had changed. Brooding storm no longer
+sat on her brow and lips. She was touched. For the moment the weight of
+her personal distress was lifted. Dickie and Dr. Knott together in that
+bedchamber, experimenting with unlovely, mechanical devices for aiding
+locomotion and concealing the humiliation of deformity, were almost
+forgotten. To those who have once loved, love must always supremely
+appeal. Julius appeared to her in a new aspect. She felt she had done
+him injustice. She placed her hand on his arm with a movement of
+apology and tenderness. And the man grew faint, trembled, feeling her
+hand; seeing it lie white and fair on the sleeve of his black cassock.
+Since childhood it was the first, the solitary caress he had received.
+
+"Pardon me, dear Julius," she said. "I must have pained you at times,
+but I did not know this. I always supposed you coldly indifferent to
+those histories of the heart which mean so much to some of us; supposed
+your religion held you wholly, and that you pitied us as the wise pity
+the foolish, standing above them, looking down. Richard told me many
+things about you, before he brought me home here, but he never told me
+this."
+
+"Richard never knew it," he answered, smiling. Her perfect
+unconsciousness at once calmed and pained him. He had kept his secret,
+all these years, only too well.
+
+Katherine turned and began to pace again, her hands clasped behind her
+back.
+
+"But, tell me--tell me," she said. "You can trust me, you know. I will
+never speak of this unless you speak. But if I knew, it would bring us
+nearer together, and that would be comforting, perhaps, to us both.
+Tell me, what happened? Did she know, and did she love you? She must
+have loved you, I think. Then what separated you? Did she die?"
+
+"No, thank God, she did not die," Julius said. He paused. He longed to
+gain the relief of fuller confession, yet feared to betray himself. "I
+believe she loved me truly as a friend--and that was sufficient."
+
+"Oh no, no!" Katherine cried. "Do not decline upon sophistries. That is
+never sufficient."
+
+"In one sense, yes--in another sense, no," Julius said. "It was thus. I
+loved her exactly as she was. Had she loved me as I loved her she would
+have become other than she was."
+
+"Ah! but surely you are too ingenious, too fastidious." Katherine's
+voice took tones of delicate remonstrance and pleading. "That would be
+your danger, in such a case. _Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien_, and you
+would always risk sacrificing the real to the ideal. I am sorry. I
+would like you to have tasted the fulness of life. Even though the days
+of perfect joy are very few, it is well to have had them----"
+
+She threw back her head, her eyebrows drew together, and her face
+darkened somewhat.
+
+"Yes, it is well to have had them, though the memory of them cuts one
+to the very quick."--Then her manner changed again, gaining a touch of
+gaiety. "Really I am very unselfish in wishing all this otherwise," she
+said, "for it would have been a sore trial to part with you. I cannot
+imagine Brockhurst without you. I should have been in great straits
+deprived of my friend and counselor. And yet, I would like you to have
+been very happy, dear Julius."
+
+Their pacing had just brought them to the arched doorway of the chapel.
+Katherine stopped, and raising her arm leaned her hand against the
+stone jamb of it above her head.
+
+"See," she went on, "I want to be truly unselfish. I know how generous
+you are. Perhaps you remain here out of all too great kindness towards
+my poor Dick and me. You mustn't do that, Julius. You say she is still
+living. Consider--is it too late?"
+
+Was it indeed too late? All the frustrated manhood cried aloud in
+Julius March. He covered his face with his hands. His carefully
+restrained imagination ran riot, presenting enchantments.
+
+And Katherine, watching him, found herself strangely moved. For it was
+very startling to see this so familiar figure under so unfamiliar an
+aspect--to see Julius March, her everyday companion and assistant, his
+reticence, his priestly aloofness, his mild and courtly calm, swept
+under by a tide of personal emotion. Lady Calmady was drawn to him by
+deepened sympathy. Yet regret arose in her that this man proved to be,
+after all, but as other men. She was vaguely disappointed, having
+derived more security than she had quite realised from his apparent
+detachment and impassibility. And, as an indirect consequence, her
+revolt against God suffered access of bitterness. For not only was
+He--to her seeing--callous regarding the fate of the many, but He
+failed to support those few most devoted to His cause. In the hour of
+their trial He was careless even of His own elect.
+
+"Ah! I think it is indeed by no means too late!" she exclaimed.
+
+Julius March let his hands drop at his sides. He gazed at her and her
+expression was of wistful mockery--compassionate rather than ironical.
+Then he looked away down the length of the chapel. In the warm
+afternoon light, the solid and rich brown of the arcaded stalls on
+either hand, emphasised the harmonious radiance of the great east
+window, a radiance as of clear jewels.--Ranks of kneeling saints, the
+gold of whose orioles rose in an upward curve to the majestic image of
+the Christ in the central light--a Christ risen and glorified,
+enthroned, His feet shining forever upon heaven's sapphire floor.
+Before the altar hung three silver-gilt lamps of Italian workmanship,
+in the crimson cup of each of which it had so long been Julius's
+pleasure to keep the tongue of flame constantly alive. The habits of a
+lifetime are not hastily set aside. Gazing on these things, his normal
+attitude returned to him. Not that which he essentially was but that
+which, by long and careful training of every thought, every faculty, he
+had become, authoritatively claimed him. His eyes fell from
+contemplation of the glories of the window to that of the long,
+straight folds of the cassock which clothed him. It was hardly the garb
+in which a man goes forth to woo! Then he looked at Lady Calmady--she
+altogether seductive in her innocence and in her wistful mockery as she
+leaned against the jamb of the door.
+
+"You are mistaken, dear Katherine," he said. "It has always been too
+late."
+
+"But why--why--if she is free to listen?"
+
+"Because I am not free to speak."
+
+Julius smiled at her. His suavity had returned, and along with it a
+dignity of bearing not observable before.
+
+"Let us walk," he said. And then:--"After all I have given you a very
+mutilated account of this matter. Soon after I took orders, before I
+had ever seen the very noble, to me perfect, woman who unconsciously
+revealed to me the glory of human love, I had dedicated my life, and
+all my powers--poor enough, I fear--of mind and body to the service of
+the Church. I was ambitious in those days. Ambition is dead, killed by
+the knowledge of my own shortcomings. I have proved an unprofitable
+servant--for which may God in His great mercy forgive me. But, while my
+faith in myself has withered, my faith in Him has come to maturity. I
+have learned to think very differently on many subjects, and to
+perceive that our Heavenly Father's purposes regarding us are more
+generous, more far-reaching, more august, than in my youthful ignorance
+I had ever dreamed. All things are lawful in His sight. Nothing is
+common or unclean--if we have once rightly apprehended Him, and He
+dwells in us. And yet--yet, a vow once made is binding. We may not do
+evil to gain however great a good."
+
+Katherine listened in silence. The words came with the power of
+immutable conviction. She could not believe, yet she was glad to have
+him believe.
+
+"And that vow precludes marriage?" she said at last.
+
+"It does," Julius answered.
+
+For a time they paced again in silence. Then Lady Calmady spoke, a
+delicate intimacy and affection in her manner, while once more, for a
+moment, she let her hand rest on his arm.
+
+"So Brockhurst keeps you--I keep you, dear Julius, to the last?"
+
+"Yes, if you will, to the very last."
+
+"I am thankful for that," she said. "You must forgive me if in the past
+I have been inconsiderate at times. I am afraid the constant struggle,
+which certain circumstances of necessity create, tends to make me harsh
+and imperious. I carry a trouble, which calls aloud for redress,
+forever in my arms. They ache with the burden of it. And there is no
+redress. And the trouble grows stronger alas. Its voice--so dear, yet
+so dreaded--grows louder, till it deafens me to all other sounds. The
+music of this once beautiful world becomes faint. Only angry discord
+remains. And I become selfish. I am the victim of a fixed idea. I
+become heedless of the suffering of those about me. And you, my poor
+Julius, must have suffered very much!"
+
+"Now, less than ever before," he answered. But even as he spoke,
+Katherine was struck by his pallor, by the drawn look of his features
+and languor of his bearing.
+
+"Ah, you have fasted all day!" she cried.
+
+"What matter?" he said, smiling. "The body surely can sustain a trifle
+of hunger, if the soul and spirit are fed. I have feasted royally
+to-day in that respect. I am strangely at ease. As to baser sort of
+food, what wonder if I forgot?"
+
+The door of Dickie's bedchamber opened, letting in long shafts of
+sunlight, and Dr. Knott came slowly forward. His aspect was savage.
+Even his philosophy had been not wholly proof against the pathos of his
+patient's case. It irritated him to fall from his usual relentlessness
+of common sense into a melting mood. He took refuge in sarcasm,
+desirous to detect weakness in others, since he was, unwillingly, so
+disagreeably conscious of it in himself.
+
+"Well, we're through with our business, Lady Calmady," he said. "Eh!
+Mr. March, what's wrong with you? Putty-coloured skin and shortness of
+breath. A little less prayer and a little more physical exercise is
+what you want. Successful, Lady Calmady?--Umph--I'm afraid the less
+said about that the better. Sir Richard will talk it out with you
+himself. Upset? Yes, I don't deny he is a little upset--and, like a
+fool, I'm upset too. You can go to him now, Lady Calmady. Keep him
+cheerful, please, and give him his head as much as you can."
+
+John Knott watched her as she moved away. He shrugged his shoulders and
+thrust his hands into his breeches' pockets.
+
+"She's going to hear what she won't much relish, poor thing," he said.
+"But I can't help that. One man's meat is another man's poison; and my
+affair is with the boy's meat, even if it should be of a kind to turn
+his mother's stomach. He shall have just all the chance I can get him,
+poor little chap. And now, Mr. March, I propose to prescribe for you,
+for you look uncommonly like taking a short-cut to heaven, and, if I
+know anything about this house, you've got your work cut out for you
+here below for a long time to come. Through with this business? Pooh!
+we've only taken a preliminary canter as yet. That boy's out of the
+common in more ways than one, and, cripple or no cripple, he's bound to
+lead you all a pretty lively dance before he's done."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE BEST OF IT
+
+
+The day had been hot, though the summer was but young. A wealth of
+steady sunlight bathed the western front of the house. All was notably
+still, save for a droning of bees, a sound of wood-chopping, voices now
+and again, and the squeak of a wheelbarrow away in the gardens.
+
+Richard lay on his back upon the bed. He had drawn the blue embroidered
+coverlet up about his waist; but his silk shirt was thrown open,
+exposing his neck and chest. His arms were flung up and out across the
+pillow on either side his gold-brown, close-curled head. As his mother
+entered he turned his face towards the open window. There was vigour
+and distinction in the profile--in the straight nose, full chin, and
+strong line of the lower jaw, in the round, firm throat, and small ear
+set close against the head. The muscles of his neck and arms were well
+developed. Seen thus, lying in the quiet glow of the afternoon
+sunshine, all possibility of physical disgrace seemed far enough from
+Richard Calmady. He might indeed, not unfitly, have been compared to
+one of those nobly graceful lads, who, upon the frieze of some Greek
+temple, set forth forever the perfect pattern of temperance and high
+courage, of youth and health.
+
+As Katherine sat down beside the bed, Richard thrust out his left hand.
+She took it in both hers, held and stroked the palm of it. But for a
+time she could not trust herself to speak. For she saw that,
+notwithstanding the resolute set of his lips, his breath caught in
+short quick sobs and that his eyelashes were glued in points by late
+shed tears. And seeing this, Katherine's motherhood arose and
+confronted her with something of reproach. It seemed to her she had
+been guilty of disloyalty in permitting her thought to be beguiled even
+for the brief space of her conversation with Julius March. She felt
+humbled, a little in Dickie's debt, since she had not realised to the
+uttermost each separate moment of his trial as each of those moments
+passed.
+
+"My darling, I am afraid Dr. Knott has hurt you very much," she said at
+last.
+
+"Oh! I don't know. I suppose he did hurt. He pulled me about awfully,
+but I didn't mind that. I told him to keep on till he made sure,"
+Richard answered huskily, still turning his face from her. "But none of
+those beastly legs and things fitted. He could not fix them so that I
+could use them. It was horrid. They only made me more helpless than
+before. You see--my--my feet are in the way."
+
+The last words came to Katherine as a shock. The boy had never spoken
+openly of his deformity, and in thus speaking he appeared to her to
+rend asunder the last of those veils with which she had earnestly
+striven to conceal the disgrace of it from him. She remained very
+still, bracing herself to bear--the while slowly stroking his hand.
+Suddenly the strong, young fingers closed hard on hers. Richard turned
+his head.
+
+"Mother," he said, "the doctor can't do anything for me. It's no use.
+We've just got to let it be."
+
+He set his teeth, choking a little, and drew the back of his right hand
+across his eyes.
+
+"It's awfully stupid; but somehow I never knew I should mind so much.
+I--I never did mind much till just lately. It began--the minding, I
+mean--the day Uncle Roger came home. It was the way he looked at me,
+and hearing about things he'd done. And I had a beastly dream that
+night. And it's all grown worse since."
+
+He paused a minute, making a strong effort to speak steadily.
+
+"I suppose it's silly to mind. I ought to be accustomed to it by this
+time. I've never known anything else. But I never thought of all it
+meant and--and--how it looked to other people till Helen was here and
+wanted me to show her the house. I--I supposed every one would take it
+for granted, as you all do here at home. And then I'd a hope Dr. Knott
+might find a way to hide it and so help me. But--but he can't. That
+hope's quite gone."
+
+"My own darling," Katherine murmured.
+
+"Yes, please say that!" he cried, looking up eagerly. "I am your
+darling, mother, aren't I, just the same? Dr. Knott said something
+about you just now. He's an awfully fine old chap. I like him. He
+talked to me for a long time after we'd sent Winter away, and he was
+ever so kind. And he told me it was bad for you too, you know--for both
+of us. I'm afraid I had not thought much about that before. I've been
+thinking about it since. And I began to be afraid that--that I might be
+a nuisance,--that you might be ashamed of me, later, when I am grown
+up, since I've always got to be like this, you see."
+
+The boy's voice broke.
+
+"Mother, mother, you'll never despise me, who ever does, will you?" he
+sobbed.
+
+And it seemed to Lady Calmady that now she must have touched bottom in
+this tragedy. There could surely be no further to go? It was well that
+her mood was soft; that for a little while she had ceased to be under
+the dominion of her so sadly fixed idea. In talking with Julius March
+she had been reminded how constant a quantity is sorrow; how real,
+notwithstanding their silence, are many griefs; how strong is human
+patience. And this indirectly had fortified her. Wrung with anguish for
+the boy, she yet was calm. She knelt down by the bedside and put her
+arms round him.
+
+"Most precious one--listen," she said. "You must never ask me such a
+question again. I am your mother--you cannot measure all that implies,
+and so you cannot measure the pain your question causes me. Only you
+must believe, because I tell it you, that your mother's love will never
+grow old or wear thin. It is always there, always fresh, always ready.
+In utter security you can come back to it again and again. It is like
+one of those clear springs in the secret places of the deep woods--you
+know them--which bubble up forever. Drink, often as you may, however
+heavy the drought or shrunken the streams elsewhere, those springs
+remain full to the very lip."--Her tone changed, taking a tender
+playfulness. "Why, my Dickie, you are the light of my eyes, my darling,
+the one thing which makes me still care to live. You are your father's
+gift to me. And so every kiss you give me, every pretty word you say to
+me, is treasured up for his, as well as for your own, dear sake."
+
+She leaned back, laid her head on the pillow beside his, cheek to
+cheek. Katherine was a young woman still--young enough to have moments
+of delicate shyness in the presence of her son. She could not look at
+him now as she spoke.
+
+"You know, dearest, if I could take your bodily misfortune upon me,
+here, directly, and give you my wholeness, I would do it more readily,
+with greater thankfulness and delight than I have ever done anything
+in----"
+
+But Richard raised his hand and laid it, almost violently, upon her
+mouth.
+
+"Oh stop, mother, stop!" he cried. "Don't--it's too dreadful to think
+of."
+
+He flung away, and lay at as far a distance as the width of the bed
+would allow, gazing at her in angry protest.
+
+"You can't do that. But you don't suppose I'd let you do it even if you
+could," he said fiercely. Then he turned his face to the sunny western
+window again. "I like to know that you're beautiful anyhow, mother,
+all--all over," he said.
+
+There followed a long silence between them. Lady Calmady still knelt by
+the bedside. But she drew herself up, rested her elbows on the bed and
+clasped her hands under her chin. And as she knelt there something of
+proud comfort came to her. For so long she had sickened, fearing the
+hour when Richard should begin clearly to gauge the extent of his own
+ill-luck; yet, now the first shock of plain speech over, she
+experienced relief. For the future they could be honest, she and
+he,--so she thought,--and speak heart to heart. Moreover, in his so
+bitter distress, it was to her--not to Mary, his good comrade, not to
+Roger Ormiston, the Ulysses of his fancy--that the boy had turned. He
+was given back to her, and she was greatly gladdened by that. She was
+gladdened too by Richard's last speech, by his angry and immediate
+repudiation of the bare mention of any personal gain which should touch
+her with loss. Katherine's eyes kindled as she knelt there watching her
+son. For it was very much to find him chivalrous, hotly sensitive of
+her beauty and the claims of her womanhood. In instinct, in thought, in
+word, he had shown himself a very gallant, high-bred gentleman--child
+though he was. And this gave Katherine not only proud comfort in the
+present, but cheered the future with hope.
+
+"Look here, Dickie, darling," she said softly at last, "tell me a
+little more about your talk with Dr. Knott."
+
+"Oh! he was awfully kind," Richard answered, turning towards her again,
+while his face brightened. "He said some awfully jolly things to me."
+
+The boy put out his hand and began playing with the bracelets on
+Katherine's wrists. He kept his eyes fixed on them as he fingered them.
+
+"He told me I was very strong and well made--except, of course, for it.
+And that I was not to imagine myself ill or invalidy, because I'm
+really less ill than most people, you know. And--he said--you won't
+think me foolish, mother, if I tell you?--he said I was a very handsome
+fellow."
+
+Richard glanced up quickly, while his colour deepened.
+
+"Am I really handsome?" he asked.
+
+Katherine smiled at him.
+
+"Yes, you are very handsome, Dickie. You have always been that. You
+were a beautiful baby, a beautiful little child. And now, every day you
+grow more like your father. I can't quite talk about him, my dear--but
+ask Uncle Roger, ask Marie de Mirancourt what he was when she knew him
+first."
+
+The boy's face flashed back her smile, as the sea does the sunlight.
+
+"Oh! I say, but that's good news," he said. He lay quite still on his
+back for a little while, thinking about it.
+
+"That seems to give one a shove, you know," he remarked presently. Then
+he fell to playing with her bracelets again. "After all, I've got a
+good many shoves to-day, mother. Dr. Knott's a regular champion shover.
+He told me about a number of people he'd known who had got smashed up
+somehow, or who'd always had something wrong, you know--and how they'd
+put a good face on it and hadn't let it interfere, but had done things
+just the same. And he told me I'd just got to be plucky--he knew I
+could if I tried--and not let it interfere either. He told me I mustn't
+be soft, or lazy, because doing things is more difficult for me than
+for other people. But that I'd just got to put my back into it, and go
+in and win. And I told him I would--and you'll help me, mummy, won't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, darling, yes," Lady Calmady said.
+
+"I want to begin at once," he went on hurriedly, looking hard at the
+bracelets. "I shouldn't like to be unkind to her, mother, but do you
+think Clara would give me up? I don't need a nurse now. It's rather
+silly. May one of the men-servants valet me? I should like Winter best,
+because he's been here always, and I shouldn't feel shy with him. Would
+it bore you awfully to speak about that now, so that he might begin
+to-night?"
+
+Lady Calmady's brave smile grew a trifle sad. The boy was less
+completely given back to her than she had fondly supposed. This day was
+after all to introduce a new order. And the woman always pays. She was
+to pay for that advance, so was the devoted handmaiden, Clara. Still
+the boy must have his way--were it even towards a merely imagined good.
+
+"Very well, dearest, I will settle it," she answered.
+
+"You won't mind, though, mother?"
+
+Katherine stroked the short curly hair back from his forehead.
+
+"I don't mind anything that promises to make you happier, Dickie," she
+said. "What else did you and Dr. Knott settle--anything else?"
+
+Richard waited, then he turned on his elbow and looked full and very
+earnestly at her.
+
+"Yes, mother, we did settle something more. And something that I'm
+afraid you won't like. But it would make me happier than anything
+else--it would make all the difference that--that can be made, you
+know."
+
+He paused, his expression very firm though his lips quivered.
+
+"Dr. Knott wants me to ride."
+
+Katherine drew back, stood up straight, threw out her hands as though
+to keep off some actual and tangible object of offense.
+
+"Not that, Richard," she cried. "Anything in the world rather than
+that."
+
+He looked at her imploringly, yet with a certain determination, for the
+child was dying fast in him and the forceful desires and intentions of
+youth growing.
+
+"Don't say I mustn't, mother. Pray, pray don't, because----"
+
+He left the sentence unfinished, overtaken by the old habit of
+obedience, yet he did not lower his eyes.
+
+But Lady Calmady made no response. For the moment she was outraged to
+the point of standing apart, even from her child. For a moment, even
+motherhood went down before purely personal feeling--and this, by the
+irony of circumstance, immediately after motherhood had made supreme
+confession of immutability. But remembering her husband's death,
+remembering the source of all her child's misfortune, it appeared to
+her indecent, a wanton insult to all her past suffering, that such a
+proposition should be made to her. And, in a flash of cruelly vivid
+perception, she knew how the boy would look on a horse, the grotesque,
+to the vulgar, wholly absurd spectacle he must, notwithstanding his
+beauty, necessarily present. For a moment the completeness of love
+failed before pride touched to the very quick.
+
+"But, how can you ride?" she said. "My poor child, think--how is it
+possible?"
+
+Richard sat upright, pressing his hands down on the bedclothes on
+either side to steady himself. The colour rushed over his face and
+throat.
+
+"It is possible, mother," he answered resolutely, "or Dr. Knott would
+never have talked about it. He couldn't have been so unkind. He drew me
+the plan of a saddle. He said I was to show it to Uncle Roger to-night.
+Of course it won't be easy at first, but I don't care about that. And
+Chifney would teach me. I know he would. He said the other day he'd
+make a sportsman of me yet."
+
+"When did you talk with Chifney?" Lady Calmady spoke very quietly, but
+there was that in her tone which came near frightening the boy. It
+required all his daring to answer honestly and at once.
+
+"I talked to him the day Aunt Ella and Helen were here. I--I went down
+to the stables with him and saw all the horses."
+
+"Then either you or he did very wrong," Lady Calmady remarked.
+
+"It was my fault, mother, all my fault. Chifney would have ridden on,
+but I stopped him. Chaplin tried to prevent me. I--I told him to mind
+his own business. I meant to go. I--I saw all the horses, and they were
+splendid," he added, enthusiasm gaining over fear. "I saw the stables,
+and the weighing-room, and everything. I never enjoyed myself so much
+before. I told Chaplin I would tell you, because he ought not to be
+blamed, you know. I did mean to tell you directly I came in. But all
+those people were here."--Richard's face darkened. "And you remember
+what happened? That put everything else out of my head."
+
+A pause. Then he said: "Are you very angry?"
+
+Katherine made no reply. She moved away round the foot of the bed and
+stood at the sunny window in silence. Bitterness of hot humiliation
+possessed her. Heretofore, whatever her trial, she had been mistress of
+the situation; she had reigned a queen-mother, her authority
+undisputed. And now it appeared her kingdom was in revolt, conspiracy
+was rife. Richard's will and hers were in conflict; and Richard's will
+must eventually obtain, since he would eventually be master. Already
+courtiers bowed to that will. All this was in her mind. And a wounding
+of feeling, far deeper and more intimate than this,--since Katherine's
+nobility of character was great and the worldly aspect, the greed of
+personal power and undisputed rule, could not affect her for long. It
+wounded her, as a slight upon the memory of the man she had so wholly
+loved, that this first conflict between Richard and herself should turn
+on the question of horses and the racing-stable. The irony of the
+position appeared unpardonable. And then, the vision of poor
+Richard--her darling, whom she had striven so jealously to shield ever
+since the day, over thirteen years ago, when undressing her baby she
+had first looked upon its malformed limbs--Richard riding forth for all
+the staring, mocking world to see, again arose before her.
+
+Thinking of all this, Katherine gazed out over the stately home
+scene--grass plot and gardens, woodland and distant landscape, rich in
+the golden splendour of steady sunshine--with smarting eyes and a sense
+of impotent misery that wrapped her about as a burning garment. The boy
+was beginning to go his own way. And his way was not hers. And those
+she had trusted were disloyal, helping him to go it. Alone, in
+retirement, she had borne her great trouble with tremendous courage.
+But how should she bear it under changed conditions, amid publicity,
+gossip, comment?
+
+Dickie, meanwhile, had let himself drop back against the pillows. He
+set his teeth and waited. It was hard. An opportunity of escape from
+the galling restraints of his infirmity had been presented to him, and
+his mother--his mother after promise given, after the sympathy of a
+lifetime; his mother, in whom he trusted absolutely--was unwilling he
+should accept it! As he lay there all the desperate longing for freedom
+and activity that had developed in him of late--all the passion for
+sport, for that primitive, half-savage manner of life, that intimate,
+if somewhat brutal, relation to nature, to wild creatures and to the
+beasts whom man by centuries of usage has broken to his service, which
+is the special heritage of Englishmen of gentle blood--sprang up in
+Richard, strong, all compelling. He must have his part in all this. He
+would not be denied. He cried out to her imperiously:--
+
+"Mother, speak to me! I haven't done anything really wrong. I've a
+right to do what any other boy has--as far as I can get it. Don't you
+see riding is just the one thing to--to make up--to make a man of me?
+Don't you see that?"
+
+He sat bolt upright, stretching out his arms to her in fierce appeal,
+while the level sunshine touched his bright hair and wildly eager face.
+
+"Mummy, mummy darling, don't you see? Try to see. You can't want to
+take away my one chance!"
+
+Katherine turned at that reiterated cry, and her heart melted within
+her. The boy was her own, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. From
+her he had life. From her he had also lifelong disgrace and
+deprivation. Was there anything then, which, he asking, she could
+refuse to give? She cast herself on her knees beside the bed again and
+buried her face in the sheet.
+
+"My precious one," she sobbed, "forgive me. I am ashamed, for I have
+been both harsh and weak. I said I would help you, and then directly I
+fail you. Forgive me."
+
+And the boy was amazed, speechless at first, seeing her broken thus;
+shamed in his turn by the humility of her attitude. To his young
+chivalry it was as an impiety to look upon her tears.
+
+"Please don't cry, mother," he entreated tremulously, a childlike
+simplicity of manner taking him. "Don't cry--it is dreadful. I never
+saw you cry before."--Then, after a pause, he added: "And--never mind
+about my riding. I don't so very much care about it--really, I don't
+believe I do--after all."
+
+At that dear lie Katherine raised her bowed head, a wonderful sweetness
+in her tear-stained face, tender laughter upon her lips. She drew the
+boy's hands on to her shoulders, clasped her hands across his extended
+arms, and kissed him upon the mouth.
+
+"No, no, my beloved, you shall ride," she said. "You shall have your
+saddle--twenty thousand saddles if you want them. We will talk to Uncle
+Roger and Chifney to-night. All shall be as you wish."
+
+"But you're not angry, mother, any more?" he asked, a little bewildered
+by her change of tone and by the passion of her lovely looks and
+speech.
+
+Katherine shook her head, and still that tender laughter curved her
+lips.
+
+"No, I am never going to be angry any more--with you at least, Dick. I
+must learn to be plucky too. A pair of us, Dickie, trying to keep up
+one another's pluck! Only let us go forward hand in hand, you and I,
+and then, however desperate our doings, I at least shall be content."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+TELLING, INCIDENTALLY, OF A BROKEN-DOWN POSTBOY AND A COUNTRY FAIR
+
+
+The Brockhurst-mail phaeton waited, in the shade of the three large
+sycamores, before Appleyard's shop at Farley Row. A groom stood stiff
+and straight at the horses' heads. While upon the high driving-seat, a
+trifle excited by the suddenness of his elevation, sat Richard. He held
+the reins in his right hand, and stretched his left to get the cramp
+out of his fingers. His arms ached--there was no question about it. He
+had never driven a pair before, and the horses needed a lot of driving.
+For the wind was gusty, piling up heavy masses of black-purple
+rain-cloud in the southeast. It made the horses skittish and unsteady,
+and Dickie found it was just all he could do to hold them, so that
+Chifney's reiterated admonition, "Keep 'em well in hand, Sir Richard,"
+had been not wholly easy to obey.
+
+From out the open shop-door came mingled odour of new leather and of
+horse clothing. Within Mr. Chifney delivered himself of certain orders;
+while Appleyard--a small, fair man, thin of nose, a spot of violent
+colour on either cheek-bone--skipped before him goat-like, in a fury of
+complacent intelligence. For it was not every day so notable a
+personage as the Brockhurst trainer crossed his threshold. To Josiah
+Appleyard, indeed--not to mention his two apprentices stretching eyes
+and ears from the back-shop, to catch any chance word of Mr. Chifney's
+conversation--it appeared as though the gods very really condescended
+to visit the habitations of men. While Mrs. Appleyard, peeping from
+behind the wire blind of the parlour, had--as she afterwards repeatedly
+declared--"felt her insides turn right over," when she saw the carriage
+draw up. The conversation was prolonged and low toned. For the order
+was of a peculiar and confidential character, demanding much
+explanation on the one part, much application on the other. It was an
+order, in short, wholly flattering to the self-esteem of the saddler,
+both as tribute to his social discretion and his technical skill. Thus
+did Josiah skip goat-like, being glad.
+
+Meanwhile, Richard Calmady waited without, resting his aching arms,
+gazing down the wide, dusty street, his senses lulled by the flutter of
+the sycamore leaves overhead. The said street offered but small matter
+of interest. For Farley Row is one of those dead-alive little towns on
+the borders of the forest land, across which progress, even at the time
+in question, 1856, had written Ichabod in capital letters. During the
+early years of the century some sixty odd coaches, plying upon the
+London and Portsmouth road, would stop to change horses at the White
+Lion in the course of each twenty-four hours. That was the golden age
+of the Row. Horns twanged, heavy wheels rumbled, steaming teams were
+led away, with drooping heads, into the spacious inn yard, and fresh
+horses stepped out cheerily to take their place between the traces. The
+next stage across Spendle Flats was known as a risky one. Legends of
+Claude Duval and his fellow-highwaymen still haunt the woods and moors
+that top the long hill going northward. And the passengers by those
+sixty coaches were wont to recover themselves from terrors escaped, or
+fortify themselves against terrors to come, by plentiful libations at
+the bar of the handsome red-brick inn. The house did a roaring trade.
+But now the traffic upon the great road had assumed a local and
+altogether undemonstrative character. The coaches had fallen into
+lumber, the spanking teams had each and all made their squalid last
+journey to the knacker's; and the once famous Gentlemen of the Road had
+long lain at rest in mother earth's lap--sleeping there none the less
+peacefully because the necks of many of them had suffered a nasty rick
+from the hangman's rope, and because the hard-trodden pavement of the
+prison-yard covered them.
+
+The fine stables of the White Lion stood tenantless, now, from year's
+end to year's end. Rats scampered, and bats squeaked in unlovely
+ardours of courtship, about the ranges of empty stalls and cobweb-hung
+rafters. Yet one ghost from out the golden age haunted the place
+still--a lean, withered, bandy-legged, little stick of a man, arrayed
+in frayed and tarnished splendour of sky-blue waist-jacket, silver
+lace, and jack-boots of which the soles and upper leathers threatened
+speedy and final divorce. In all weathers this bit of human
+wreckage--Jackie Deeds by name--might be seen wandering aimlessly about
+the vacant yard, or seated upon the bench beside the portico of the
+silent, bow-windowed inn, pulling at a, too often empty, clay-pipe and
+spitting automatically.
+
+Over Richard, tender-hearted as yet towards all creatures whom nature
+or fortune had treated cavalierly, the decrepit postboy exercised a
+fascination. One day, when driving through the Row with Mary Cathcart,
+he had succeeded in establishing relations with Jackie Deeds through
+the medium of a half-crown. And now, as he waited beneath the rustling
+sycamores, it was with a sensation of quick, yet half-shy, pleasure,
+that he saw the disreputable figure lurch out of the inn yard, stand
+for a minute shading eyes with hand while making observations, and then
+hobble across the street, touching the peak of a battered, black-velvet
+cap as it advanced.
+
+"Be 'e come to zee the show, sir?" the old man coughed out, peering
+with dim, blear eyes up into the boy's fresh face.
+
+"No, we've come about something from Appleyard's. I--I didn't know
+there was a show."
+
+"Oh! bain't there though, Sir Richard! I tell 'e there be a prime sight
+of a show. There be monkeys down town, and dorgs what dances on their
+'inder legs, and gurt iron cages chock full er wild beastises, by what
+they tells me."
+
+Dickie, feeling anxiously in his pockets for some coin of sufficient
+size to be worthy of Mr. Deeds' acceptance, ejaculated involuntarily:--"Oh!
+are there? I'd give anything to see them."
+
+"Sixpence 'ud do most er they 'ere shows, I expect. The wild beastises
+'ud run into a shilling may be."--The old postboy made a joyless,
+creaking sound, bearing but slightest affinity to laughter. "But you
+'ud see your way round more'n a shilling, Sir Richard. A terrible,
+rich, young gentleman, by what they tells me."
+
+Something a trifle malicious obtained in this attempt at jocosity,
+causing Dickie to bend down rather hastily over the wheel, and thrust
+his offering into the crumpled, shaky hands.
+
+"There," he said. "Oh! it's nothing. I'm so pleased you--you don't
+mind. Where do you say this show is?"
+
+"Gor a'mighty bless 'e, sir," the old man whimpered, with a change of
+tone. "'Tain't every day poor old Jackie Deeds runs across a rich,
+young gentleman as ull give him 'arf a crown. Times is bad, mortal
+bad--couldn't be much wuss."
+
+"I'm so sorry," Richard answered. He felt apologetic, as though in some
+manner responsible for the decay of the coaching system and his
+companion's fallen estate.
+
+"Mortal bad, couldn't be no wuss."
+
+"I'm very sorry. But about the show--where is it please?" the boy asked
+again, a little anxious to change the subject.
+
+"Oh! that there show. 'Tain't much of a show neither, by what they
+tells me."
+
+Mr. Deeds spoke with sudden irritability. Uplifted by the possession of
+a half crown, he became contemptuous of the present, jealous of the
+past when such coin was more plentiful with him.
+
+"Not much of a show," he repeated. "The young uns ull crack up most
+anything as comes along. But that's their stoopidness. Never zeed
+nothing better. Law bless 'e, this ain't a patch on the shows I've a'
+zeen in my day. Cock-fightings, and fellows--wi' a lot er money laid on
+'em by the gentry too--a-pounding of each other till there weren't an
+inch above the belt of 'em as weren't bloody. And the Irish giant, and
+dwarfs 'ad over from France. They tell me most Frencheys's made that
+way. Ole Boney 'isself wasn't much of a one to look at. And I can mind
+a calf wi' two 'eads-'ud eat wi' both mouths at once, and all the food
+'ud go down into the same belly. And a man wi' no arms, never 'ad none,
+by what they used to tell me----"
+
+"Ah!" Richard exclaimed quickly.
+
+"No, never 'ad none, and yet 'ud play the drum wi' 'is toes and fire
+off a horse pistol. Lor, you would 'er laughed to 'av zeen 'im. 'E made
+fine sport for the folks 'e did."
+
+Jackie Deeds had recovered his good-humour. He peered up into the boy's
+face again maliciously, and broke into cheerless, creaking merriment.
+
+"Gor a'mighty 'as 'is jokes too," he said. "I'm thinking, by the curous
+made creeturs 'e sends along sometimes."
+
+"Chifney," Richard called imperatively. "Chifney, are you nearly ready?
+We ought to get home. There's a storm coming up."
+
+"Well, we shall get that matter of the saddle done right enough, Sir
+Richard," the trainer remarked presently, as the carriage bowled up the
+street. "Don't be too free with the whip, sir.--Steady, steady
+there.--Mind the donkey-cart.--Bear away to the right. Don't let 'em
+get above themselves. Excuse me, Sir Richard."
+
+He leaned forward and laid both hands quietly on the reins.
+
+"Look here, sir," he said, "I think you'd better let Henry lead the
+horses past all this variety business."
+
+The end of the street was reached. On either hand small red or white
+houses trend away in a broken line along the edge of a flat, grass
+common, backed by plantations of pollarded oak trees. In the
+foreground, fringing the broad roadway, were booths, tents, and vans.
+And the staring colours of these last, raw reds and yellows, the blue
+smoke beating down from their little stove-pipe chimneys, the dirty
+white of tent flaps and awnings, stood out harshly in a flare of stormy
+sunlight against the solid green of the oaks and uprolling masses of
+black-purple cloud.
+
+Here indeed was the show. But to Richard Calmady's eyes it lacked
+disappointingly in attraction. His nerves were somewhat a-quiver. All
+the course detail, all the unlovely foundations, of the business of
+pleasure were rather distressingly obvious to his sight. A
+merry-go-round was in full activity--wooden horses and most unseaworthy
+boats describing a jerky circle to the squeaking of tin whistles and
+purposeless thrumpings of a drum. Close by a crop-eared lurcher, tied
+beneath one of the vans, dragged choking at his chain and barked
+himself frantic under the stones and teasing of a knot of idle boys. A
+half-tipsy slut of a woman threatened a child, who, in soiled tights
+and spangles, crouched against the muddy hind-wheel of a wagon, tears
+dribbling down his cheeks, his arm raised to ward off the impending
+blow. From the menagerie--an amorphous huddle of gray tents, ranged
+behind a flight of wooden steps leading up to an open gallery hung with
+advertisements of the many attractions within--came the hideous
+laughter of a hyena, and the sullen roar of a lion weary of the rows of
+stolid English faces staring daily, hourly, between the bars of his
+foul and narrow cage, heart-sick with longing for sight of the open,
+starlit heaven and the white-domed, Moslem tombs amid the prickly,
+desert thickets and plains of clean, hot sand. On the edge of the
+encampment horses grazed--sorry beasts for the most part, galled,
+broken-kneed and spavined, weary and heart-sick as the captive lion.
+But weary not from idleness, as he. Weary from heavy loads and hard
+traveling and scant provender. Sick of collar and whip and reiterated
+curses.
+
+About the tents and booths, across the grass, and along the roadway,
+loitered a sad-coloured, country crowd. Even to the children, it took
+its pleasure slowly and silently; save in the case of a hulking, young
+carter in a smock-frock, who, being pretty far gone in liquor,
+alternately shouted bawdy songs and offered invitation to the company
+generally to come on and have its head punched.
+
+Such were the pictures that impressed themselves upon Richard's brain
+as Henry led the dancing carriage-horses up the road. And it must be
+owned that from this first sight of life, as the common populations
+live it, his soul revolted. Delicately nurtured, finely bred, his
+sensibility accentuated by the prickings of that thorn in the flesh
+which was so intimate a part of his otherwise noble heritage, the
+grossness and brutality of much which most boys of his age have already
+learnt to take for granted affected him to the point of loathing. And
+more especially did he loathe the last picture presented to him on the
+outskirts of the common. At the door of a gaudily-painted van, somewhat
+apart from the rest, stood a strapping lass, tambourine in one hand,
+tin mug for the holding of pennies in the other. She wore a black,
+velvet bodice, rusty with age, and a blue, silk skirt of doubtful
+cleanliness, looped up over a widely distended scarlet petticoat. Rows
+of amber beads encircled her brown throat. She laughed and leered,
+bold-eyed and coarsely alluring, at a couple of sheepish country lads
+on the green below. She called to them, pointing over her shoulder with
+the tin cup, to the sign-board of her show. At the painting on that
+board Richard Calmady gave one glance. His lips grew thin and his face
+white. He jerked at the reins, causing the horses to start and swerve.
+Was it possible that, as old Jackie Deeds said, God Almighty had His
+jokes too, jokes at the expense of His own creation? That in cynical
+abuse of human impotence, as a wanton pastime, He sent human beings
+forth into the world thus ludicrously defective? The thought was
+unformulated. It amounted hardly to a thought indeed,--was but a blind
+terror of insecurity, which, coursing through the boy's mind, filled
+him with agonised and angry pity towards all disgraced fellow-beings,
+all enslaved and captive beasts. Dimly he recognised his kinship to all
+such.
+
+Meanwhile the carriage bowled along the smooth road and up the long
+hill, bordered by fir and beech plantations, which leads to Spendle
+Flats. And there, in the open, the storm came down, in rolling thunder
+and lashing rain. Tall, shifting, white columns chased each other madly
+across the bronze expanse of the moorland. Chifney, mindful of his
+charge, hurried Dickie into a greatcoat, buttoned it carefully round
+him, offered to drive, almost insisted on doing so. But the boy refused
+curtly. He welcomed the stinging rain, the swirling wind, the swift
+glare of lightning, the ache and strain of holding the pulling horses.
+The violence of it all heated his blood as with the stern passion of
+battle. And under the influence of that passion his humour changed from
+agonised pity to a fierce determination of conquest. He would fight, he
+would come through, he would win, he would slay dragons.
+Prometheus-like he would defy the gods. Again his thought was
+unformulated, little more than the push of young, untamed energy
+impatient of opposition. But that he could face this wild mood of
+nature and control and guide these high-mettled, headstrong horses gave
+him coolness and self-confidence. It yielded him assurance that there
+was, after all, an immensity of distance between himself and all caged,
+outworn creatures, and that the horrible example of deformity upon the
+brazen-faced girl's show-board had really nothing to do with him.
+Dickie's last humour was less noble than his first, it is to be feared.
+But in all healthy natures, in all those in whom the love of beauty is
+keen, there must be in youth strong repudiation of the brotherhood of
+suffering. Time will teach a finer and deeper lesson to those that have
+faith and courage to receive it; yet it is well the young should defy
+sorrow, hate suffering, gallantly, however hopelessly, fight.
+
+And the warlike instinct remained by Dickie all that evening. He was
+determined to assert himself, to measure his power, to obtain. While
+Winter was helping him dress for dinner he gave orders that his chair
+should be placed at the bottom of the table.
+
+"But the colonel sits there, Sir Richard."
+
+Dickie's face did not give in the least.
+
+"He has sat there," he answered rather shortly. "But I have spoken to
+her ladyship, and in future he will sit by her. I'll go down early,
+Winter. I prefer being in my place when the others come in."
+
+It must be added that Ormiston accepted his deposition in the best
+possible spirit, patting the boy on the shoulder as he passed him.
+
+"Quite right, old chap. I like to see you there. Claim your own, and
+keep it."
+
+At which a lump rose in Dickie's throat, nearly causing him to choke
+over his first spoonful of soup. But Mary Cathcart whose kind eyes saw
+most things, smiled first upon her lover and then upon him, and began
+talking to him of horses, as one sportsman to another. And so Dickie
+speedily recovered himself, and grew eager, playing host very prettily
+at his own table.
+
+He demanded to sit up to prayers, moreover, and took his place in the
+dead Richard Calmady's stall nearest the altar rails on the left. Next
+him was Dr. Knott, who had come in unexpectedly just before dinner. He
+had the boy a little on his mind; and, while contemptuous of his own
+weakness in the matter, wanted badly to know just how he was. Lady
+Calmady had begged him to stay. He could be excellent company when he
+pleased. He had laid aside his roughness of manner and been excellent
+company to-night. Next him was Ormiston, while the seats immediately
+below were occupied by the men-servants, Winter at their head.
+
+Opposite to Richard, across the chapel, sat Lady Calmady. The fair,
+summer moonlight streaming in through the east window spread a network
+of fairy jewels upon her stately, gray-clad figure and beautiful head.
+Beside her was Mary Cathcart, and then came a range of dark, vacant
+stalls. And below these was a long line of women-servants, ranging from
+Denny, in rustling, black silk, and Clara,--alert and pretty, though a
+trifle tearful,--through many grades and orders, down to the little
+scullery-maid, fresh from the keeper's cottage on the Warren--homesick,
+and half scared by the grand gentlemen and ladies in evening-dress, by
+the strange, lovely figures in the stained-glass windows, by the great,
+gold cross and flowers, and the rich altar-cloth and costly hangings
+but half seen in the conflicting light of the moonbeams and quivering
+candles.
+
+John Knott was impressed by the scene too, though hardly on the same
+lines as the little scullery-maid. He had long ago passed the doors of
+orthodoxy and dogma. Christian church and heathen temple--could he have
+had the interesting experience of entering the latter--were alike to
+him. The attitude and office of the priest, the same in every age and
+under every form of religion, filled him with cynical scorn. Yet he had
+to own there was something inexpressibly touching in the nightly
+gathering together of this great household, gentle and simple; and in
+this bowing before the source of the impenetrable mystery which
+surrounds and encloses the so curiously urgent and vivid consciousness
+of the individual. He had to own, too, that there was something
+inexpressibly touching in the tones of Julius March's voice as he read
+of the young Galilean prophet "going about and doing good"--simple and
+gracious record of human tenderness and pity, upon which, in the course
+of centuries, the colossal fabric of the modern Christianity, Catholic
+and Protestant, has been built up.
+
+"'And great multitudes came to Him,'" read Julius, "'having with them
+those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast
+them down at Jesus' feet, and He healed them; insomuch that the
+multitude marveled when they saw the dumb to speak, and the maimed to
+be whole, and the lame to walk----'"
+
+How simple it all sounded in that sweet, old-world story! And yet how
+lamentably, in striving to accomplish just these same things, his own
+far-reaching science failed!
+
+"'The maimed to be whole, the lame to walk'"--involuntarily he looked
+round at the boy beside him.
+
+Richard leaned back in his stall, tired with the long day and its
+varying emotions. His eyes were half closed, and his profile showed
+pale as wax against the background of dark woodwork. His eyebrows were
+drawn into a slight frown, and his face bore a peculiar expression of
+reticence. Once he glanced up at the reader, as though on a sudden a
+pleasant thought occurred to him. But the movement was a passing one.
+He leaned back in his stall again and folded his arms, with a movement
+of quiet pride, almost of contempt.
+
+Later that night, as her custom was, Katherine opened the door of
+Richard's room softly, and entering bent over his bed in the warm
+dimness to give him a last look before going to rest herself. To-night
+Dickie was awake. He put his arms round her coaxingly.
+
+"Stay a little, mummy darling," he said. "I am not a bit sleepy. I want
+to talk."
+
+Katherine sat down on the edge of the bed. All the mass of her hair was
+unbound, and fell in a cloud about her to the waist. Richard, leaning
+on one elbow, gathered it together, held and kissed it. He was
+possessed by the sense of his mother's great beauty. She seemed so
+magnificently far removed from all that is coarse, spoiled, or
+degraded. She seemed so superb, so exquisite a personage. So he gazed
+at her, kissed her hair, and gently touched her arms, where the open
+sleeves of her white dressing-gown left them bare, in reverential
+ecstasy.
+
+Katherine became almost perplexed.
+
+"My dearest, what is it?" she asked at last.
+
+"Oh! it's only that you're so perfect, mother," he said. "You make me
+feel so safe somehow. I'm never afraid when you are there."
+
+"Afraid of what?" she asked. A hope came upon her that he had grown
+nervous of riding, and wanted her to help him to retire gracefully from
+the matter. But his next words undeceived her. He threw himself back
+against the pillow and clasped his hands under his head.
+
+"That's just it," he said. "I don't know exactly what I am afraid of,
+and yet I do get awfully scared at times. I suppose, mother, if one's
+in a good position--the position we're in, you know--nobody can ill-use
+one very much?"
+
+Lady Calmady's eyes blazed with indignation. "Ill-use you? Who has ever
+dared to hint at, to dream of such a thing, dear Richard?"
+
+"Oh, no one--no one! Only I can't help wondering about things, you
+know. And some--some people do get most awfully ill-used. I can't help
+seeing that."
+
+Katherine paused before answering. The boy did not look at her. She
+spoke with quiet conviction, her eyes gazing out into the dimness of
+the room.
+
+"I know," she said, almost reluctantly. "And perhaps it is as well you
+should know it too, though it is sad knowledge. People are not always
+very considerate of one another. But ill-usage cannot touch you, my
+dearest. You are saved by love, by position, by wealth."
+
+"You are sure of that, mother?"
+
+"Sure? Of course I am sure, darling," she answered. Yet even while
+speaking her heart sank.
+
+Richard remained silent for a space. Then he said, with certain
+hesitancy: "Mother, tell me, it is true then that I am rich?"
+
+"Quite true, Dick."
+
+"But sometimes people lose their money."
+
+Katherine smiled.--"Your money is not kept in a stocking, dearest."
+
+"I don't suppose it is," the boy said, turning towards her. "But don't
+banks break?"
+
+"Yes, banks break. But a good many broken banks would not affect you.
+It is too long a story to tell you now, Dickie, but your income is very
+safe. It would almost need a revolution to ruin you. You are rich now;
+and I am able to save considerable sums for you yearly."
+
+"It's--it's awfully good of you to take so much trouble for me,
+mother," he interrupted, stroking her bare arm again delicately.
+
+To Katherine his half-shy endearments were the most delicious thing in
+life--so delicious that at moments she could hardly endure them. They
+made her heart too full.
+
+"Eight years hence, when you come of age and I give account of my
+stewardship, you will be very rich," she said.
+
+Richard lay quite still, his eyes again fixed on the dimness.
+
+"That--that's good news," he said at last, drawing a long breath. "I
+saw things to-day, mother, while we were driving. It was nobody's
+fault. There was a fair with a menagerie and shows at Farley Row. I
+couldn't help seeing. Don't ask me about it, mother. I'd rather forget,
+if I can. Only it made me understand that it is safer for any
+one--well, any one like--me--don't you know, to be rich."
+
+Richard sat up, flung his arms round her and kissed her with sudden
+passion.
+
+"Beautiful mother, honey-sweet mother," he cried, "you've told me just
+everything I wanted to know. I won't be afraid any more." Then he
+added, in a charming little tone of authority: "Now you mustn't stay
+here any longer. You must be tired. You must go to bed and go to
+sleep."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN WHICH OUR HERO'S WORLD GROWS SENSIBLY WIDER
+
+
+In the autumn of 1862 Richard Calmady went up to Oxford. Not through
+ostentation, but in obedience to the exigencies of the case, his going
+was in a somewhat princely sort, so that the venerable city, moved from
+the completeness of her scholarly and historic calm, turned her eyes,
+in a flutter of quite mundane excitement, upon the newcomer. Julius
+March accompanied Richard. Time and thought had moved forward; but the
+towers and spires of Oxford, her fair cloisters and enchanting gardens,
+her green meadows and noble elms, her rivers, Isis and Cherwell,
+remained as when Julius too had been among the young and ardent of her
+sons. He was greatly touched by this return to the Holy City of his
+early manhood. He renewed old friendships. He reviewed the past, taking
+the measure calmly of what life had promised, what it had given of
+good. A pleasant house had been secured in St. Giles' Street; and a
+contingent of the Brockhurst household, headed by Winter, went with the
+two gentlemen, while Chaplin and a couple of grooms preceded them, in
+charge of a goodly number of horse-boxes.
+
+For that first saddle, fashioned now some six years ago by Josiah
+Appleyard of Farley Row, had worked something as near a miracle as ever
+yet was worked by pigskin. It was a singularly ugly saddle, running up
+into a peak front and back, furnished with a complicated system of
+straps and buckles and--in place of stirrups and stirrup-leathers--with
+a pair of contrivances resembling old-fashioned holsters. Mary
+Cathcart's brown eyes had grown moist on first beholding it. And
+Colonel Ormiston had exclaimed, "Good God! Oh, well, poor dear little
+chap, I suppose it's the best we can do for him." An ugly saddle--yet
+had Josiah Appleyard ample reason to skip, goat-like, being glad. For,
+ugly or not, it fulfilled its purpose, bringing custom to the maker and
+happiness and health to the owner of it.
+
+The boy rode fearlessly, while exercise and exertion begot in him a
+certain light-heartedness and audacity good to see. The window-seat of
+the Long Gallery, the book-shelves of the library, knew him but seldom
+now. He was no less courteous, no less devoted to his mother, no less
+in admiration of her beauty; but the young barbarian was well awake in
+Dickie, and drove him out of doors, on to the moorland or into the
+merry greenwood, with dog, and horse, and gun. On his well-broken pony
+he shot over the golden stubble fields in autumn, brought down his
+pheasants, stationed at the edge of the great coverts; went out for
+long afternoons, rabbiting in the warrens and field banks, escorted by
+spaniels and retrievers, and keepers carrying lithe, lemon-coloured
+ferrets tied up in a bag.
+
+Later, when he was older,--but this tried Katherine somewhat, reminding
+her too keenly of another Richard Calmady and days long dead,--Winter,
+a trifle reluctant at such shortening of his own virtuous slumbers,
+would call Dickie and dress him, all in the gray of the summer morning;
+while, at the little arched doorway in the west front, Chifney and a
+groom with a led horse would await his coming, and the boy would mount
+and ride away from the great, sleeping house. At such times a charm of
+dewy freshness lay on grass and woodland, on hill and vale. The morning
+star grew pale and vanished in the clear-flashing delight of sunrise,
+as Richard rode forth to meet the string of racers; as he noted the
+varying form and fortune of Rattlepate or Sweet Rosemary, of Yellow
+Jacket, Morion or Light-o'-Love, over the short fragrant turf of the
+gallop; as he felt the virile joy which the strength of the horses and
+the pounding rush of them as they swept past him ever aroused in him.
+Then he would ride on, by a short cut, to the old, red-brick
+rubbing-house, crowning the rising ground on the farther side of the
+lake, and wait there to see the finish, talking of professional matters
+with Chifney meanwhile; or, turning his horse's head towards the wide,
+distant view, sit silent, drawing near to nature and worshipping--with
+the innocent gladness of a still virgin heart--in the temple of the
+dawn.
+
+Life at Oxford was set in a different key. The university city was well
+disposed towards this young man of so great wealth and so strange
+fortunes; and Richard was unsuspicious, and ready enough to meet
+friendliness half-way. Yet it must be owned he suffered many bad
+quarters of an hour. He was, at once, older in thought and younger in
+practical experience than his fellow-undergraduates. He was cut off, of
+necessity, from their sports. They would eat his breakfasts, drink his
+wine, and show no violent objection to riding his horses. They were
+considerate, almost anxiously careful of him, being generous and
+good-hearted lads. And yet poor Dick was perturbed by the fear that
+they were more at ease without him, that his presence acted as a slight
+check upon their genial spirits and their rattling talk. And so it came
+about that though his acquaintances were many, his friends were few.
+Chief among the latter was Ludovic Quayle, a younger son of Lord
+Fallowfeild--whom that kindly if not very intelligent nobleman had long
+ago proposed to export from the Whitney to the Brockhurst nursery with
+a view to the promotion of general cheerfulness. Mr. Ludovic Quayle was
+a rather superfine, young gentleman, possessed of an excellent opinion
+of himself, and a modest opinion of other persons--his father included.
+But under his somewhat supercilious demeanour there was a vein of true
+romance. He loved Richard Calmady; and neither time, nor opposing
+interests, nor certain black chapters which had later to be read in the
+history of life, destroyed or even weakened that love.
+
+And so Dick, finding himself at sad disadvantage with most of the
+charming young fellows about him in matters of play, turned to matters
+of work, letting go the barbarian side of life for a while. In brain,
+if not in body, he believed himself the equal of the best of them. His
+ambition was fired by the desire of intellectual triumph. He would have
+the success of the schools, since the success of the river and the
+cricket-field were denied him. Not that Richard set any exaggerated
+value upon academic honours. Only two things are necessary--this at
+least was his code at that period--never to lapse from the instincts of
+high-breeding and honour, and to see just as much of life, of men and
+of affairs, as obedience to those instincts permits. Already the sense
+of proportion was strong in Richard, fed perhaps by the galling sense
+of personal deformity. Learning is but a part of the whole of man's
+equipment, and a paltry enough part unless wisdom go along with it. But
+the thirst of battle remained in Richard; and in this matter of
+learning, at least, he could meet men of his own age and standing on
+equal terms and overcome them in fair fight.
+
+And so, during the last two years of his university course, he did meet
+them and overcame, honours falling liberally to his share. Julius March
+looked on in pleased surprise at the exploits of his former pupil.
+While Ludovic Quayle, with raised eyebrows and half-tender,
+half-ironical amusement relaxing the corners of his remarkably
+beautiful mouth, would say:--
+
+"Calmady, you really are a shameless glutton! How many more immortal
+glories, any one of which would satisfy an ordinary man, do you propose
+to swallow?"
+
+"I suppose it's a bad year," Richard would answer. "The others can't
+amount to very much, or, needless to say, I shouldn't walk over the
+course."
+
+"A charming little touch of modesty, as far as you yourself are
+concerned," Ludovic answered. "But not strikingly flattering to the
+others. I would rather suppose you abnormally clever, than all the rest
+abnormally stupid--for, after all, you know, am I, my great self, not
+among the rest?"
+
+At which Dickie would laugh rather shamefacedly, and say:--"Oh
+you!--why you know well enough you could do anything you liked if you
+weren't so confoundedly lazy!"
+
+And, meanwhile, at Brockhurst, as news arrived of these successes, Lady
+Calmady's soul received comfort. Her step was light, her eyes full of
+clear shining as she moved to and fro ordering the great house and
+great estate. She felt repaid for the bitter pain of parting with her
+darling, and sending him forth to face the curious, possibly scornful,
+world of the university city. He had proved himself and won his spurs.
+And this solaced her in the solitude and loneliness of her present
+life. For her dear friend and companion Marie de Mirancourt had found
+the final repose, before seeking that of the convent. Early one
+February morning, in the second year of Richard's sojourn at Oxford,
+fortified by the rites of the Church, she had passed the gates of death
+peacefully, blessing and blessed. Katherine mourned for her, and would
+continue to mourn with still and faithful sorrow, even while welcoming
+home her young scholar, hearing the details of his past achievements
+and hopes for the future, or entertaining--with all gracious
+hospitality--such of his Oxford friends as he elected to invite to
+Brockhurst.
+
+It was on one of these last occasions, the young men having gone down
+to the Gun-Room to smoke and discuss the day's pheasant shooting, that
+Katherine had kept Julius March standing before the Chapel-Room fire,
+and had looked at him, a certain wistfulness in her face.
+
+"He is happy--don't you think, Julius?" she said. "He seems to me
+really happier, more contented, than I have ever seen him since his
+childhood."
+
+"Yes, I also think that," Julius answered. "He has reason to be
+contented. He has measured himself against other men and is satisfied
+of his own powers."
+
+"Every one admires him at Oxford?"
+
+"Yes, they admire and envy him. He has been brilliantly successful."
+
+Katherine drew herself up, clasping her hands behind her, and smiling
+proudly as she mused, gazing into the crimson heart of the burning
+logs. Then, after a silence, she turned suddenly to her companion.
+
+"It is very sweet to have you here at home again, Julius," she said
+gently. "I have missed you sorely since dearest Marie de Mirancourt
+died. Live a little longer than I do, please. Ah! I am afraid it is no
+small thing that I ask you to do for my sake, for I foresee that I
+shall survive to a lamentably old age. But sacrifice yourself, Julius,
+in the matter of living. Less than ever, when the shadows fall, shall I
+be able to spare you."
+
+For which words of his dear lady's, though spoken lightly, half in
+jest, Julius March gave God great thanks that night.
+
+It was about this period that two pieces of news, each proving
+eventually to have much personal significance, reached Lady Calmady
+from the outside world. The first took the form of a letter--a rather
+pensive and tired letter--from her brother, William Ormiston, telling
+her that his daughter Helen was about to marry the Comte de Vallorbes,
+a young gentleman very well known both to Parisian and Neapolitan
+society. The second took the form of an announcement in the _Morning
+Post_, to the effect that Lady Tobemory, whose lamented death that
+paper had already chronicled, had left the bulk of her not
+inconsiderable fortune to her god-daughter Honoria, eldest child of
+that distinguished officer General St. Quentin. In both cases Lady
+Calmady wrote letters of congratulation, in the latter with very
+sincere and lively pleasure. She held her cousin, General St. Quentin,
+in affection for old sake's sake. Honoria she remembered as a
+singularly graceful, high-bred, little maiden, fleet of foot as a
+hind--too fleet of foot indeed for little Dickie's comfort of mind, and
+therefore banished from the Brockhurst nursery. In the former case, her
+congratulations being somewhat conventional, she added--in her own name
+and that of Richard--a necklace of pearls, with a diamond clasp and
+bars to it, of no mean value.
+
+In the spring of 1865 Richard left Oxford for good, and took up his
+residence once more at Brockhurst. But it was not until the autumn of
+the following year, when he had reached the age of three-and-twenty,
+and had already for some six months served his Queen and country in the
+capacity of Justice of the Peace for the county of Southampton, that
+any event occurred greatly affecting his fortunes, and therefore worthy
+to set forth at large in this history.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+TELLING HOW DICKIE'S SOUL WAS SOMEWHAT SICK, AND HOW HE MET FAIR WOMEN
+ON THE CONFINES OF A WOOD
+
+
+RICHARD CALMADY rode homeward through the autumn woods, and the aspect
+of them was very lovely. But their loveliness was hectic, a loveliness
+as it seemed, at all events at first sight, of death and burial, rather
+than of life and hope. The sky was overcast, and a chill clung to the
+stream side and haunted the hollows. The young man's humour,
+unfortunately, was only too much in harmony with the more melancholy
+suggestions of the scene. For Richard was by nature something of a
+poet, though he but rarely wrote verses, and usually burned them as
+soon as written, being scholar enough to know and feel impatient of the
+"second best." And this inherent strain of poetry in him tempered the
+active and practical side of his character, making wealth and position,
+and all those things which the worldly-minded seek, seem of slight
+value to him at times. It induced in him many and very varying moods.
+It carried him back often, even now in the strength of his young
+manhood, to the fine fancies and exquisite unreason of the fairy world
+in which those so sadly ill-balanced footsteps of his had first been
+set. To-day had proved, so far, an unlucky one, prolific of warfare
+between his clear brain and all too sensitive heart. For it was the
+burden of Richard's temperament--the almost inevitable result of that
+ever-present thorn in the flesh--that he shrunk as a poet, even as a
+woman, while as a man, and a strong one, he reasoned and fought.
+
+It fell out on this wise. He had attended the Quarter Sessions at
+Westchurch; and a certain restlessness, born of the changing seasons,
+being upon him, he had ridden. His habit, when passing outside the
+limits of his own property, was to drive. He became aware--and angrily
+conscious his groom was aware also--that his appearance afforded a
+spectacle of the liveliest interest to the passers-by; that persons of
+very various age and class had stopped and turned to gaze at him; and
+that, while crossing the bridge spanning the dark, oily waters of the
+canal, in the industrial quarter of the pushing, wide-awake, county
+town, he had been the subject of brutal comment, followed by a hoarse
+laugh from the collarless throats of some dozen operatives and bargees
+loitering thereupon.
+
+The consequence was that the young man arrived in court, his eyes
+rather hard and his jaw set. Rich, well-born, not undistinguished too
+for his attainments, and only three and twenty, Dickie had a fine fund
+of arrogance to draw upon yet. He drew upon it this morning, rather to
+the confusion of his colleagues upon the bench. Mr. Cathcart, the
+chairman, was already present, and stood talking with Mr. Seymour, the
+rector of Farley, a shrewd, able parson of the old sporting type.
+Captain Fawkes of Water End was there too; and so was Lemuel Image,
+eldest son of the Mr. Image, sometime mayor of Westchurch, who has been
+mentioned in the early pages of this chronicle.
+
+In the last twenty years, supported by ever-increasing piles of
+barrels, the Image family had mounted triumphantly upward in the social
+scale. Lemuel, the man in question, married a poor and distant relation
+of Lord Aldborough, the late lord lieutenant of the county; and had by
+this, and by a rather truculent profession of high Tory politics,
+secured himself a seat on the bench. He had given a fancy price, too,
+for that pretty, little place, Frodsmill, the grounds of which form
+such an exasperating Naboth's vineyard in the heart of the Newland's
+property. Neither his person, nor his politics, nor his absence of
+culture, found favour in Richard Calmady's sight. And to-day, being
+somewhat on edge, the brewer's large, blustering presence and
+manner--at once patronising and servile--struck him as peculiarly
+odious. Image betrayed an evil tendency to emphasise his remarks by
+slapping his acquaintances upon the back. He was also guilty of
+supposing a defect of hearing in all persons older than, or in any
+measure denied the absolute plethora of physical vigour so conspicuous
+in, himself. He invariably raised his voice in addressing Richard. In
+return for which graceful attention Dickie most cordially detested him.
+
+"Image is a bit of a cad, and certainly Calmady makes no bones about
+letting him know it," Captain Fawkes remarked to Mr. Seymour, as they
+drove back to Farley in the latter's dog-cart. "Fortunately he has a
+hide like a rhinoceros, or we should have had a regular row between
+them more than once this morning. Calmady's generally charming; but I
+must say, when he likes, he can be about the most insolent fellow I've
+ever met, in a gentleman-like way."
+
+"A great deal of that is simply self-protective," the clergyman
+answered. "It is not difficult to see how it comes about, when you take
+his circumstances into account. If I was him, God forgive me, I know I
+shouldn't be half so sweet tempered. He bears it wonderfully well, all
+things considered."
+
+Nor did the disturbing incidents of the day end with the familiarities
+of the loud-voiced brewer. The principal case to be tried was a
+melancholy one enough--a miserable history or wayward desire, shame and
+suffering, followed by a despairing course of lies and petty thieving
+to help support the poor baby whose advent seemed so wholly a curse.
+The young mother--a pretty, desperate creature--made no attempt at
+denial. She owned she had robbed her mistress of a shilling here and
+sixpence there, that she had taken now a bit of table silver and then a
+garment to the pawn-shop. How could she help it? Her wages were a
+trifle, since her character was damaged. Wasn't it a charity to employ
+a girl like her at all, so her mistress said? And yet the child must
+live. And Richard Calmady, sitting in judgment there, with those four
+other gentlemen of substantial means and excellent position, sickened
+as he listened to the sordid details, the relentless elementary
+arguments. For the girl, awed and frightened at first, grew eloquent in
+self-defense.--"She loved him"--he being a smart young fellow, who,
+with excellent recommendations from Chifney, had left the Brockhurst
+stables some two years before, to take service in Westchurch.--"And he
+always spoke her fair. Had told her he'd marry her right enough, after
+a bit--before God he would. But it would ruin his chance of first-class
+places if he married yet. The gentry wouldn't take any but single men
+of his age. A wife would stand in his way. And she didn't want to stand
+in his way--he knew her better than that. Not but that he reckoned her
+just as much his wife as any woman could be. Of course he did. What a
+silly she was to trouble about it. And then when there was no hiding
+any longer how it was with her, he up and awayed to London, saying he
+would make a home for her there. And he kept on writing for a bit, but
+he never told her where to write to him in return, so she couldn't
+answer. And then his letters came seldom, and then stopped altogether,
+and then--and then----"
+
+The girl was rebuked for her much speaking, and so wasting the time of
+the court. There were other cases. And Richard Calmady sickened yet
+more, recognising in that a parable of perpetual application. For are
+there not always other cases? The tragedy of the individual life
+reaching its climax seems, to the chief actor, worthy to claim and hold
+universal attention. Yet the sun never stands still in heaven, nor do
+the footsteps of men tarry upon earth. No one person may take up too
+much space, too much time. The movement of things is not stayed. The
+single cry, however bitter, is drowned in the roar of the pushing
+crowd. The individual, however keen his griefs, however heinous the
+offense done him, must make way for those same other cases. This is the
+everlasting law.
+
+And so pained, out of tune, troubled too by smouldering fires of anger,
+Richard left Westchurch and his fellow-magistrates as early as he
+decently could. Avoiding the highroad leading by Newlands and through
+Sandyfield village, he cut across country by field lanes and over waste
+lands to Farley Row. The wide quiet of the autumn afternoon, the slight
+chill in the air, were grateful to him after the noise and close
+atmosphere of the court. Yet the young man strove vainly to think of
+pleasant things and to regain his serenity. The girl's tear-blotted
+face, the tones of her voice, haunted him. Six weeks' imprisonment. The
+sentence, after all, was a light one. Yet who was he, who were those
+four other well-to-do gentlemen, that they should judge her at all? How
+could they measure the strength of the temptation which had beset her?
+If temptation is strong enough, must not the tempted of necessity
+yield? If the tempted does not yield, is that not merely proof that the
+temptation was not strong enough? The whole thing appeared to him a
+matter of mathematics or mechanics. Given a greater weight than it can
+carry, the rope is bound to break. And then for those who have not felt
+the strain to blame the rope, punish the rope! It seemed to Richard, as
+he rode homeward, that human justice is too often a very comedy of
+injustice. It all appeared to him so exceedingly foolish. And yet
+society must be protected. Other pretty, weak, silly creatures must be
+warned, by such rather brutal object lessons, not to bear bastards or
+pawn their mistresses' spoons.
+
+"'_Je ne sais pas ce que c'est que la vie eternelle, mais celle ci est
+une mauvaise plaisanterie_,'" Dickie quoted to himself somewhat
+bitterly.
+
+He turned aside at Farley Row, following the narrow road that runs
+behind the houses in the main street and the great, vacant stables and
+outbuildings of the White Lion Inn. And here, as though the immediate
+displeasures of this ill-starred day were insufficient, memory arose
+and recalled other displeasures of long ago. Recalled old Jackie Deeds
+lurching out of that same inn yard, empty pipe in mouth, greedy of
+alms. Recalled the old postboy's ugly morsel of profanity--"God
+Almighty had His jokes too." And, at that, the laughter of those
+loafers upon the canal bridge saluted Richard's ears once more, as did
+the loud, familiar phrases of Mr. Lemuel Image, the Westchurch brewer.
+
+Before him the flat expanse of Clerke's Green opened out; and the turf
+of it--beaded with dew which the frail sunshine of the early morning
+had failed to burn up--was crossed by long tracks of darker green,
+where flocks of geese had wandered over its misty surface. Here the
+traveling menagerie and all the booths of the fair had been stationed.
+Memory rigged up the tents once more, painted the vans in crude,
+glaring colours, set drums beating and merry-go-rounds turning, pointed
+a malicious finger at the sign-board of a certain show. How many times
+Richard had passed this way in the intervening years, and remembered in
+passing, yet thrown all hurt of remembrance from him directly and
+lightly! To-day it gripped him. He put his horse into a sharp trot.
+
+Skirting the edge of the green, he rode down a rutted cart lane--farm
+buildings and well-filled rickyards on the left--and forded the
+shallow, brown stream which separates the parish of Farley from that of
+Sandyfield and the tithing of Brockhurst.
+
+Ahead lay the wide, rough road, ending in a broken avenue of ancient
+oaks, and bordered on either hand by a strip of waste land overgrown
+with coarse grasses and low thickets of maple--which leads up to the
+entrance of the Brockhurst woods. Over these hung a soft, bluish haze,
+making them appear vast in extent, and upraising the dark ridge of the
+fir forest, which crowns them, to mountain height against the western
+sky. A covey of partridges ran up the sandy road before Richard's
+horse; and, rising at last, with a long-drawn whir of wings, skimmed
+the top of the bank and dropped into the pale stubble field on the
+other side of it. He paused at the head of the avenue while the
+keeper's wife--in lilac apron and sunbonnet--ran out to open the big,
+white gate; the dogs meantime, from their kennels under the Spanish
+chestnuts upon the slope behind her gabled cottage, setting up a
+vociferous chorus. Thus heralded, Richard passed into the whispering,
+mysterious stillness of the autumn woods.
+
+The summer had been dry and fine, the foliage unusually rich and heavy,
+all the young wood ripening well. Consequently the turn of the leaf was
+very brilliant that year. The sweetly, sober, English landscape seemed
+to have run mad and decked itself, as for a masquerade, in extravagant
+splendours of colour. The smooth-stemmed beeches had taken on every
+tint from fiery brown, through orange and amber, to verdigris green
+touching latest July shoots. The round-headed oaks, practising even in
+carnival time a measure of restraint, had arrayed themselves in a
+hundred rich, finely-gradated tones of russet and umber. While, here
+and there, a tall bird-cherry, waxing wanton, had clothed itself like
+the Woman of Babylon in rose-scarlet from crown to lowest black-barked
+twig. Higher up, the larch plantations rose in crowds of
+butter-coloured spires. Amethystine and blood-red, white-spotted
+toadstools, in little companies, pushed through the light soil on
+either side the road. Trailing sprays of bramble glowed as flame. Rowan
+berries hung in heavy coral bunches, and the dogwood spread itself in
+sparse china-pink clusters. Only the undergrowth of crooked alders, in
+swampy, low-lying places, kept its dark, purplish green; and the light
+foliage of the ash waved in shadowy pallor against its knobbed and
+knotted branches; and the ranks of the encircling firs retained their
+solemn habit, as though in protest against the universal riot.
+
+The stream hidden away in the hazel coppice gurgled and murmured.
+Beech-masts pattered down, startling the stillness as with a sudden
+dropping of thunder rain. Squirrels, disturbed in the ingathering of
+their winter store, whisked up the boles of the great trees and scolded
+merrily from the forks of the high branches. Shy wild things rustled
+and scampered unseen through the tangled undergrowth and beds of
+bracken. While that veil of bluish haze touched all the distance of the
+landscape with a delicate mystery, and softly blotted the vista of each
+wide shooting drive, or winding pathway, to left and right.
+
+And as Richard rode onward, leaves gay even in death fluttering down
+around him, his mood began to suffer change. He ceased to think and
+began to feel merely. First came a dreamy delight in the beauty of the
+scene about him. Then the sense of mystery grew upon him--of mystery,
+not merely hanging in the delicate haze, but dwelling in the endless
+variety of form and colour which met his eyes, of mystery inviting him
+in the soft, multitudinous voices of the woodland. And as the minutes
+passed this sense grew increasingly provocative, became too
+increasingly elusive. The light leapt into Dickie's eyes. He smiled to
+himself. He was filled with unreasoning expectation. He seemed--it was
+absurd, yet very charming--to be playing hide-and-seek with some glad
+secret which at any instant might be revealed to him. It murmured to
+him in the brook. It scolded at him merrily with the scolding
+squirrels. It startled the surrounding stillness, with the down
+pattering beech-masts and fluttering of leaves. It eluded him deftly,
+rustling away unseen through the green and gold of the bracken. Lastly
+when, reaching the summit of the ridge of hill, he entered upon the
+levels of the great table-land, it hailed him in the long-drawn sighing
+of the fir forest. For a wind, suddenly awakened, swept towards him
+from some far distance, neared, broke overhead, as summer waves upon a
+shingly beach, died in delicious whispers, only to sweep up and break
+and die again. Meanwhile the gray pall of cloud parted in the west,
+disclosing spaces of faint yet clearest blue, and the declining sun,
+from behind dim islands of shifting vapour, sent forth immense rays of
+mild and misty light.
+
+Richard laughed involuntarily to himself. For there was a fantastic,
+curiously alluring influence in all this. It spoke to him as in
+delicate persuasion. His sense of expectation intensified. He would not
+ride homeward and shut himself within four walls just yet; but yield
+himself to the wooing of these fair sylvan divinities; to that of the
+spirit of the evening wind, of the softly shrouding haze, and of the
+broadening sunlight, a little longer.
+
+A turf-ride branches away to the left, leading along a narrow
+outstanding spur of table-land to a summer-house, the prospect from
+which is among the noted beauties of Brockhurst. This summer-house or
+Temple, as it has come to be called, is an octagonal structure.
+Round-shafted pillars rise at each projecting angle. In the recesses
+between them are low stone benches, save in front where an open
+colonnade gives upon the view. The roof is leaded, and surmounted by a
+wooden ball and tall, three-sided spike. These last, as well as the
+plastered, windowless walls are painted white. Within, the hollow of
+the dome is decorated in fresco, with groups of gaily clad ladies and
+their attendant cavaliers, with errant cupids, garlands of flowers,
+trophies of rather impossible musical instruments, and cages full of
+imprisoned, and therefore doubtless very naughty, loves. The colours
+have grown faint by action of insweeping wind and weather; but this
+lends a pathos to the light-hearted, highly-artificial art, emphasising
+the contrast between it and its immediate surroundings.
+
+For the Temple stands on a platform of turf at the extreme point of the
+spur of table-land. The hillside, clothed with heather and bracken,
+fringed lower down with a coppice of delicate birches, falls steeply
+away in front and on either hand. Outstretched below, besides the
+panorama of the great woods, lies all the country about Farley, on to
+Westchurch, and beyond again--pasture and cornlands, scattered hamlets
+and red-roofed farms half-hidden among trees, the glint of streams set
+in the vivid green of water-meadows, and soft blue range behind range
+of distance to that pale uprising of chalk down in the far south. Upon
+the right, some quarter of a mile away, blocking the end of an avenue
+of ancient Scotch firs, the eastern facade of Brockhurst House shows
+planted proudly upon the long gray and red lines of the terrace.
+
+Richard checked his horse, pausing to look for a moment at that
+well-beloved home. Then musing, he let his horse go forward along the
+level turf-ride. The glistering, gray dome and white columns of the
+Temple standing out against the spacious prospect--the growing
+brightness of this last, still chastened by the delicious autumn
+haze--captivated his imagination. There was, seen thus, a simplicity
+and distinction altogether classic in the lonely building. To him it
+appeared not unfit shrine for the worship of that same all-pervasive
+spirit of mystery, not unfit spot for the revelation of that same glad,
+yet cunningly elusive secret, of which he suffered the so fond
+obsession.
+
+And so it was that when, coming abreast of the building, the sound of
+young voices--women's voices--and finely modulated laughter saluted his
+ear, though startled for no stranger had the right of entry to the
+park, he was by no means displeased. This seemed but part of the
+all-pervasive magic of this strange afternoon. Richard smiled at the
+phantasies of his own mood; yet he forgot to be shy, forgot the
+distressing self-consciousness which made him shrink from the
+observation of strangers--specially those of the other sex. The
+adventure tempted his fancy. Even familiar things had put on a new and
+beguiling vesture in the last half hour, so there were miracles abroad,
+perhaps. Anyhow he would satisfy himself as to the aspect of those
+sweet voiced and, as yet, unseen trespassers. He let his horse go
+forward slowly across the platform of turf.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IN WHICH RICHARD CONFIRMS ONE JUDGMENT AND REVERSES ANOTHER
+
+
+"How magnificently your imagination gallops when it once gets agoing.
+Here you are bearing away the spoils, when the siege is not yet even
+begun--never will be, I venture to hope, for I doubt if this would be a
+very honourable----"
+
+The speaker broke off abruptly, as the shadow of horse and rider
+lengthened upon the turf. And, during the silence which followed,
+Richard Calmady received an impression at once arresting and subtly
+disquieting.
+
+A young lady, of about his own age, leaned against one of the white
+pillars of the colonnade. Her attitude and costume were alike slightly
+unconventional. She was unusually tall, and there was a lazy, almost
+boyish indifference and grace in the pose of her supple figure and the
+gallant carriage of her small head. She wore a straight, pale
+gray-green jacket, into the pockets of which her hands were thrust. Her
+skirt, of the same colour and material, hung in straight folds to her
+feet, being innocent alike of trimming and the then prevailing fashion
+of crinoline. Further, she wore a little, round matador's hat, three
+black pompons planted audaciously upstanding above the left ear. Her
+eyes, long in shape and set under straight, observant brows, appeared
+at first sight of the same clear, light, warm brown as her hair. Her
+nose was straight, rather short, and delicately square at the tip.
+While her face, unlined, serenely, indeed triumphantly youthful, was
+quite colourless and sufficiently thin to disclose fine values of bone
+in the broad forehead and the cutting of jaw and cheek and chin.
+
+In that silence, as she and Richard Calmady looked full at one another,
+he apprehended in her a baffling element, a something untamed and
+remote, a freedom of soul, that declared itself alike in the
+gallantries and severities of her dress, her attitude, and all the
+lines of her person. She bore relation to the glad mystery haunting the
+fair autumn evening. She also bore relation to the chill haunting the
+stream-side and the deep places of the woods. And her immediate action
+emphasised this last likeness in his mind. When he first beheld her she
+was bright, with a certain teasing insouciance. Then, for a minute,
+even more, she stood at gaze, as a hind does suddenly startled on the
+edge of the covert--her head raised, her face keen with inquiry. Her
+expression changed, became serious, almost stern. She recoiled, as in
+pain, as in an approach to fear--this strong, nymphlike creature.
+
+"Helen," she called aloud, in tones of mingled protest and warning. And
+thereupon, without more ado, she retired, nay, fled, into the
+sheltering, sun-warmed interior of the Temple.
+
+At this summons her companion, who until now had stood contemplating
+the wide view from the extreme verge of the platform, wheeled round.
+For an appreciable time she, too, looked at Richard Calmady, and that
+haughtily enough, as though he, rather than she, was the intruder. Her
+glance traveled unflinchingly down from his bare head and broad
+shoulders to that pocket-like appendage--as of old-fashioned pistol
+holsters--on either side his saddle. Swiftly her bearing changed. She
+uttered an exclamation of unfeigned and unalloyed satisfaction--a
+little joyful outcry, such as a child will make on discovery of some
+lost treasure.
+
+"Ah! it is you--you," she said, laughing softly, while she moved
+forward, both hands extended. Which hand, by the same token, she
+proposed to bestow on Dickie remained matter for conjecture, since in
+the one she carried a parasol with a staff-like gold and tortoise-shell
+handle to it, and in the other, between the first and second fingers, a
+cigarette, the blue smoke of which curled upward in transparent spirals
+upon the clear, still air.
+
+As the lady of the gray-green gown retired precipitately within the
+Temple, a wave of hot blood passed over Richard's body. For
+notwithstanding his three-and-twenty years, his not contemptible
+mastery of many matters, and that same honourable appointment of
+Justice of the Peace for the county of Southampton, he was but a lad
+yet, with all a lad's quickness of sensitive shame and burning
+resentment. The girl's repulsion had been obvious---that instinctive
+repulsion, as poor Dickie's too acute sympathies assured him, of the
+whole for the maimed, of the free for the bound, of the artist for some
+jarring colour or sound which mars an otherwise entrancing harmony. And
+the smart of all this was, to him, doubly salted by the fact that he,
+after all, was a man, his critic merely a woman. The bitter mood of the
+earlier hours of the day returned upon him. He cursed himself for a
+doting fool. Who was he, indeed, to seek revelation of glad secrets,
+cherish fair dreams and tempt adventures?
+
+Consequently it fell out when that other lady--she of the
+cigarette--advanced thus delightfully towards him, Richard's face was
+white with anger, and his lips rigid with pain--a rigidity begotten of
+the determination that they should not tremble in altogether too
+unmanly fashion. Sometimes it is very sad to be young. The flesh is
+still very tender, so that a scratch hurts more than a sword-thrust
+later. Only, let it be remembered, the scratch heals readily; while of
+the sword-thrust we die, even though at the moment of receiving it we
+seem not so greatly to suffer. And unquestionably as Dickie sat there,
+on his handsome horse, hat in hand, looking down at the lady of the
+cigarette, the hurt of that lately received scratch began quite
+sensibly to lessen. For her eyes, their first unsparing scrutiny
+accomplished, rested on his with a strangely flattering and engaging
+insistence.
+
+"But this is the very prettiest piece of good fortune!" she exclaimed.
+"Had I arranged the whole matter to suit my own fancy it could not have
+turned out more happily."
+
+Her tone was that of convincing sincerity; while, as she spoke, the
+soft colour came and went in her cheeks, and her lips parting showed
+little, even teeth daintily precious as a row of pearls. The outline of
+her face was remarkably pure--in shape an oval, a trifle wide in
+proportion to its length. Her eyebrows were arched, the eyelids arched
+also--very thin, showing the movement of the eyeballs beneath them,
+drooping slightly, with a sweep of dark lashes at the outer corner. It
+struck Richard that she bore a certain resemblance to his mother,
+though smaller and slighter in build. Her mouth was less full, her hair
+fairer--soft, glistening hair of all the many shades of heather
+honey-comb, broken wax and sweet, heady liquor alike. Her hands, he
+remarked, were very finished--the fingers pointed, the palms rosy. The
+set of her black, velvet coat revealed the roundness of her bust. The
+broad brim of her large, black hat, slightly upturned at the sides, and
+with sweeping ostrich plumes as trimming to it, threw the upper part of
+her charming face into soft shadow. Her heavy, dove-coloured, silk
+skirts stood out stiffly from her waist, declaring its slenderness. The
+few jewels she wore were of notable value. Her appearance, in fact,
+spoke the last word of contemporary fashion in its most refined
+application. She was a great lady, who knew the world and the worth of
+it. And she was absolute mistress both of that knowledge, and of
+herself--notwithstanding those outstretched hands, and outcry of
+childlike pleasure,--there, perhaps, lay the exquisite flattery of this
+last to her hearer! She was all this, and something more than all this.
+Something for which Dickie, his heart still virgin, had no name as yet.
+It was new to his experience. A something clear, simple, and natural,
+as the sunlight, and yet infinitely subtle. A something ravishing, so
+that you wanted to draw it very close, hold it, devour it. Yet
+something you so feared, you needs must put it from you, so that, faint
+with ecstasy, standing at a distance, you might bow yourself and humbly
+worship. But such extravagant exercises being, in the nature of his
+case, physically as well as socially inadmissible, the young man was
+constrained to remain seated squarely in the saddle--that singularly
+ungainly saddle, moreover, with holster-like appendages to it--while he
+watched her, wholly charmed, curious and shy, carried indeed a little
+out of himself, waiting for her to make further disclosures, since he
+felt absurdly slow and unready of speech.
+
+Nor was he destined to wait in vain. The fair lady appeared agreeably
+ready to declare herself, and that with the finest turns of voice and
+manner, with the most coercive variety of appeal, pathos, caprice, and
+dignity.
+
+"I know on the face of it I have not the smallest right to have taken
+possession in this way," she continued. "It is the frankest
+impertinence. But if you realised how extremely I am enjoying myself,
+you could not fail to forgive me. All this park of yours, all this
+nature," she turned sideways, sketching out the great view with a broad
+gesture of the cigarette and graceful hand that held it, "all this is
+divinely lovely. It is wiser to possess oneself of it in an illicit
+manner, to defy the minor social proprieties and unblushingly to steal,
+than not to possess oneself of it at all. If you are really hungry, you
+know, you learn not to be too nice as to the ways and means of
+acquiring sustenance."
+
+"And you were really hungry?" Richard found himself saying, as he
+feared rather blunderingly. But he wanted, so anxiously, the present to
+remain the present--wanted to continue to watch her, and to hear her.
+She turned his head. How then could he behave otherwise than with
+stupidity?
+
+"La! la!" she replied, laughing indulgently, and thereby enchanting him
+still more; "what must your experience of life be if you suppose one
+gets a full meal of divine loveliness every day in the week? For my
+part, I am not troubled with any such celestial plethora, believe me. I
+was ravening, I tell you, positively ravening."
+
+"And your hunger is satisfied?" he asked, still as he feared
+blunderingly, and with a queer inward movement of envy towards the wide
+view she looked upon, and the glory of the sunset which dared touch her
+hair.
+
+"Satisfied?" she exclaimed. "Is one's hunger for the divinely lovely
+ever satisfied? Just now I have stayed mine with the merest
+mouthful--as one snatches a sandwich at a railway _buffet_. And
+directly I must get into the train again, and go on with my noisy,
+dusty, stifling journey. Ah! you are very fortunate to live in this
+adorable and restful place; to see it in all its fine drama of changing
+colour and season, year in and year out."
+
+She dropped the end of her cigarette into a little sandy depression in
+the turf, and drawing aside her silken skirts, trod out the red heart
+of it neatly with her daintily shod foot. Just then the other lady, she
+of the gray-green gown, came from within the shelter of the Temple, and
+stood between the white pillars of the colonnade. Dick's grasp
+tightened on the handle of the hunting-crop lying across his thigh.
+
+"Am I so very fortunate?" he said, almost involuntarily.
+
+His companion looked up, smiling, her eyes dwelling on his with a
+strange effect of intimacy, wholly flattering, wholly, indeed,
+distracting to common sense.
+
+"Yes--you are fortunate," she answered, speaking slowly. "And some day,
+Richard, I think you will come to know that."
+
+Sudden comprehension, sudden recognition struck the young man--very
+literally struck him a most unwelcome buffet.
+
+"Oh! I see--I understand," he exclaimed, "you are my cousin--you are
+Madame de Vallorbes."
+
+For a moment his sense of disappointment was so keen, he was minded to
+turn his horse and incontinently ride away. The misery of that episode
+of his boyhood set its tooth very shrewdly in him even yet. It seemed
+the most cruelly ironical turn of fate that this entrancing, this
+altogether worshipful, stranger should prove to be one and the same as
+the little dancer of long ago with blush-roses in her hat.
+
+But though the colour deepened somewhat in the lady's cheeks, she did
+not lower her eyes, nor did they lose their smiling importunity. A
+little ardour, indeed, heightened the charm of her manner--an ardour of
+delicate battle, as of one whose honour has been ever so slightly
+touched.
+
+"Certainly, I am your cousin, Helen de Vallorbes," she replied. "You
+are not sorry for that, Richard, are you? At this moment I am
+increasingly glad to be your cousin--though not perhaps so very
+particularly glad to be Helen de Vallorbes." Then she added,
+rapidly:--"We are here in England for a few weeks, my father and I.
+Troublesome, distressing things had happened, and he perceived I needed
+change. He brought me away. London proved a desert and a dust-heap.
+There was no solace, no distraction from unpleasant thoughts to be
+found there. So we telegraphed and came down last night to the kind
+people at Newlands. Naturally my father wanted to see Aunt Katherine. I
+desired to see her also, well understood, for I have heard so much of
+her talent and her great beauty. But I knew they--the brother and
+sister--would wish to speak of the past and find their happiness in
+being very sad about it all. At our age--yours and mine--the sadness of
+any past one may possess is a good deal too present with one still to
+afford in the least consoling subject of conversation." Madame de
+Vallorbes spoke with a certain vehemence. "Don't you think so,
+Richard?" she demanded.
+
+And Richard could but answer, very much out of his heart, that he did
+indeed think so.
+
+She observed him a moment, and then her tone softened. The colour
+deepened yet more in her cheeks. She became at once prettily
+embarrassed and prettily sincere.
+
+"And then, to tell you quite the truth, I am a trifle afraid of Aunt
+Katherine. I have always wanted to come here and to see you, but--it is
+an absurd confession to make--I have been scared at the idea of meeting
+Aunt Katherine, and that is the real reason why I made Honoria take
+refuge with me in this lovely park of yours, instead of going on with
+my father to the house. There is a legend, a thrice accursed legend in
+our family,--my mother employs it even yet when she proposes to reduce
+me to salutary depths of humility--that I came,--she brought me--here,
+once, long ago, when I was a child, and that I was fiendishly naughty,
+that I behaved odiously."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes stretched out her hands, presenting the rosy palms
+of them in the most engaging manner.
+
+"But it can't--it can't be true," she protested. "Why, in the name of
+all folly, let alone all common decency, should I behave odiously? It
+is not like me. I love to please, I love to have people care for me.
+And so I cannot but believe the legend is the malign invention of some
+nurse or governess, whom, poor woman, I probably plagued handsomely
+enough in her day, and who, in revenge, rigged up this detestable
+scarecrow with which to frighten me. Then, moreover, I have not the
+faintest recollection of the affair, and one generally has an only too
+vivid memory of one's own sins. Surely, _mon cher cousin_, surely I am
+innocent in your sight, as in my own? You do not remember the episode
+either?"
+
+Whereupon Dickie, looking down at her,--and still enchanted
+notwithstanding his so sinister discovery, being first, and always a
+gentleman, and secondly, though as yet unconsciously, a
+lover,--proceeded to lie roundly. Lied, too, with a notable
+cheerfulness, born as cheerfulness needs must be of every act of faith
+and high generosity.
+
+"I remember it? Of course not," he said. "So let the legend be
+abolished henceforth and forevermore. Here, once and for all, Cousin
+Helen, we combine to pull down and bury that scarecrow."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes clapped her hands softly and laughed. And her
+laughter, having the merit of being perfectly genuine--for the young
+man very really pleased her fancy--was likewise very infectious.
+Richard found himself laughing too, he knew not why, save that he was
+glad of heart.
+
+"And now that matter being satisfactorily disposed of, you will come to
+Brockhurst often," he said. It seemed to him that a certain joyous
+equality had been established between him and his divinity, both by his
+repudiation of all former knowledge of her, and by their moment of
+laughter. He began fearlessly to make her little offerings. "Do you
+care about riding? I am afraid there is not much to amuse you at
+Brockhurst; but there are always plenty of horses."
+
+"And I adore horses."
+
+"Do you care about racing? We've some rather pretty things in training
+this year. I should like awfully to show them to you."
+
+But here the conversation, just setting forth in so agreeable a
+fashion, suffered interruption. For the other lady, she of the
+gray-green gown, sauntered forward from the Temple. The carriage of her
+head was gallant, her air nonchalant as ever; but her expression was
+grave, and the delicate thinness of her face appeared a trifle
+accentuated. She came up to Madame de Vallorbes and passed her hand
+through the latter's arm caressingly.
+
+"You know, really, Helen, we ought to go, if we are not to keep your
+father and the carriage waiting."--Then she looked up with a certain
+determined effort at Richard Calmady. "We promised to meet Mr. Ormiston
+at the first park gate," she added in explanation. "That is nearly a
+mile from here, isn't it?"
+
+"About three-quarters--hardly that," he answered. Her eyes were not
+brown, he perceived, but a clear, dim green, as the soft gloom in the
+under-spaces of a grove of ilexes. They affected him as fearlessly
+observant--eyes that could judge both men and things and could also
+keep their own counsel.
+
+"Will you give your mother Honoria St. Quentin's love, please," she
+went on. "I stayed here with her for a couple of days the year before
+last, while you were at Oxford. She was very good to me. Now, Helen,
+come----"
+
+"I shall see you again," Richard cried to the lady of the cigarette.
+But his horse, which for some minutes had been increasingly fidgety,
+backed away down the hillside, and he could not catch the purport of
+her answer. To the lady of the gray-green gown and eyes he said nothing
+at all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+JULIUS MARCH BEARS TESTIMONY
+
+
+"So you really wish me to ask them both to come, Richard?"
+
+Lady Calmady stood on the tiger-skin before the Gun-Room hearth. Upon
+the said hearth a merry, little fire of pine logs clicked and
+chattered. Even here, on the dry upland, the night air had an edge to
+it; while in the valleys there would be frost before morning, ripening
+that same splendour of autumn foliage alike to greater glory and
+swifter fall. And the snap in the air, working along with other
+unwonted influences, made Katherine somewhat restless this evening. Her
+eyes were dark with unspoken thought. Her voice had a ring in it. The
+shimmering, black, satin dress and fine lace she wore gave a certain
+magnificence to her appearance. Her whole being was vibrant. She was
+rather dangerously alive. Her elder brother's unlooked-for advent had
+awakened her strangely from the reserve and stately monotony of her
+daily existence, had shaken even, for the moment, the completeness of
+the dominion of her fixed idea. She ceased, for the moment, to sink the
+whole of her personality in the maternal relationship. Memories of her
+youth, passed amid the varied interests of society and of the literary
+and political world of Paris and London, assailed her. All those other
+Katherines, in short, whom she might have been, and who had seemed to
+drop away from her, vanishing phantom-like before the uncompromising
+realities of her husband's death and her child's birth, crowded about
+her, importuning her with vague desires, vague regrets. The confines of
+Brockhurst grew narrow, while all that which lay beyond them called to
+her. She craved, almost unconsciously, a wider sphere of action. She
+longed to obtain, and to lend a hand in the shaping of events and
+making of history. Even the purest and most devoted among
+women--possessing the doubtful blessing of a measure of intellect--are
+subject to such vagrant heats, such uprisings of personal ambition,
+specially during the dangerous decade when the nine-and-thirtieth year
+is past.
+
+Meanwhile Richard's answer to her question was unfortunately somewhat
+over-long in coming, for the young man was sunk in meditation and
+apparently oblivious of her presence. He leaned back in the long, low
+armchair, his hands clasped behind his head, the embroidered rug drawn
+about his waist, a venerable, yellow-edged, calf-bound volume lying
+face downwards on his lap. While young Camp--young no longer, full of
+years indeed beyond the allotted portion of his kind--reposed,
+outstretched and snoring, on the all-too-wide space of rug and
+chair-seat at his feet. And this indifference, both of man and dog,
+grew irksome to Lady Calmady. She moved across the shining yellow and
+black surface of the tiger-skin and straightened the bronzes of
+Vinedresser and Lazy Lad standing on the high chimneypiece.
+
+"My dear, it grows late," she said. "Let us settle this matter. If your
+uncle and cousin are to come, I must send a note over to Newlands
+to-morrow before breakfast. Remember I have no choice in the matter. I
+leave it entirely to you. Tell me seriously what you wish."
+
+Richard stretched himself, turning his head in the hollow of his hands,
+and shrugged his shoulders slightly.
+
+"That is exactly what I would thank you so heartily to tell me," he
+answered. "Do I, or don't I seriously wish it? I give you my word,
+mother, I don't know."
+
+"Oh; but, my dearest, that is folly! You must have inclination enough,
+one way or the other, to come to a decision. I was careful not to
+commit myself. It is still easy not to ask them without being guilty of
+any discourtesy."
+
+"It isn't that," Richard said. "It is simply that being anything but
+heroic I am trying of two evils to choose the least. I should like to
+have my uncle--and Helen here immensely. But if the visit wasn't a
+success I should be proportionately disappointed and vexed. So is it
+worth the risk? Disappointments are sufficiently abundant anyhow. Isn't
+it slightly imbecile to run a wholly gratuitous risk of adding to their
+number?"
+
+Then the fixed idea began stealthily, yet surely, to reassert its
+dominion; for there was a perceptible flavour of discouragement in the
+young man's speech.
+
+"Dickie, there is nothing wrong, is there,--nothing the matter,
+to-night?"
+
+"Oh, dear no, of course not!" he answered, half closing his eyes.
+"Nothing in the world's the matter."
+
+He unclasped his hands, leaned forward and patted the bulldog lying
+across the rug at his feet. "At least nothing more than usual, nothing
+more than the abiding something which always has been and always will
+be the matter."
+
+"Ah, my dear!" Katherine cried softly.
+
+"I've just been reading Burton's Anatomy here," he went on bending
+down, so that his face was hidden, while he pulled the dog's soft ears.
+"He assures all--whom it may concern--that 'bodily imperfections do not
+a whit blemish the soul or hinder the operations of it, but rather help
+and much increase it.' There, Camp, poor old man, don't start--it's
+nothing worse than me. I wonder if the elaborate pains which have been
+taken through generations of your ancestors to breed you into your
+existing and very royal hideousness--your flattened nose and perpetual
+grin, for instance--do help and much increase the operations of your
+soul!"
+
+He looked up suddenly.
+
+"What do you think, mother?"
+
+"I think--think, my darling," she said, "that perhaps neither you nor I
+are quite ourselves to-night."
+
+"Oh, well I've had rather a beastly day!" Richard dropped back against
+the chair cushions again, clasping his hands behind his head. "Or I've
+seemed to have it, which comes practically to much the same thing. I
+confess I have been rather hipped lately. I suppose it's the weather.
+You're not really in a hurry, mother, are you? Come and sit down."
+
+And obediently Katherine drew forward a chair and sat beside him. Those
+uprisings of vagrant desire still struggled, combating the dominion of
+the fixed idea. But the struggle grew faint and fainter. And then, for
+a measurable time, Richard fell silent again while she waited. Verily
+there is no sharper discipline for a woman's proud spirit, than that
+administered, often quite unconsciously, by the man whom she loves.
+
+"We gave a wretched girl six weeks to-day for robbing her mistress," he
+remarked at last. "It was a flagrant case, so I suppose we were
+justified. In fact I don't see how we could have done otherwise. But it
+went against me awfully, all the same. She has a child to support. Jim
+Gould got her into trouble and deserted her, like a cowardly, young
+blackguard. However, it's easy to be righteous at another person's
+expense. Perhaps I should have done the same in his place. I wonder if
+I should?"--
+
+"My dear, we need hardly discuss that point, I think," Lady Calmady
+said.
+
+Richard turned his head and smiled at her.
+
+"Poor dear mother, do I bore you? But it is so comfortable to grumble.
+I know it's selfish. It's a horrid bad habit, and you ought to blow me
+up for it. But then, mother, take it all round, really I don't grumble
+much, do I?"
+
+"No, no!" Katherine said quickly. "Indeed, Dickie, you don't."
+
+"I have been awfully afraid though, lately, that I do grumble more than
+I imagine," he went on, straightening his head, while his handsome
+profile showed clear cut against the dancing brightness of the
+firelight. "But it's almost impossible always to carry something about
+with you which--which you hate, and not let it infect your attitude of
+mind and, in a degree, your speech. Twenty or thirty years hence it may
+prove altogether sufficient and satisfactory to know"--his lips worked,
+obliging him to enunciate his words carefully--"that bodily
+imperfections do not a whit blemish the soul or hinder its
+operations--are, in short, an added means of grace. Think of it! Isn't
+it a nice, neat, little arrangement, sort of spiritual consolation
+stakes! Only I'm afraid I'm some two or three decades on the near side
+of that comfortable conclusion yet, and I find----"
+
+Richard shifted his position, letting his arms drop along the chair
+arms with a little thud. He smiled again, or at all events essayed to
+do so.
+
+"In fact, I find it's beastly difficult to care a hang about your soul,
+one way or another, when you clearly perceive your body's making you
+the laughing-stock of half the people--why, mother, sweet dear
+mother,--what is it?"
+
+For Lady Calmady's two hands had closed down on his hand, and she bowed
+herself above them as though smitten with sharp pain.
+
+"Pray don't be distressed," he went on. "I beg your pardon. I wasn't
+thinking what I was saying, I'm an ass. It's nothing I tell you but the
+weather. You're all a lot too good to me and indulge me too much, and I
+grow soft, and then every trifle rubs me the wrong way. I'm a regular
+spoilt child--I know it and a jolly good spanking is what I deserve.
+Burton, here, declares that the autumnal, like the vernal, equinox
+breeds hot humours and distempers in the blood. I believe we ought to
+be bled, spring and fall, like our forefathers. Look here, mother,
+don't take my grumbling to heart. I tell you I'm just a little hipped
+from the weather. Let's send for dear old Knott and get him to drive
+out the devil with his lancet? No, no, seriously, I tell you what we
+will do. It'll be good for us both. I have arrived at a decision. We'll
+have Uncle William and--Helen----"
+
+Richard had spoken very rapidly, half ashamed, trying to soothe her. He
+paused on the last word. He was conscious of a singular pleasure in
+pronouncing it. The perfectly finished figure of his cousin,
+outstanding against the wide, misty brightness of the sunset, the scent
+of the wood and moorland, the haunting suggestion of glad secrets, even
+that upcurling of blue cigarette smoke, rising as the smoke of
+incense--with a difference--upon the clear evening air, above all that
+silent flattery of intimate and fearless glances, those gay welcoming
+gestures, that merry calling, as of birds in the tree-tops, from the
+spirit of youth within him to the spirit of youth so visibly and
+radiantly resident in her--all this rose up before Richard. He grew
+reckless, though reckless of precisely what, innocent as he was, in
+fact although mature in learning, he knew not as yet. Only he turned on
+his mother a face at once eager and shy, coaxing her as when in his
+long-ago baby-days he had implored some petty indulgence or the gift of
+some coveted toy on which his little heart was set.
+
+"Yes, let us have them," he said. "You know Helen is very charming. You
+will admire her, mother. She is as clever as she can stick, one sees
+that at a glance. And she is very much _grande dame_ too--and, oh,
+well, she is a whole lot of charming things! And her coming would be a
+wholesome breaking up of our ordinary ways of going on. We are usually
+very contented--at least, I think so--you, and dear Julius, and I, but
+perhaps we are getting into a bit of a rut. Helen's society might prove
+an even more efficacious method of driving out my blue-devils than
+Knott's lancet or a jolly good spanking."
+
+He laughed quietly, patting Katherine's hand, but looking away.
+
+"And there is no denying it would be a vastly more graceful one--don't
+you think so?"
+
+Thus were smouldering fires of personal ambition quenched in Lady
+Calmady, as so often before. Richard's tenderness brought her to her
+knees. She hugged, with an almost voluptuous movement of passion, that
+half-rejected burden of maternity, gathering it close against her heart
+once more. But, along with the rapture of self-surrender, came a
+thousand familiar fears and anxieties. For she had looked into Dickie's
+mind, as he spoke out his grumble, and had there perceived the
+existence of much which she had dreaded and to the existence of which
+she had striven to blind herself.
+
+"My darling," she said, with a certain hesitation, "I will gladly have
+them if you wish it--only you remember what happened long ago when
+Helen was here last?"
+
+"Yes, I know, I was afraid you would think of that. But you can put
+that aside. Helen's not the smallest recollection of it. She told me so
+this afternoon."
+
+"Told you so?" Katherine repeated.
+
+"Yes," he said. "It was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been
+bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and
+I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite
+amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really
+happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the
+subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would
+have been impossible."
+
+There was a pause. Lady Calmady rose. The young man spoke with
+conviction, yet her anxiety was not altogether allayed.
+
+"Impossible," he repeated. "Pretty mother don't disquiet yourself.
+Trust me. To tell you the truth I have felt to-day--is it very
+foolish?--that I should like some one of my own age for a little while,
+as--don't you know--a playfellow."
+
+Katherine bent down and kissed him. But mother-love is not, even in its
+most self-sacrificing expression, without torments of jealousy.
+
+"My dear, you shall have your playfellow," she said, though conscious
+of a tightening of the muscles of her beautiful throat. "Good-night.
+Sleep well."
+
+She went out, closing the door behind her. The perspective of the
+dimly-lighted corridor, and the great hall beyond, struck her as rather
+sadly lifeless and silent. What wonder, indeed, that Richard should ask
+for a companion, for something young! Love made her selfish and
+cowardly she feared. She should have thought of this before. She turned
+back, again opening the Gun-Room door.
+
+Richard had raised himself. He stood on the seat of the chair,
+steadying himself by one hand on the chair-back, while with the other
+he pulled the rug from beneath the sleepy bull-dog.
+
+"Wake up, you lazy old beggar," he was saying. "Get down, can't you. I
+want to go to bed, and you block the way, lying there in gross comfort,
+snoring. Make yourself scarce, old man. If I'd your natural advantages
+in the way of locomotion, I wouldn't be so slow of using them----"
+
+He looked up, and slipped back into a sitting position hastily.
+
+"Oh, mother, I thought you had gone!" he exclaimed, almost sharply.
+
+And to Katherine, overstrung as she was, the words came as a rebuke.
+
+"My dearest, I won't keep you," she said. "I only came back to ask you
+about Honoria St. Quentin."
+
+"What about her?"
+
+"She is staying at Newlands--the two girls are friends, I believe. She
+seemed to me a fine creature when last I saw her. She knows the world,
+yet struck me curiously untouched by it. She is well read, she has
+ideas--some of them a little extravagant, but time will modify that.
+Only her head is awake as yet, not her heart, I think. Shall I ask her
+to come too?"
+
+"So that we may wake up her heart?" Richard inquired coldly. "No
+thanks, dear mother, that's, too serious an undertaking. Have her
+another time, please. I saw her to-day, and, no doubt my taste is bad,
+but I must confess she did not please me very much. Nor--which is more
+to the point in this connection perhaps--did I please her. Would you
+ring the bell, please, as you're there? I want Powell. Thanks so much.
+Good-night."
+
+Some ten minutes later Julius March, after kneeling in prayer, as his
+custom was, before the divinely sorrowful and compassionate image of
+the Virgin Mother and the Dead Christ, looked forth through the
+many-paned study window into the clair-obscure of the windless autumn
+night. He had been sensible of an unusual element in the domestic
+atmosphere this evening, and had been vaguely disquieted concerning
+both Katherine and Richard. It was impossible but that, as time went
+on, life should become more complicated at Brockhurst, and Julius
+feared his own inability to cope helpfully with such complication. He
+entertained a mean opinion of himself. It appeared to him he was but an
+unprofitable servant, unready, tongue-tied, lacking in resource. A
+depression possessed him which he could not shake off. What had he to
+show, after all, for these fifty-odd years of life granted to him? He
+feared his religion had walked in silver slippers, and would so walk to
+the end. Could it then, in any true and vital sense, be reckoned
+religion at all? Gross sins had never exercised any attraction over
+him. What virtue was there, then, in being innocent of gross sin? But
+to those other sins--sins of defective moral courage in speech and
+action, sins arising from over-fastidiousness--had he not yielded
+freely? Was he not a spiritual valetudinarian? He feared so. Offered,
+in the Eternal Mercy, endless precious opportunities of service, he had
+been too weak, too timorous, too slothful, to lay hold on them. And so,
+as it seemed to him very justly, to-night confession, prayer,
+adoration, left him unconsoled.
+
+Then, looking out of the many-paned window, while the shame of his
+barrenness clothed him even as a garment, he beheld Lady Calmady pacing
+slowly over the gray quarries of the terrace pavement. A dark,
+fur-bordered mantle shrouded her tall figure from head to foot. Only
+her face showed, and her hands folded stiffly high upon her bosom,
+strangely pale against the blackness of her cloak. Ordinarily Julius
+would have scrupled to intrude upon her lonely walk. But just now the
+cry within him for human sympathy was urgent. Her near neighbourhood in
+itself was very dear to him, and she might let fall some gracious word
+testifying that, in her opinion at least, his life had not been wholly
+vain. For very surely that which survives when all other passions are
+uprooted and cast forth--survives even in the case of the true ascetic
+and saint--is the unquenchable yearning for the spoken approval of
+those whom we love and have loved.
+
+And so, pushed by his poverty of self-esteem, Julius March, throwing a
+plaid on over his cassock, went out and paced the gray quarries beside
+Katherine Calmady.
+
+On one hand rose the dark, rectangular masses of the house, crowned by
+its stacks of slender, twisted chimneys. On the other lay the
+indefinite and dusky expanse of the park and forest. The night was very
+clear. The stars were innumerable--fierce, cold points of pulsing
+light.--Orion's jeweled belt and sword flung wide against the
+blue-black vault. Cassiopeia seated majestic in her golden chair.
+Northward, above the walled gardens, the Bear pointing to the diamond
+flashing of the Pole star. While across all high heaven, dusty with
+incalculable myriads of worlds, stretched the awful and mysterious
+highroad of the Milky-Way. The air was keen and tonic though so still.
+An immense and fearless quiet seemed to hold all things--a quiet not of
+sleep, but of conscious and perfect equilibrium, a harmony so sustained
+and complete that to human ears it issued, of necessity, in silence.
+
+And that silence Lady Calmady was in no haste to break. Twice she and
+her companion walked the length of the terrace, and back, before she
+spoke. She paused, at length, just short of the arcade of the further
+garden-hall.
+
+"This great peace of the night puts all violence of feeling to the
+blush," she said. "One perceives that a thousand years are very really
+as one day. That calms one--with a vengeance."
+
+Katherine waited, looking out over the vague landscape, clasping the
+fur-bordered edges of her cloak with either hand. It appeared to Julius
+that both her voice and the expression of her face were touched with
+irony.
+
+"There is nothing new under the sun," she went on, "nor under the
+'visiting moon,' nor under those somewhat heartless stars. Does it
+occur to you, Julius, how hopelessly unoriginal we are, how we all
+follow in the same beaten track? What thousands of men and women have
+stood, as you and I stand now, at once calmed--as I admit that I
+am--and rendered not a little homeless by the realisation of their own
+insignificance in face of the sleeping earth and this brooding
+immensity of space! _A quoi bon, a quoi bon?_ Why can't one learn to
+harden one's poor silly heart, and just move round, stone-like, with
+the great movement of things accepting fate and ceasing to struggle or
+to care?"
+
+"Just because, I think," he answered, "the converse of that same saying
+is equally true. If, in material things, a thousand years are as one
+day, in the things of the spirit one day is as a thousand years.
+Remember the Christ crying upon the cross--'My God, My God, why hast
+Thou forsaken Me?' and suffering during that brief utterance the sum of
+all the agony of sensible insignificance and sensible homelessness
+human nature ever has borne or will bear."
+
+"Ah, the Christ! the Christ!" Lady Calmady exclaimed, half wistfully as
+it seemed to Julius March, and half impatiently. She turned and paced
+the pale pavement again.
+
+"You are too courteous, my dear friend, and cite an example august out
+of all proportion to my little lament." She looked round at him as she
+spoke, smiling; and in the uncertain light her smile showed tremulous,
+suggestive of a nearness to tears. "Instinctively you scale
+Olympus,--Calvary?--yes, but I am afraid both those heights take on an
+equally and tragically mythological character to me--and would bring me
+consolation from the dwelling-places of the gods. And my feet, all the
+while, are very much upon the floor, alas! That is happening to me
+which never yet happened to the gods, according to the orthodox
+authorities. Just this--a commonplace--dear Julius, I am growing old."
+
+Katherine drew her cloak more severely about her and moved on hastily,
+her head a little bent.
+
+"No, no, don't protest," she added, as he attempted to speak. "We can
+be honest and dispense with conventional phrases, here, alone, under
+the stars. I am growing old, Julius--and being, I suppose, but a vain,
+doting woman, I have only discovered what that really means to-day! But
+there is this excuse for me. My youth was so blessed, so--so glorious,
+that it was natural I should strive to delude myself regarding its
+passing away. I perceive that for years I have continued to call that a
+bride-bed which was, in truth, a bier. I have struggled to keep my
+youth in fancy, as I have kept the red drawing-room in fact, unaltered.
+Is not all this pitifully vain and self-indulgent? I have solaced
+myself with the phantom of youth. And I am old--old."
+
+"But you are yourself, Katherine, yourself. Nothing that has been, has
+ceased to be," Julius broke in, unable in the fulness of his reverent
+honour of his dear lady to comprehend the meaning of her present
+bitterness. "Surely the mere adding of year to year can make no so
+vital difference?"
+
+"Ah! you dear stupid creature," she cried,--"stupid, because, manlike,
+you are so hopelessly sensible--it makes just all the difference in the
+world. I shall grow less alert, less pliable of mind, less quick of
+sympathy, less capable of adjusting myself to altered conditions, and
+to entertaining new views. And, all the while, the demand upon me will
+not lessen."
+
+Katherine stopped suddenly in her swift walk. The two stood facing one
+another.
+
+"The demand will increase," she declared. "Richard is not happy."
+
+And thereupon--since, even in the most devout and holy, the old Adam
+dies extremely hard--Julius March fell a prey to very lively
+irritation. While she talked of herself, bestowing unreserved
+confidence upon him, he could listen gladly, forever. But if that most
+welcome subject of conversation should be dropped, let her give him
+that which he craved to-night, so specially--a word for himself. Let
+her deal, for a little space, with his own private needs, his own
+private joys and sorrows.
+
+"Ah! Richard is not happy!" he exclaimed, his irritation finding voice.
+"We reach the root of the matter. Richard is not happy. Alas, then, for
+Richard's mother!"
+
+"Are you so much surprised?" Katherine asked hotly. "Do you venture to
+blame him? If so, I am afraid religion has made you rather cruel,
+Julius. But that is not a new thing under the sun either. Those who
+possess high spiritual consolations--unknown to the rank and file of
+us--have generally displayed an inclination to take the misfortunes of
+others with admirable resignation. Dearest Marie de Mirancourt was an
+exception to that rule. You might do worse perhaps than learn to follow
+her example."
+
+As she finished speaking Lady Calmady turned from him rather loftily,
+and prepared to move away. But even in so doing she received an
+impression which tended to modify her resentful humour.
+
+For an instant Julius March stood, a tall, thin, black figure, rigid
+and shadowless upon the pallor of the gray pavement, his arms extended
+wide, as once crucified, while he looked, not at her, not out into the
+repose of the night-swathed landscape, but up at the silent dance of
+the eternal stars in the limitless fields of space. As Katherine,
+earlier in the evening, had taken up the momentarily rejected burden of
+her motherhood, so Julius now, with a movement of supreme
+self-surrender, took up the momentarily rejected burden of the
+isolation of the religious life. Self-wounded by self-love, he had
+sought comfort in the creature rather than the creator. And the
+creature turned and rebuked him. It was just. Now Julius gave himself
+back, bowed himself again under the dominion of his fixed idea; and, so
+doing, gained, unconsciously, precisely that which he had gone forth to
+seek. For Katherine, struck alike by the strange vigour, and strange
+resignation, of his attitude, suffered quick fear, not only for, but of
+him. His aloofness alarmed her.
+
+"Julius! dear Julius!" she cried. "Come, let us walk. It grows cold. I
+enjoy that, but it is not very safe for you. And, pardon me, dear
+friend, I spoke harshly just now. I told you I was getting old. Put my
+words down to the peevishness of old age then."
+
+Katherine smiled at him with a sweet, half-playful humility. Her face
+was very wan. And speech not coming immediately to him, she spoke
+again.
+
+"You have always been very patient with me. You must go on being so."
+
+"I ask nothing better," Julius said.
+
+Lady Calmady stopped, drew herself up, shook back her head.
+
+"Ah! what sorry creatures we all are," she cried, rather bitterly.
+"Discontented, unstable, forever kicking against the pricks, and
+fighting against the inevitable. Always crying to one another, 'See how
+hard this is, know how it hurts, feel the weight!' My poor darling
+cries to me--that is natural enough"--Katherine paused--"and as it
+should be. But I must needs run out and cry to you. In this we are like
+links of an endless chain. What is the next link, Julius? To whom will
+you cry in your turn?"
+
+"The chain is not endless" he replied. "The last link of it is riveted
+to the steps of the throne of God. I will make my cry there--my
+threefold cry--for you, for Richard, and for myself, Katherine."
+
+Lady Calmady had reached the arched side-door leading from the terrace
+into the house. She paused, with her hand on the latch.
+
+"Your God and I quarreled nearly four-and-twenty years ago--not when
+Richard, my joy, died, but when Richard, my sorrow, was born," she
+said. "I own I see no way, short of miracle, of that quarrel being made
+up."
+
+"Then a miracle will be worked," he answered.
+
+"Ah! You forget I grow old," Katherine retorted, smiling; "so that for
+miracles the time is at once too long and too short."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+TELLING HOW QUEEN MARY'S CRYSTAL BALL CAME TO FALL ON THE GALLERY FLOOR
+
+
+This world is unquestionably a vastly stimulating and entertaining
+place if you take it aright--namely, if you recognise that it is the
+creation of a profound humorist, is designed for wholly practical and
+personal uses, and proceed to adapt your conduct to that knowledge in
+all light-heartedness and good faith. Thus, though in less trenchant
+phrase since she was still happily very young, meditated Madame de
+Vallorbes, while standing in the pensive October sunshine upon the wide
+flight of steps which leads down from the main entrance of Brockhurst
+House. Tall, stone pinnacles alternating with seated griffins--long of
+tail, fierce of beak and sharp of claw--fill in each of the many angles
+of the descending stone balustrade on either hand. Behind her, the
+florid, though rectangular, decoration of the house front ranged up,
+storey above storey, in arcade and pilaster, heavily mullioned window,
+carven plaque and string course, to pairs of matching pinnacles and
+griffins--these last rampant, supporting the Calmady shield and
+coat-of-arms--the quaint forms of which break the long line of the
+pierced, stone parapet in the centre of the facade, and rise above the
+rusty red of the low-pitched roofs, until the spires of the one and
+crested heads of the other are outlined against the sky. About her feet
+the pea-fowl stepped in mincing and self-conscious elegance--the cocks
+with rustlings of heavy trailing quills, the hens and half-grown chicks
+with squeakings and whifflings--subdued, conversational--accompanied by
+the dry tap of many bills picking up the glossy grains of Indian-corn
+which she let dribble slowly down upon the shallow steps from between
+her pretty fingers. She had huddled a soft sable tippet about her
+throat and shoulders. The skirt of her indigo-coloured, poplin dress,
+turning upon the step immediately above that on which she stood, showed
+some inches of rose-scarlet, silken frill lining the hem of it.
+
+Helen de Vallorbes had a lively consciousness of her surroundings. She
+enjoyed every detail of them. Enjoyed the gentle, southwesterly wind
+which touched her face and stirred her bright hair, enjoyed the
+plaintive, autumn song of a robin perched on a rose-grown wall, enjoyed
+the impotent ferocity of the guardian griffins, enjoyed the small
+sounds made by the feeding pea-fowl, the modest quaker grays and the
+imperial splendours of their plumage. She enjoyed the turn of her own
+wrist, its gold chain-bracelet and the handsome lace falling away from
+and displaying it, as she held out the handfuls of corn. She enjoyed
+even that space of rose-scarlet declaring itself between the dull blue
+of her dress and the gray, weathered surface of the stone.
+
+But all these formed only the accompaniment, the ground-tone, to more
+reasoned, more vital enjoyments. Before her, beyond the carriage sweep,
+lay the square lawn enclosed by red walls and by octagonal, pepper-pot
+summer-houses, whereon--unwillingly, yet in obedience to the wild
+justice of revenge--Roger Ormiston had shot the Clown, half-brother to
+Touchstone, race-horse of mournful memory. As a child Helen had heard
+that story. Now her somewhat light, blue-gray eyes, their beautiful
+lids raised wide for once, looked out curiously upon the space of
+dew-powdered turf; while the corners of her mouth--a mouth a trifle
+thin lipped, yet soft and dangerously sweet for kissing--turned upward
+in a reflective smile. She, too, knew what it was to be angry, to the
+point of revenge; had indeed come to Brockhurst not without purpose of
+that last tucked away in some naughty convolution of her active brain.
+But Brockhurst and its inhabitants had proved altogether more
+interesting than she had anticipated. This was the fourth day of her
+visit, and each day had proved more to her taste than the preceding
+one. So she concluded this matter of revenge might very well stand over
+for the moment, possibly stand over altogether. The present was too
+excellent, of its kind, to risk spoiling. Helen de Vallorbes valued the
+purple and fine linen of a high civilisation; nor did she disdain,
+within graceful limits, to fare sumptuously every day. She valued all
+that is beautiful and costly in art, of high merit and distinction in
+literature. Her taste was sure and just, if a little more disposed
+towards that which is sensuous than towards that which is spiritual.
+And in all its many forms she appreciated luxury, even entertaining a
+kindness for that necessary handmaid of luxury--waste. Appreciated
+these the more ardently, that, with birth-pangs at the beginning of
+each human life, death-pangs and the corruption of the inevitable grave
+at the close of each, all this lapping, meanwhile, of the doomed flesh
+in exaggerations of ease and splendour seemed to her among the very
+finest ironies of the great comedy of existence. It heightened, it
+accentuated the drama. And among the many good things of life, drama,
+come how and where and when it might, seemed to her supremely the best.
+She desired it as a lover his mistress. To detect it, to observe it,
+gave her the keenest pleasure. To take a leading part in and shape it
+to the turn of her own heart, her own purpose, her own wit was, so far,
+her ruling passion.
+
+And of potential drama, of the raw material of it, as the days passed,
+she found increasingly generous store at Brockhurst. It invaded and
+held her imagination, as the initial conception of his poem will that
+of the poet, or of his picture that of the painter. She brooded over
+it, increasingly convinced that it might be a masterpiece. For the
+drama--as she apprehended it--contained not only elements of virility
+and strength, but an element, and that a persistent one, of the
+grotesque. This put the gilded dome to her silent, and perhaps slightly
+unscrupulous, satisfaction. How could it be otherwise, since the
+presence of the grotesque is, after all, the main justification of the
+theory on which her philosophy of life was based--namely, the belief
+that above all eloquence of human speech, behind all enthusiasm of
+human action or emotion, the ear which hears aright can always detect
+the echo of eternal laughter? And this grim echo did not affect the
+charming young lady to sadness as yet. Still less did it make her mad,
+as the mere suspicion of it has made so many, and those by no means
+unworthy or illiterate persons. For the laugh, so far, had appeared to
+be on her side, never at her expense--which makes a difference. And the
+chambers of her house of life were too crowded by health and agreeable
+sensations, mental activities and sparkling audacities, to have any one
+of them vacant for reception, more than momentary, of that
+thrice-blessed guest, pity.
+
+And so it followed that, as she fed the mincing pea-fowl, Madame de
+Vallorbes' smile changed in character from reflection to impatience. A
+certain heat running through her, she set her pretty teeth and fell to
+pelting the pea-hens and chicks mischievously, breaking up all their
+aristocratic reserve and making them jump and squeak to some purpose.
+For this precious, this very masterpiece of a drama was not only here
+potentially, but actually. It was alive. She had felt it move under her
+hand--or under her heart, which was it?--yesterday evening. Again this
+morning, just now, she had noted signs of its vitality, wholly
+convincing to one skilled in such matters. Impatience, then, became
+very excusable.
+
+"For my time is short and the action disengages itself so deplorably
+slowly!" she exclaimed. "Pah! you greedy, conceited birds, which do you
+hold dearest after all, the filling of your little stomachs, or the
+supporting of your little dignities? Be advised by a higher
+intelligence. Revenge yourselves on the grains that hit and sting you
+by gobbling them up. It is a venerable custom that of feasting upon
+one's enemies. And has been practised, in various forms, both by
+nations and individuals. There, I give you another chance of displaying
+wisdom--there--there!--La! la! what an absurd commotion! You little
+idiots, don't flutter. Agitation is a waste of energy, and advances
+nothing. I declare peace. I want to consider."
+
+And so, letting the remaining handfuls of corn dribble down very
+slowly, while the sunshine grew warmer and the shadows of the guardian
+griffins more distinct upon the lichen-encrusted stones, Helen de
+Vallorbes sank back into meditation--Yes, unquestionably the drama was
+alive. But it seemed so difficult to bring it to the birth. And she
+wanted, very badly, to hear its first half-articulate cries and watch
+its first staggering footsteps. All that is so entertaining, you
+yourself safely grown-up, standing very firm on your feet, looking
+down! And it would be a lusty child, this drama, very soon reaching
+man's estate and man's inspiring violence of action, striking out like
+some blind, giant Samson, blundering headlong in its unseeing,
+uncalculating strength.--Helen laid her hands upon her bosom, and threw
+back her head, while her throat bubbled with suppressed laughter. Ah!
+it promised to be a drama of ten thousand, if she knew her power, and
+knew her world--and she possessed considerable confidence in her
+knowledge of both. Only, how on earth to set the crystal free of the
+matrix, how to engage battle, how to get this thing fairly and squarely
+born? For, as she acknowledged, in the flotation of all such merry
+schemes as her present one, chance encounters, interludes, neatly
+planned evasions and resultant pursuits, play so large and important a
+part. But at Brockhurst this whole chapter of accidents was barred, and
+received rules of strategy almost annihilated, by the fact of Richard
+Calmady's infirmity and the hard-and-fast order of domestic procedure,
+the elaborate system of etiquette, which that infirmity had gradually
+produced. At Brockhurst there were no haphazard exits and entrances.
+These were either hopelessly official and public, or guarded to an
+equally hopeless point of secrecy. A contingent of tall, civil
+men-servants was always on duty. Richard was invariably in his place at
+table when the rest of the company came down. The ladies took their
+after-dinner coffee in the drawing-room, and joined the gentlemen in
+the Chapel-Room, library, or gallery, as the case might be. If they
+rode, Richard was at the door ready mounted, along with the grooms and
+led-horses. If they drove, he was already seated in the carriage.
+
+"And how, how in the name of common sense," Madame de Vallorbes
+exclaimed, stamping her foot, and thereby throwing the now thoroughly
+nervous pea-fowl into renewed agitation, "are you to establish any
+relation worth mentioning with a man who is perpetually being carried
+in procession like a Hindu idol? My good birds, one's never alone with
+him--whether by design and arrangement, I know not. But, so far, never,
+never, picture that! And yet, don't tell me, matchless mixture of pride
+and innocence though he is, he wouldn't like it!"
+
+However, she checked her irritation by contemplation of yesterday. Ah!
+that had been very prettily done assuredly. For riding in the forenoon
+along the road skirting the palings of the inner park, while they
+walked their horses over the soft, brown bed of fallen fir-needles,--she,
+her father, and Dick,--the conversation dealt with certain first
+editions and their bindings, certain treasures, unique in historic
+worth, locked in the glass tables and fine Florentine and _pietra dura_
+cabinets of the Long Gallery. Mr. Ormiston was a connoisseur and talked
+well. And Helen had sufficient acquaintance with such matters both to
+appreciate, and to add telling words to the talk.
+
+"Ah! but I cannot go without seeing those delectable things, Richard,"
+she said. "Would it be giving you altogether too much trouble to have
+them out for me?"
+
+"Why, of course not. You shall see them whenever you like," he
+answered. "Julius knows all about them. He'll be only too delighted to
+act showman."
+
+Just here the road narrowed a little, and Mr. Ormiston let his horse
+drop a few lengths behind, so that she, Helen, and her cousin rode
+forward side by side. The tones of the low sky, of the ranks of firs
+and stretches of heather formed a rich, though sombre, harmony of
+colour. Scents, pungent and singularly exhilarating, were given off by
+the damp mosses and the peaty moorland soil. The freedom of the forest,
+the feeling of the noble horse under her, stirred Helen as with the
+excitement of a mighty hunting, a positively royal sport. While the
+close presence of the young man riding beside her sharpened the edge of
+that excitement to a perfect keenness of pleasure.
+
+"Ah, how glorious it all is!" she cried. "How glad I am that you asked
+me to come here."
+
+And she turned to Richard, looking at him as, since the first day of
+their meeting, she had not, somehow, quite ventured to look.
+
+"But, oh! dear me! please," she went on, "I know Mr. March is an angel,
+a saint--but--but--_mea culpa, mea maxima culpa_, I don't want him to
+show me those special treasures of yours. He'll take the life out of
+them. I know it. And make them seem like things read of merely in a
+learned book. Be very charming to me, Richard. Waste half an hour upon
+me. Show me those moving relics yourself."
+
+As she spoke, momentary suspicion rose in Dickie's eyes. But she gazed
+back unflinchingly, with the uttermost frankness, so that suspicion
+died, giving place to the shy, yet triumphant, gladness of youth which
+seeks and finds youth.
+
+"Do, Richard, pray do," she repeated.
+
+The young man had averted his face rather sharply, and both horses,
+somehow, broke into a hand gallop.
+
+"All right," he answered. "I'll arrange it. This evening, about six,
+after tea? Will that suit you? I'll send you word."
+
+Then the road had widened, permitting Mr. Ormiston to draw up to them
+again. The remainder of the ride had been a little silent.
+
+Yes, all that had been prettily done. Nor had the piece that followed
+proved unworthy of the prelude. She ran over the scene in her mind now,
+as she stood among the pocketing pea-fowl, and it caused her both mirth
+and delightful little heats, in which the heart has a word to
+say.--Madame de Vallorbes was ravished to feel her heart, just now and
+again.--For, contradictory as it may seem, no game is perfect that has
+not moments of seriousness.--She recalled the aspect of the Long
+Gallery, as one of those civil, ever-present men-servants had opened
+the door for her, and she waited a moment on the threshold. The true
+artist is never in a hurry. The breadth of the great room immediately
+before her showed very bright with candle-light and lamplight. But that
+died away, through gradations of augmenting obscurity, until the
+extreme end, towards the western bay, melted out into complete
+darkness. This produced an effect of almost limitless length which
+moved her to a childish, and at first pleasing, fancy of vague
+danger--an effect heightened by the ranges of curious and costly
+objects standing against, or decorating, the walls in a perspective of
+deepening gloom. Turquoise-coloured, satin curtains, faded to intimate
+accord with the silvered surface of the paneling, were drawn across the
+wide windows. They reached to the lower edge of the stonework merely,
+leaving blottings of impenetrable shadow below. While, as culmination
+of interest, as living centre of this rich and varied setting, was the
+figure of Richard Calmady--seen, as his custom was, only to the
+waist--seated in a high-backed chair drawn close against an antique,
+oak table, upon which a small _pietra dura_ cabinet shad been placed.
+The doors of the cabinet stood open, displaying slender columns of
+jasper and porphyry, and little drawers encrusted with raised work in
+marbles and precious stones. The young man sat stiffly upright, as one
+who listens, expectant. His expression was almost painfully serious. In
+one hand he held a string of pearls, attached to which, and enclosed by
+intersecting hoops of gold, was a crystal ball that shone with the mild
+effulgence of a mimic moon. And the great room was so very quiet, that
+Helen, in her pause upon the threshold, had remarked the sound of
+raindrops tapping upon the many window-panes as with impatiently
+nervous fingers.
+
+And this bred in her a corresponding nervousness--sensation to her,
+heretofore, almost unknown. The darkness yonder began to provoke a
+disagreeable impression, queerly challenging both her eyesight and her
+courage. Old convent teachings, regarding the Prince of Darkness and
+his emissaries, returned upon her. What if diabolic shapes lurked
+there, ready to become stealthily emergent? She had scoffed at such
+archaic fancies in the convent, yet, in lonely hours, had suffered
+panic fear of them, as will the hardiest sceptic. A certain little
+scar, moreover, carefully hidden under the soft hair arranged low on
+her right temple, smarted and pricked. In short, her habitual
+self-confidence suffered partial eclipse. She was visited by the
+disintegrating suspicion, for once, that the eternal laughter might,
+possibly, be at her expense, rather than on her side.
+
+But she conquered such suspicion as contemptible, and cast out the
+passing weakness. The bare memory of it angered her now, causing her to
+fire a volley of yellow corn at a lordly peacock, which sent him
+scuttling down the steps on to the gravel in most plebeian haste. Yes,
+she had speedily cast out her weakness, thank heaven! What was all the
+pother about after all? This was not the first time she had played
+merry games with the affairs and affections of men. Madame de Vallorbes
+smiled to herself, recalling certain episodes, and shook her charming
+shoulders gleefully, as she looked out into the sunny morning. And
+then, was there not ample excuse? This man moved her more than
+most--more than any. She swore he did. Her attitude towards him was
+something new, something quite different, thereby justifying her
+campaign. And therefore, all the bolder for her brief self-distrust and
+hesitation, she had swept across the great room, light of foot, and
+almost impertinently graceful of carriage.
+
+"Here you are at last!" Dickie had exclaimed, with a sigh as of relief.
+"I shan't want anything more, Powell. You can come back when the
+dressing-bell rings." Then, as the valet closed the door behind him, he
+continued rapidly:--"Not that I propose to victimise you till then,
+Helen. You mustn't stay a bit longer than you like. I confess I'm
+awfully fond of this room. I'm almost ashamed to think how much time I
+waste in it. Doing what? Oh, well, just dreaming! You see it contains
+samples of the doings of all my father's people, and I return to
+primitive faiths here and to perform acts of ancestor worship."
+
+"Ah! I like that!" Helen said. And she did. Picture this man, long of
+arm, unnaturally low of stature, and astonishingly--yes, quite
+astonishingly good-looking, moving about among these books and
+pictures, these trophies of war and of sport, these oriental jars, tall
+almost as himself, and all the other strange furnishings from out
+distant years and distant lands! Picture him emerging from that well of
+soft darkness yonder, for instance! Helen's eyes danced under their
+arched and drooping lids, and she registered the fact that, though
+still frightened, her fright had changed in character. It was grateful
+to her palate. She relished it as the bouquet of a wine of finest
+quality. Meanwhile her companion talked on.
+
+"The ancestor worship? Oh yes! I dare say you might like it for a
+change. Getting it as I do, as habitual diet, it is not remarkably
+stimulating. The natural man prefers to find occasion for worshipping
+himself rather than his ancestors, after all, you know. But a little
+turn of it will serve to fill in a gap and lessen the monotony of your
+visit. I am afraid you must be a good deal bored, Helen. It must seem
+rather terribly humdrum here after Paris and Naples, and--well--most
+places, at that rate, as you know them."
+
+Richard shifted his position. And the crystal moon encompassed by
+golden bands, crossing and intersecting one another like those of a
+sidereal sphere, gleamed as with an inward and unearthly light,
+swinging slowly upon the movement of his hand.
+
+"You must feel here as though the clock had been put back two or three
+centuries. I know we move slowly, and conduct ourselves with tedious
+deliberation. And so, you understand, you mustn't let me keep you. Just
+look at what you like of these odds and ends, and then depart without
+scruple. It's rather a fraud, in any case, my showing them to you.
+Julius March, as I told you, is much better qualified to."
+
+"Julius March, Julius March," Madame de Vallorbes broke in. "Do, I
+beseech you, dear Cousin Richard, leave him to the pious retirement of
+his study. Is he not middle-aged, and a priest into the bargain?"
+
+"Unquestionably," Dickie said. "But, pardon me, I don't quite see what
+that has to do with it."
+
+Thereupon Madame de Vallorbes made a very naughty, little grimace and
+drummed with her finger-tips upon the table.
+
+"La! la!" she cried, "you're no better than all the rest. Commend me to
+a clever man for incapacity to apprehend what is patent to the
+intelligence of the most ordinary woman. Look about you."--Helen
+sketched in their surroundings with a quick descriptive gesture.
+"Observe the lights and shadows. The ghostly wavings of those pale
+curtains. Smell the potpourri and spices. Think of the ancestor
+worship. Listen to the protesting wind and rain. See the mysterious
+treasure you hold in your hand. And then ask me what middle-age and the
+clerical profession have to do with all this! Why, nothing, just
+precisely nothing, nothing in the whole world. That's the point of my
+argument. They'd ruin the sentiment, blight the romance, hopelessly
+blight it--for me at least."
+
+The conversation was slightly embarrassed, both Helen and Richard
+talking at length, yet at random. But she knew that it was thus, and
+not otherwise, that it behooved them to talk. For that which they said
+mattered not in the least. The thing said served as a veil, as a cloak,
+merely, wherewith to disguise those much greater things which,
+perforce, remained unsaid.--To cover his and her lively consciousness
+of their present isolation, desired these many days and now obtained.
+To conceal the swift, silent approaches of spirit to spirit, so full of
+inquiry and self-revelation, fugitive reserves and fugitive distrusts.
+To hide, as far as might be, the existence of the hungry,
+all-compelling _joie de vivre_ which is begotten whensoever youth thus
+seeks and finds youth.--These unspoken and, as yet, unspeakable things
+were alone of real moment, making eyes lustrous and lips quick with
+tremulous, uncalled-for smiles irrespective of the purport of their
+speech.
+
+"Ah! but that's rather rough on poor dear Julius, you know," Dickie
+said. "I suppose you wanted to learn all----"
+
+"Learn?" she interrupted. "I wanted to feel. Don't you know there is
+only one way any woman worth the name ever really learns--through her
+emotions? Only the living feel. Such men as he, if they are sincere,
+are already dead. He would have made feeling impossible."
+
+A perceptible hush descended upon the room. Richard Calmady's hand
+usually was steady enough, but, in the silence, the pearls chattered
+against the table. He went rather pale and his face hardened.
+
+"And are you getting anything of that which you wanted, Helen?" he
+asked. "For sometimes in the last few days--since you have been
+here--I--I have wondered if perhaps we were not all like that--all
+dead----"
+
+"You mean do I get emotion, am I feeling?" she said. "Rest contented.
+Much is happening. Indeed I have doubted, during the last few days,
+since I have been here, whether I have ever known what it is to feel
+actually and seriously before."
+
+She sat down at right angles to him, resting her elbows upon the table,
+her chin upon her folded hands, leaning a little towards him. One of
+those pleasant heats swept over her, flushing her delicate skin,
+lending a certain effulgence to her beauty. The scent of roses long
+faded hung in the air. But here was a rose sweeter far than they. No
+white rose of paradise, it must be confessed. Rather like her immortal
+namesake, that classic Helen, was she _rosa mundi_, glowing with warmth
+and colour, rose-red rose altogether of this dear, naughty, lower
+world?
+
+"Richard," she said impulsively, "why don't you understand? Why do you
+underrate your own power? Don't you know that you are quite the most
+moving, the most attractive--well--cousin, a woman ever had?"
+
+She looked closely at him, her lips a little parted, her head thrown
+back.
+
+"Life is sweet, dear cousin. Reckon with yourself and with it, and
+live--live."--Then she put out her hand and held up the crystal between
+her face and his. "There," she went on, "tell me about this. I become
+indiscrete, thanks I suppose to your Brockhurst habit of putting back
+the clock, and speak with truly Elizabethan frankness. It belongs to
+semi-barbaric ages, doesn't it, this, to tell the true truth? Show me
+this. It seems rather fascinating."
+
+And Richard obeyed mechanically, pointing out to her the signs of the
+Zodiac, those of the planets, and other figures of occult significance
+engraved on the encircling, golden bands. Showed her how those same
+bands, turning on a pivot, formed a golden cradle, in which the crystal
+sphere reposed. He lifted it out from that cradle, moreover, and laid
+it in the softer cradle of her palm. And of necessity in the doing of
+all this, their heads--his and hers--were very near together, and their
+hands met. But they were very solemn all the while, solemn, eager,
+busy, as two babies revealing to each other the mysteries of a newly
+acquired toy. And it seemed to Madame de Vallorbes that all this was as
+pretty a bit of business as ever served to help forward such gay
+purposes as hers. She was pleased with herself too--for did she not
+feel very gentle, very sincere, really very innocent and good?
+
+"No, hold it so," Richard said, rounding her fingers carefully, that
+the tips of them might alone touch the surface of the crystal. "Now
+gaze into the heart of it steadily, fixing your will to see. Pictures
+will come presently, dimly at first, as in a mist. Then the mist will
+lift and you will read your own fortune and--perhaps--some other
+person's fate."
+
+"Have you ever read yours?"
+
+"Oh! mine's of a sort that needs no crystal to reveal it," he answered,
+with a queer drop in his voice. "It's written in rather indecently big
+letters and plain type. Always has been."
+
+Helen glanced at him. His words whipped up her sense of drama, fed her
+excitement. But she bent her eyes upon the crystal again, and the hush
+descended once more, disturbed only by that nervous tapping of rain.
+
+"I see nothing, nothing," she said presently. "And there is much I
+would give very much to see."
+
+"You must gaze with a simple intention." The young man's voice came
+curiously hoarse and broken. "Purify your mind of all desire."
+
+Helen did not raise her head.
+
+"Alas! if those are the conditions of revelation my chances of seeing
+are extremely limited. To purify one's mind of all desire is to commit
+emotional suicide. Of course I desire, all the while I desire. And
+equally, of course, you desire. Every one who is human and in their
+sober senses must do that. Absence of desire means idiotcy, or----"
+
+"Or what?"
+
+For an instant she looked up at him, a very devil of dainty malice in
+her expression, in the shrug of her shoulders too, beneath their fine
+laces and the affected sobriety of that same dull-blue, poplin gown.
+
+"Or priestly, saintly middle-age--from which may heaven in its mercy
+ever deliver us," she said.
+
+Richard shifted his position a little, gathering himself back from her
+so near neighbourhood--a fact of which the young lady was not unaware.
+
+"I'm not quite sure whether I echo your prayer," he said slowly. "I
+doubt whether that attitude, or one approximate to it, is not the
+safest and best for some of us."
+
+"Safest, no doubt." Madame de Vallorbes' eyes were bent on the crystal
+sphere again. "As it is safer to decline a duel, than go out and meet
+your man. Best? On that point you must permit me to hold my own
+opinion. The word best has many readings according to the connection in
+which it is employed. Personally I should always fight."
+
+"Whatever the odds?"
+
+"Whatever the odds."--And almost immediately Madame de Vallorbes
+uttered a little cry, curiously at variance with her bold words.
+"Something is moving inside the crystal, something is coming. I don't
+half like it, Richard. Perhaps we are tempting Providence. Yes, it
+moves, it moves, like mist rising off a river. It is poisonous. Some
+woman has looked into this before--a woman of my temperament--and read
+an evil fortune. I know it. Tell me quick, how did the crystal come
+here, to whom did it belong?"
+
+"To Mary Stuart--Mary, Queen of Scots," Dickie said.
+
+"Ah! unhappy woman, ill-omened woman. You should have told me that
+before and I would never have looked. Here take it, take it. Lock it
+up, hide it. Let no woman ever look in it again."
+
+As she spoke Helen crossed herself hastily, pushing the magic ball
+towards him. But, as though endowed with life and volition of its
+own--or was it merely that Dick's hand was even yet not quite of the
+steadiest?--it evaded his grasp, fell off the table edge and rolled,
+gleaming moonlike, far across the floor, away behind the pedestal of
+the bronze Pompeian Antinous, into the dusky shadow of those
+ghostly-waving, turquoise, satin curtains.
+
+With a sense of catastrophe upon her Helen had sprung to her
+feet.--Even now, standing in the peaceful warmth of the autumn
+sunshine, among the feeding pea-fowl, the remembrance of it caused her
+a little shiver. For at sight of that gleaming ball hurrying across the
+carpet, all the nervousness, the distrust of herself, the vague
+spiritual alarms, which had beset her on first entering the room,
+returned on her with tenfold force. The superstitious terrors of the
+convent-bred girl mastered the light-hearted scepticism of the woman of
+the world, and regions of sinister possibility seemed disclosing
+themselves around her.
+
+"Oh! how horrible! What does it mean?" she cried.
+
+And Richard answered cheerily, somewhat astonished at her agitation,
+trying to reassure her.
+
+"Mean? Nothing, except that I was abominably awkward and the crystal
+abominably slippery. What does it matter? We can find it again
+directly."
+
+Then, self-forgetful in the fulness of his longing to pacify her,
+Richard had pushed his chair back from the table, intending to go in
+search of the vagrant jewel. But the chair was high, and its make not
+of the most solid sort; and so he paused, instinctively calculating the
+amount of support it could be trusted to render him in his descent. And
+during that pause Helen had felt her heart stand still. She set her
+little teeth now, recalling it. For the extent of his deformity was
+fully apparent for once. And, apprehending that which he proposed to
+do, she was smitten by immense curiosity to realise the ultimate of the
+grotesque in respect of his appearance as he should move, walk, grope
+in the dimness over there after the lost crystal. But there are some
+indulgences which can be bought at too high a price, and along with the
+temptation to gratify her curiosity came an intensification of
+superstitious alarm. What if she had sinned, and trafficked with
+diabolic agencies, in trying to read the future? Payment of an actively
+disagreeable character might be exacted for that, and would not such
+payment risk disastrous augmentation if she gratified her curiosity
+thus further? Helen de Vallorbes became quite wonderfully prudent and
+humane.
+
+"No, no, don't bother about it, don't move, dear Richard," she cried.
+"Let me find it please. I saw exactly the direction in which it went."
+
+And to emphasise her speech, and keep the young man in his place, she
+laid her hands persuasively upon his shoulders. This brought her
+charming face, so pure in outline, set in its aureole of honey-coloured
+hair, very near to his, she looking down, he up. And in this position
+the two remained longer than was absolutely necessary, silent, quite
+still, while the air grew thick with the push of unspoken and as yet
+unspeakable matters, and Helen's hands resting upon his shoulders grew
+heavy, as the seconds passed, with languorous weight.
+
+"There are better things than crystals to read in, after all, Richard,"
+she said at last. Then she lifted her hands almost brusquely and
+stepped back. "All the same it is stupid I should have to go away," she
+continued, speaking more to herself than to him. "I am happy here. And
+when I am happy it's easy to be good--and I like to be good."
+
+She crossed the room and passed behind the bronze Pompeian Antinous.
+Under the shadow of the curtains, in the angle of the bay, against the
+wainscot, Queen Mary's magic ball showed softly luminous. Helen could
+have believed that it watched her. She hesitated before stooping to
+pick it up and looked over her shoulder at Richard Calmady. His back
+was towards her, his chair close against the table again. He leaned
+forward on his elbows, his face buried in his hands. Something in the
+bowed head, in the set of the almost crouching figure reassured Madame
+de Vallorbes. She picked up the crystal without more ado, with, indeed,
+a certain flippancy of gesture. For she had received pleasing assurance
+that she had been frightened in the wrong place, and that the eternal
+laughter was very completely on her side after all.
+
+And just then a bell had rung in some distant quarter of the great
+house. Powell, incarnation of decent punctualities, had appeared.
+Whereupon the temperature fell to below normal from fever-heat. Drama,
+accentuations of sensibility, in short all the unspoken and
+unspeakable, withered as tropic foliage at a touch of frost. No doubt
+it was as well, Madame de Vallorbes reflected philosophically, since
+the really psychological moment was passed. There had been a dinner
+party last night, and----
+
+But here the young lady's reminiscences broke off short. She gathered
+up her blue, poplin, scarlet-lined skirts, ran down the steps,
+scattering the pea-fowl to right and left, and hastened across the
+gravel.
+
+"Wait half a minute for me, dear Aunt Katherine," she cried. "Are you
+going to the conservatories? I would so like to see them. May I go
+too?"
+
+Lady Calmady stood by the door in the high, red-brick wall. She wore a
+white, lace scarf over her hair--turned up and back, dressed high, as
+of old, though now somewhat gray upon the temples. The lace was tied
+under her chin, framing her face. In her gray dress she looked as some
+stately, yet gracious lady abbess might--a lady abbess who had known
+love in all fulness, yet in all honour--a lady abbess painted, if such
+happy chance could be, by the debonair and clean-hearted Reynolds. She
+stood smiling, charmed--though a trifle unwillingly--by the brilliant
+vision of the younger woman.
+
+"Assuredly you may come with me, if it would amuse you," she said.
+
+"I may? Then let me open that door for you. La! la! how it sticks. Last
+night's rain must have swelled it;" and she wrestled unsuccessfully
+with the lock.
+
+"My dear, don't try any more," Katherine said. "You will tire yourself.
+The exertion is too great for you. I will go back and call one of the
+servants."
+
+"No, no;" and regardless of her fine laces, and trinkets, and sables
+Madame de Vallorbes put her shoulder against the resisting door and
+fairly burst it open.
+
+"See," she cried, breathless but triumphant, "I am very strong."
+
+"You are very pretty," Katharine said, almost involuntarily.
+
+The steeply-terraced kitchen gardens, neat box edgings, wide flower
+borders in which a few clumps of chrysanthemum and Michaelmas daisy
+still resisted the frost, ranged down to greenish brown ponds in the
+valley bottom spotted with busy, quacking companies of white ducks.
+Beyond was an ascending slope of thick wood, the topmost trees of which
+showed bare against the sky line. All this was framed by the arch of
+the door. Madame de Vallorbes glanced at it, while she pulled down the
+soft waves of hair, which her late exertions had slightly disarranged,
+over her right temple. Then she turned impulsively to Lady Calmady.
+
+"Thank you, dear Aunt Katherine," she said. "I would so like you to
+like me, you know."
+
+"I should be rather unpardonably difficult to please, if I did not like
+you, my dear," Lady Calmady answered. But she sighed as she spoke.
+
+The two women moved away, side by side, down the path to the glistering
+greenhouses. But Camp, who, missing Richard, had followed his mistress
+out of the house for a leisurely morning potter, turned back sulkily
+across the gravel homewards, his tail limp, his heavy head carried low.
+His instincts were conservative, as has been already mentioned. He was
+suspicious of newcomers. And whoever liked this particular newcomer,
+Madame de Vallorbes, he was sorry to say--and on more than one occasion
+he said it with quite inconvenient distinctness--he did not.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IN WHICH DICKIE TRIES TO RIDE AWAY FROM HIS OWN SHADOW, WITH SUCH
+SUCCESS AS MIGHT HAVE BEEN ANTICIPATED
+
+
+That same morning Richard was up and out early. Fog had followed on the
+evening's rain, and at sunrise still shrouded all the landscape.
+
+"Let her ladyship know I breakfast at the stables and shan't be in
+before luncheon," he had said to Powell while settling himself in the
+saddle. Then, followed by a groom, he fared forth. The house vanished
+phantom-like behind him, and the clang of the iron gates as they swung
+to was muffled by the heavy atmosphere, while he rode on by invisible
+ways across an invisible land, hemmed in, close-encompassed, passed
+upon, by the chill, ashen whiteness of the fog.
+
+And for the cold silence and blankness surrounding him Richard was
+grateful. It was restful--after a grim fashion--and he welcomed rest,
+having passed a but restless night. For Dickie had been the victim of
+much travail of spirit. His imagination vexed him, pricking up
+slumbering lusts of the flesh. His conscience vexed him likewise,
+suggesting that his attitude had not been pure cousinly; and this
+shamed him, since he was still singularly unspotted from the world,
+noble modesties and decencies still paramount in him. He was keenly,
+some might say mawkishly, sensible of the stain and dishonour of
+turning, even involuntarily and passingly, covetous glances upon
+another man's goods. In sensation and apprehension he had lived at
+racing pace during the last few days. That hour in the Long Gallery
+last night had been the climax. The gates of paradise had opened before
+him. And, since opposites of necessity imply their opposites, the gates
+of hell had opened likewise. It appeared to Dickie that the great
+poets, and painters, and musicians, the great lovers even, had nothing
+left to tell him--for he knew. Knew, moreover, that his Eden had come
+to him with the angel of the fiery sword that "turneth every way"
+standing at the threshold of it--knew, yet further, as he had never
+known before, the immensity of the difficulties, disabilities,
+humiliations, imposed on him by his deformity. Bitterly, nakedly, he
+called his trouble by that offensive name. Then he straightened himself
+in the saddle. Yes, welcome the cold weight against his chest, welcome
+the silence, the blankness, the dead, ashen pallor of the fog!
+
+But just where the tan ride, leading down across the road to the left
+diverges from the main road, this source of negative consolation began
+to fail him. For a draw of fresher air came from westward, causing the
+blurred, wet branches to quiver and the pall of mist to gather, and
+then break and melt under its wholesome breath, while the rays of the
+laggard sun, clearing the edge of the fir forest, eastward, pierced it,
+hastening its dissolution. Therefore it followed that by the time
+Richard rode in under the stable archway, he found the great yard full
+of noise and confused movement. The stable doors stood wide along one
+side of the quadrangle. Stunted, boyish figures shambled hither and
+thither, unwillingly deserting the remnants of half-eaten breakfasts,
+among the iron mugs and platters of the long, deal tables of the
+refectory. Chifney and Preiston--the head-lad--hurried them, shouting
+orders, admonishing, inciting to greater rapidity of action. And the
+boys were sulky. The thick morning had promoted hopes of an hour or two
+of unwonted idleness. Now those poor, little hopes were summarily
+blighted. Lazy, pinched with cold by the raw morning air, still a bit
+hungry, sick even, or downright frightened, they must mount and
+away--the long line of race-horses streaming, in single file, up the
+hillside to the exercising ground--with as short delay as possible, or
+Mr. Chifney and his ash stick would know the reason why.
+
+There were elements of brutality in the scene from which Richard would,
+oftentimes, have recoiled. To-day he was selfish, absorbed to the point
+of callousness. If he remarked them at all, it was in bitter welcome,
+as he had welcomed the chill and staring blankness of the fog. He was
+indifferent to the fact that Chifney was harsh, the horses testy or
+wicked, that the boys' noses were red, and that they blew their purple
+fingers before laying hold of the reins in a vain attempt to promote
+circulation. Dickie sat still as a statue in the midst of all the
+turmoil, the handle of his crop resting on his thigh, his eyes hot from
+sleeplessness and wild thoughts, his face hard as marble.--Unhappy?
+Wasn't he unhappy too? Suffer? Well, let them suffer--within reasonable
+limits. Suffering was the fundamental law of existence. They must bow
+to the workings of it along with the rest.
+
+But one wretched, little chap fairly blubbered. He had been kicked in
+the stomach some three weeks earlier, and had been in hospital. This
+was his first morning out. He had grown soft, and was light-headed, his
+knees all of a shake. By means of voluminous threats Preiston got him
+up. But he sat his horse all of a huddle, as limp as a half-empty sack
+of chaff. Richard looked on feeling, not pity, but only irritation,
+finally amounting to anger. The child's whole aspect and the sniveling
+sounds he made were so hatefully ugly. It disgusted him.
+
+"Here Chifney, leave that fellow at home," he said. "He's no good."
+
+"He's malingering, Sir Richard. I know his sort. Give in to him now and
+we shall have the same game, and worse, over again to-morrow."
+
+"Very probably," Richard answered. "Only it is evident he has no more
+hand and no more grip than a sick cat to-day. We shall have some mess
+with him, and I'm not in the humour for a mess, so just leave him.
+There boy, stop crying. Do you hear?" he added, wheeling round on the
+small unfortunate. "Mr. Chifney'll give you another day off, and the
+doctor will see you. Only if he reports you fit and you give the very
+least trouble to-morrow, you'll be turned out of the stables there and
+then. We've no use for shirkers. Do you understand?"
+
+In spite of his irritation, the hardness of Richard's expression
+relaxed as he finished speaking. The poor, little beggar was so
+abject--too abject indeed for common decency, since he too, after all,
+was human. Richard's own self-respect made it incumbent upon him to
+lift the creature out of the pit of so absolutely unseemly a
+degradation. He looked kindly at him, smiled, and promptly forgot all
+about him. While to the boy it seemed that the gods had verily
+descended in the likeness of men, and he would have bartered his
+little, dirty, blear-eyed rudiment of a soul thenceforward for another
+such a look from Richard Calmady.
+
+Dickie promptly forgot the boy, yet some virtue must have been in the
+episode for he began to feel better in himself. As the horses filed
+away through the misty sunshine--Preiston riding beside the fourth or
+fifth of the string, while Richard and Chifney brought up the rear, his
+chestnut suiting its paces to the shorter stride of the trainer's
+cob--the fever of the night cooled down in him. Half thankfully, half
+amusedly, he perceived things begin to assume their normal relations.
+He filled his lungs with the pure air, felt the sun-dazzle pleasant in
+his eyes. He had run somewhat mad in the last twenty-four hours surely?
+He was not such a fatuous ass as to have mistaken Helen's frank
+_camaraderie_, her bright interest in things, her charming little ways
+of showing cousinly regard, for some deeper, more personal feeling? She
+had been divinely kind, but that was just her--just the outcome of her
+delightful nature. She would go away on Friday--Saturday perhaps--he
+rather hoped Saturday--and be just as divinely kind to other people.
+And then he shook himself, feeling the languid weight of her hands on
+his shoulders again. Would she--would--? For an instant he wanted to
+get at, and incontinently brain, those other people. After which,
+Richard mentally took himself by the throat and proceeded to choke the
+folly out of himself. Yes, she would go back to all those other people,
+back moreover to the Vicomte de Vallorbes--whom, by the way, it
+occurred to him she so seldom mentioned. Well, we don't continually
+talk about the people we love best, do we, to comparative strangers?
+She would go back to her husband--her husband.--Richard repeated the
+words over to himself sternly, trying to drive them home, to burn them
+into his consciousness past all possibility of forgetting.
+
+Anyhow, she had been wonderfully sweet and charming to him. She had
+shown him--quite unconsciously, of course--what life might be for--for
+somebody else. She had revealed to him--what indeed had she not
+revealed! He remembered the spirit of expectation that possessed him
+riding back through the autumn woods the day he first met her. The
+expectation had been more than justified by the sequel. Only--only--and
+then Dick became stern with himself again. For, she having,
+unconsciously, done so much for him, was it not his first duty never to
+distress her?--never to let her know how much deeper it had all gone
+with him than with her?--never to insult her beautiful innocence by a
+word or look suggesting an affection less frank and cousinly than her
+own?
+
+Only, since even our strongest purposes have moments of lapse and
+weakness in execution, it would be safer, perhaps, not to be much alone
+with her--since she didn't know--how should she? Yes, Richard agreed
+with himself not to loaf, to allow no idle hours. He would ride, he
+would see to business. There were a whole heap of estate matters
+claiming attention. He had neglected them shamefully of late.
+Unquestionably Helen counted for very much, would continue to do so. He
+supposed he would carry the ache of certain memories about with him
+henceforth and forever. She had become part of the very fibre of his
+life. He never doubted that. And yet, he told himself--assuming a
+second-hand garment of slightly cynical philosophy which suited
+singularly ill with the love-light in his eyes, there radiantly
+apparent for all the world to see--that woman, even the one who first
+shows you you have a heart--and a body too, worse luck--even she is but
+a drop in the vast ocean of things. There remains all The Rest. And
+with praiseworthy diligence Dickie set himself to reckon how immensely
+much all The Rest amounts to. There is plenty, exclusive of her, to
+think about. More than enough, indeed, to keep one hard at work all
+day, and send one to bed honestly tired, to sleeping-point, at night.
+Politics for instance, science, literature, entertaining little
+controversial rows of sorts--the simple, almost patriarchal duties of a
+great land-owner; pleasant hobbies such as the collection of first
+editions, or a pretty taste in the binding of favourite books--the
+observation of this mysterious, ever young, ever fertile nature around
+him now, immutable order underlaying ceaseless change, the ever new
+wonder and beauty of all that, and:--"I say, Chifney, isn't the brown
+Lady-Love filly going rather short on the off foreleg? Anything wrong
+with her shoulder?"--and sport. Yes, thank God, in the name of
+everything healthy and virile, sport and, above all, horses--yes,
+horses.
+
+Thus did Richard Calmady reason with and essay to solace himself for
+the fact that some fruits are forbidden to him who holds honour dear.
+Reasoned with and solaced himself to such good purpose, as he fondly
+imagined, that when, an hour and a half later, he established himself
+in the trainer's dining-room, a mighty breakfast outspread before him,
+he felt quite another man. Racing cups adorned the chimneypiece and
+sideboard, portraits of race-horses and jockeys adorned the walls. The
+sun streamed in between the red rep curtains, causing the pot-plants in
+the window to give off a pleasant scent, and the canary, in his
+swinging blue and white painted cage above them, to sing. Mrs. Chifney,
+her cheeks pink, her manner slightly fluttered,--as were her lilac cap
+strings,--presided over the silver tea and coffee service, admonished
+the staid and bulky tom-cat who, jumping on the arm of Dickie's chair,
+extended a scooping tentative paw towards his plate, and issued gentle
+though peremptory orders to her husband regarding the material needs of
+her guest. To Mrs. Chifney such entertainings as the present marked the
+red-letter days of her calendar. Temporarily she forgave Chifney the
+doubtful nature of his calling and his occasional outbreaks of profane
+swearing alike. She ceased to regret that snug might-have-been, little,
+grocery business in a country town. She forgot even to hanker after
+prayer meetings, anniversary teas, and other mild, soul-saving
+dissipations unauthorised by the Church of England. She ruffled her
+feathers, so to speak, and cooed to the young man half in feudal, half
+in unsatisfied maternal affection--for Mrs. Chifney was childless. And
+it followed that as he teased her a little, going back banteringly on
+certain accepted subjects of difference between them, praised, and made
+a hole, in her fresh-baked rolls, her nicely browned, fried potatoes,
+her clear, crinkled rashers, assuring her it gave one an appetite
+merely to sit down in a room so shiningly clean and spick and span, she
+was supremely happy. And Dickie was happy too, and blessed the
+exercise, the food, and the society of these simple persons, which,
+after his evil night, seemed to have restored to him his wiser and
+better self.
+
+"He always was the noblest looking young gentleman I ever saw," Mrs.
+Chifney remarked subsequently to her husband. "But here at breakfast
+this morning, when he said, 'If you won't be shocked, Mrs. Chifney, I
+believe I could manage a second helping of that game pie,' his face was
+like a very angel's from heaven. Unearthly beautiful, Thomas, and yet a
+sort of pain at the back of it. It gave me a regular turn. I had to
+shed a few tears afterwards when I got alone by myself."
+
+"You're one of those that see more than's there, half your time,
+Maria," the trainer answered, with an unusual effort at sarcasm, for he
+was not wholly easy about the young man himself.--"There's something up
+with him, and danged if I know what it is." But these reflections he
+kept to himself.
+
+Dr. Knott, later that same day, made reflections of a similar nature.
+For though Dickie adhered valiantly to his good resolutions--going out
+with the second lot of horses between ten and eleven o'clock, riding on
+to Banister's farm to inspect the new barn and cowsheds in course of
+erection, then hurrying down to Sandyfield Street and listening to long
+and heated arguments regarding a right-of-way reported to exist across
+the meadows skirting the river just above the bridge, a right strongly
+denied by the present occupier. Notwithstanding these improving and
+public-spirited employments, the love-light grew in his eyes all
+through the long morning, causing his appearance to have something, if
+not actually angelic, yet singularly engaging, about it. For,
+unquestionably, next to a fortunate attachment, an unfortunate one, if
+honest, is among the most inspiring and grace-begetting of possessions
+granted to mortals. Helen must never know--that was well understood.
+Yet the more Dickie thought the whole affair over, the more he
+recognised the fine romance of thus cherishing a silent and secret
+devotion. He was very young in this line as yet, it may be observed.
+Meanwhile it was nearly two o'clock. He would need to ride home sharply
+if he was to be in time for luncheon. And at luncheon he would meet
+her. And remembering that, his heart--traitorous heart--beat quick, and
+his lips--traitorous lips--began to repeat her name. Thus do the gods
+of life and death love to play chuck-farthing with the wise purposes of
+men, the theory of the eternal laughter having a root of truth in it,
+as it would seem, after all! And there ahead of him, under the
+shifting, dappled shadow of the overarching firs, Dr. Knott's broad,
+cumbersome back, and high, two-wheeled trap blocked the road, while
+Timothy, the old groom,--stiff-kneed now and none too active,--slowly
+pushed open the heavy, white gate of the inner park.
+
+As Richard rode up, the doctor turned in his seat and looked at him
+from under his rough eyebrows, while his loose lips worked into a
+half-ironical smile. He loved this lad of great fortune, and great
+misfortune, more tenderly than he quite cared to own. Then, as Dick
+checked his horse beside the cart, he growled out:--
+
+"No need to make anxious inquiries regarding your health, young sir.
+What have you been doing with yourself, eh? You look as fit as a fiddle
+and as fresh as paint."
+
+"If I look as I feel I must look ravenously hungry," Richard answered,
+flushing up a little. "I've been out since six."
+
+"Had some breakfast?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes! Enough to teach one to know what a jolly thing a good
+meal is, and make one wish for another."
+
+"Hum!" Dr. Knott said. "That's a healthy state of affairs, anyhow.
+Young horses going well?"
+
+"Famously."
+
+"Bless me, everything's beer and skittles with you just at present
+then!"
+
+Richard looked away down the smooth yellow road whereon the dappled
+shadows kissed and mingled, mingled and kissed, and his heart cried
+"Helen, Helen," once again.
+
+"Oh! I don't know about that," he said. "I get my share as well as the
+rest I suppose--at least--anyway the horses are doing capitally this
+season."
+
+"I should like to have a look at them."
+
+"Oh, well you've only got to say when, you know. I shall be only too
+delighted to show them you."
+
+As he walked the trap through the gateway, Dr. Knott watched Richard
+riding alongside.--"What's up with the boy," he thought. "His face is
+as keen as a knife, and as soft as--God help us, I hope there's no
+sweethearting on hand! It's bound to come sooner or later, but the
+later the better, for it'll be a risky enough set out, come when it
+may.--Ah, look out there now, you old fool,"--this to Timothy,--"don't
+go missing the step and laying yourself up with broken ribs for another
+three months, just when my work's at its heaviest. Be careful, can't
+you?"
+
+"But why not come in to luncheon now?" Richard said, wisdom whipping up
+good resolutions once more, and bidding him check the gladness that
+gained on him at thought of that approaching meeting. Oh yes! he would
+be discreet, he would erect barriers, he would flee temptation. Knott's
+presence offered a finely rugged barrier, surely. Therefore, he
+repeated, "Come in now. My mother will be delighted to see you, and we
+can have a look round the stables afterwards."
+
+"I'll come fast enough if Lady Calmady will take me as I am. Workaday
+clothes, and second best lot at that. You're alone, I suppose?"
+
+He watched the young man as he spoke. Noted the lift of his chin, and
+the slightly studied indifference of his manner.
+
+"No, for once we're not. But that doesn't matter. My Uncle William
+Ormiston is with us. You remember him?"
+
+"I remember his wife."
+
+"Oh! she's not here," Dickie said. "Only he and his daughter, Madame de
+Vallorbes. You'll come?"
+
+"Oh! dear yes, I'll come, if you'll be good enough to prepare your
+ladies for a rough-looking customer. Don't let me keep you. Wonder what
+the daughter's like?" he added to himself. "The mother was a bit of a
+baggage."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WHEREIN THE READER IS COURTEOUSLY INVITED TO IMPROVE HIS ACQUAINTANCE
+WITH CERTAIN PERSONS OF QUALITY
+
+
+But Richard might have spared himself the trouble of erecting barriers
+against too intimate intercourse with his cousin. Providence, awaking
+suddenly as it would seem, to the perils of his position, had already
+seen to all that. For since he went forth, hot-eyed and hot-headed,
+into the blank chill of the fog, the company at Brockhurst--as Powell
+announced to him--had suffered large and unlooked-for increase. Ludovic
+Quayle was the first of the self-invited guests to appear when Richard
+was settled in the dining-room. He sauntered up to the head of the
+table with his accustomed air of slightly supercilious inquiry, as of
+one who expects to meet little save fools and foolishness, yet suffers
+these gladly, being quite secure of his own wisdom.
+
+"How are you, Dickie?" he said. "Fairly robust I hope, for the
+Philistines are upon you. Still it might have been worse. I have done
+what I could. My father, who has never grasped that there is an element
+of comedy in the numerical strength of his family, wished to bring us
+over a party of eight. But I stopped that. Four, as I tried to make him
+comprehend, touched the limits of social decency. He didn't comprehend.
+He rarely does. But he yielded, which was more to the point perhaps.
+Understand though, we didn't propose to add surprise to the other
+doubtful blessings of our descent on you. I wrote to you yesterday, but
+it appears you went out at some unearthly hour this morning superior
+alike to the state of the weather and arrival of your letters."
+
+"Fine thing going out early---excellent thing going out early. Very
+glad to see you, Calmady, and very kind indeed of you and Lady Calmady
+to take us in in this friendly way and show us hospitality at such
+short notice----"
+
+This from Lord Fallowfeild--a remarkably tall, large, and handsome
+person. He affected a slightly antiquated style of dress, with a
+sporting turn to it,--coats of dust colour or gray, notably long as to
+the skirts, well fitted at the waist, the surface of them traversed by
+heavy seams. His double chin rested within the points of a high, white
+collar, and was further supported by voluminous, black, satin stock.
+His face, set in soft, gray hair and gray whisker, brushed well
+forward, suggested that of a benign and healthy infant--an infant, it
+may be added, possessed of a small and particularly pretty mouth. Save
+in actual stature, indeed, his lordship had never quite succeeded in
+growing up. Very full of the milk of human kindness, he earnestly
+wished his fellow-creatures--gentle and simple alike--to be as
+contented and happy as he, almost invariably, himself was. When he had
+reason to believe them otherwise, it perplexed and worried him greatly.
+It followed that he was embarrassed, apologetic even, in Richard
+Calmady's presence. He felt vaguely responsible as for some neglected
+duty, as though there was something somehow which he ought to set
+right. And this feeling harassed him, increasing the natural
+discursiveness and inconsequence of his speech. He was so terribly
+nervous of forgetting and of hurting the young man's feelings by saying
+the wrong thing, that all possible wrong things got upon his brain,
+with the disastrous result that of course he ended by saying them. In
+face of a person so sadly stationary as poor Dick, moreover, his own
+perfect ability to move freely about appeared to him as little short of
+discourteous, not to say coarse. He, therefore, tried to keep very
+still, with the consequence that he developed an inordinate tendency to
+fidget. Altogether Lord Fallowfeild did not show to advantage in
+Richard Calmady's company.
+
+"Ah, yes! fine thing going out early," he repeated. "Always made a
+practice of it myself at your age, Calmady. Can't stand doctor's stuff,
+don't believe in it, never did. Though I like Knott, good fellow
+Knott--always have liked Knott. But never was a believer in drugs.
+Nothing better than a good sharp walk, now, early, really early before
+the frost's out of the grass. Excellent for the liver walking----"
+
+Here, perceiving that his son Ludovic looked very hard at him, eyebrows
+raised to most admonitory height, he added hastily--
+
+"Eh?--yes, of course, or riding. Riding, nothing like that for
+health--better exercise still----"
+
+"Is it?" Richard put in. He was too busy with his own thoughts to be
+greatly affected by Lord Fallowfeild's blunders just then. "I'm glad to
+know you think so. You see it's a matter in which I'm not very much of
+a judge."
+
+"No--no--of course not.--Queer fellow Calmady," Lord Fallowfeild added
+to himself. "Uncommonly sharp way he has of setting you down."
+
+But just then, to his relief, Lady Calmady, Lady Louisa Barking, and
+pretty, little Lady Constance Quayle entered the room together. Mr.
+Ormiston and John Knott followed engaged in close conversation, the
+rugged, rough-hewn aspect of the latter presenting a strong contrast to
+the thin, tall figure and face, white and refined to the point of
+emaciation, of the diplomatist. Julius March, accompanied by
+Camp--still carrying his tail limp and his great head rather
+sulkily--brought up the rear. And Dickie, while greeting his guests,
+disposing their places at table, making civil speeches to his immediate
+neighbour on the left,--Lady Louisa,--smiling a good-morning to his
+mother down the length of the table, felt a wave of childish
+disappointment sweep over him. For Helen came not, and with a great
+desiring he desired her. Poor Dickie, so wise, so philosophic in fancy,
+so enviably, disastrously young in fact!
+
+"Oh! thanks, Lady Louisa--it's so extremely kind of you to care to
+come. The fog was rather beastly this morning wasn't it? And I
+shouldn't be surprised if it came down on us again about sunset. But
+it's a charming day meanwhile.--There Ludovic please,--next Dr. Knott.
+We'll leave this chair for Madame de Vallorbes. She's coming, I
+suppose?"
+
+And Richard glanced towards the door again, and, so doing, became aware
+that little Lady Constance, sitting between Lord Fallowfeild and Julius
+March, was staring at him. She had an innocent face, a small, feminine
+copy of her father's save that her eyes were set noticeably far apart.
+This gave her a slow, ruminant look, distinctly attractive. She
+reminded Richard of a gentle, well-conditioned, sweet-breathed calf
+staring over a bank among ox-eyed daisies and wild roses. As soon as
+she perceived--but Lady Constance did not perceive anything very
+rapidly--that he observed her, she gave her whole attention, to the
+contents of her plate and her colour deepened perceptibly.
+
+"Pretty country about you here, uncommonly pretty," Lord Fallowfeild
+was saying in response to some remark of Lady Calmady's. "Always did
+admire it. Always liked a meet on this side of the county when I had
+the hounds. Very pleasant friendly spirit on this side too. Now
+Cathcart, for instance--sensible fellow Cathcart, always have liked
+Cathcart, remarkably sensible fellow. Plain man though--quite
+astonishingly plain. Daughter very much like him, I remember.
+Misfortune for a girl that. Always feel very much for a plain woman.
+She married well though--can't recall who just now, but somebody we all
+know. Who was it now, Lady Calmady?"
+
+Between that haunting sense of embarrassment, and the kindly wish to
+carry things off well, and promote geniality, Lord Fallowfeild spoke
+loud. At this juncture Mr. Quayle folded his hands and raised his eyes
+devoutly to heaven.
+
+"Oh, my father! oh, my father!" he murmured. Then he leant a little
+forward watching Lady Calmady.
+
+"But, as you may remember, Mary Cathcart had a charming figure," she
+was saying, very sweetly, essaying to soften the coming blow.
+
+"Ah! had she though? Great thing a good figure. I knew she married
+well."
+
+"Naturally I agree with you there. I suppose one always thinks one's
+own people the most delightful in the world. She married my brother."
+
+"Did she though!" Lord Fallowfeild exclaimed, with much interest. Then
+suddenly his tumbler stopped half-way to his mouth, while he gazed
+horror-stricken across the table at Mr. Ormiston.
+
+"Oh no, no! not that brother," Katherine added quickly. "The younger
+one, the soldier. You wouldn't remember him. He's been on foreign
+service almost ever since his marriage. They are at the Cape now."
+
+"Oh! ah! yes--indeed, are they?" he exclaimed. He breathed more easily.
+Those few thousand miles to the Cape were a great comfort to him. A man
+could not overhear your strictures on his wife's personal appearance at
+that distance anyhow.--"Very charming woman, uncommonly tactful woman,
+Lady Calmady," he said to himself gratefully.
+
+Meanwhile Lady Louisa Barking, at the other end of the table, addressed
+her discourse to Richard and Julius, on either side of her, in the
+high, penetrating key affected by certain ladies of distinguished
+social pretensions. Whether this manner of speech implies a fine
+conviction of superiority on the part of the speaker, or a conviction
+that all her utterances are replete with intrinsic interest, it is
+difficult to determine. Certain it is that Lady Louisa practically
+addressed the table, the attendant men-servants, all creation in point
+of fact, as well as her two immediate neighbours. Like her father she
+was large and handsome. But her expression lacked his amiability, her
+attitude his pleasing self-distrust. In age she was about
+six-and-thirty and decidedly mature for that. She possessed a
+remarkable power of concentrating her mind upon her own affairs. She
+also laboured under the impression that she was truly religious,
+listening weekly to the sermons of fashionable preachers on the
+convenient text that "worldliness is next to godliness" and
+entertaining prejudices, finely unqualified by accurate knowledge,
+against the abominable errors of Rome.
+
+"I was getting so terribly fagged with canvassing that my doctor told
+me I really must go to Whitney and recruit. Of course Mr. Barking is
+perfectly secure of his seat. I am in no real anxiety, I am thankful to
+say. He does not speak much in the House. But I always feel speaking is
+quite a minor matter, don't you?"
+
+"Doubtless," Julius said, the remark appearing to be delivered at him
+in particular.
+
+"The great point is that your party should be able to depend absolutely
+upon your loyalty. Being rather behind the scenes, as I can't help
+being, you know, I do feel that more and more. And the party depends
+absolutely upon Mr. Barking. He has so much moral stamina, you know.
+That is what they all feel. He is ready at any moment to sacrifice his
+private convictions to party interests. And so few members of any real
+position are willing to do that. And so, of course, the leaders do
+depend on him. All the members of the Government consult him in
+private."
+
+"That is very flattering," Richard remarked.--Still Helen tarried,
+while again, glancing in the direction of the door, he encountered Lady
+Constance's mild, ruminant stare.
+
+"Can one pronounce anything flattering when one sees it to be so
+completely deserved?" Ludovic Quayle inquired in his most urbane
+manner. "Prompt and perpetual sacrifice of private conviction to party
+interest, for example--how can such devotion receive recognition beyond
+its deserts?"
+
+"Do have some more partridge, Lady Louisa," Richard put in hastily.
+
+"In any case such recognition is very satisfactory.--No more, thank
+you, Sir Richard," the lady replied, not without a touch of acerbity.
+Ludovic was very clever no doubt; but his comments often struck her as
+being in equivocal taste. He gave a turn to your words you did not
+expect and so broke the thread of your conversation in a rather
+exasperating fashion. "Very satisfactory," she repeated. "And, of
+course, the constituency is fully informed of the attitude of the
+Government towards Mr. Barking, so that serious opposition is out of
+the question."
+
+"Oh! of course," Richard echoed.
+
+"Still I feel it a duty to canvass. One can point out many things to
+the constituents in their own homes which might not come quite so well,
+don't you know, from the platform. And of course they enjoy seeing one
+so much."
+
+"Of course, it makes a great change for them," Richard echoed
+dutifully.
+
+"Exactly, and so on their account, quite putting aside the chance of
+securing a stray vote here or there, I feel it a duty not to spare
+myself, but to go through with it just for their sakes, don't you
+know."
+
+"My sister is nothing if not altruistic, you'll find, Calmady," Mr.
+Quayle here put in in his most exquisitely amiable manner.
+
+But now encouraged thereto by Lady Calmady, Lord Fallowfeild had
+recovered his accustomed serenity and discoursed with renewed
+cheerfulness.
+
+"Great loss to this side of the county, my poor friend Denier," he
+remarked. "Good fellow Denier--always liked Denier. Stood by him from
+the first--so did your son.--No, no, pardon me--yes, to be
+sure--excellent claret this--never tasted a better luncheon
+claret.--But there was a little prejudice, little narrowness of feeling
+about Denier, when he first bought Grimshott and settled down here.
+Self-made man, you see, Denier. Entirely self-made. Father was a
+clergyman, I believe, and I'm told his grandfather kept an umbrella
+shop in the Strand. But a very able, right-minded man Denier, and
+wonderfully good-natured fellow, always willing to give you an opinion
+on a point of law. Great advantage to have a first-rate authority like
+that to turn to in a legal difficulty. Very useful in county business
+Denier, and laid hold of country life wonderfully, understood the
+obligations of a land-owner. Always found a fox in that Grimshott gorse
+of his, eh, Knott?"
+
+"Fox that sometimes wasn't very certain of his country," the doctor
+rejoined. "Hailed from the neighbourhood of the umbrella shop perhaps,
+and wanted to get home to it."
+
+Lord Fallowfeild chuckled.
+
+"Capital," he said, "very good--capital. Still, it's a great relief to
+know of a sure find like that. Keeps the field in a good temper. Yes,
+few men whose death I've regretted more than poor Denier's. I miss
+Denier. Not an old man either. Shouldn't have let him slip through your
+fingers so early, Knott, eh?"
+
+"Oh! that's a question of forestry," John Knott answered grimly. "If
+one kept the old wood standing, where would the saplings' chances come
+in?"
+
+"Oh! ah! yes--never thought of that before,"--and thinking of it now
+the noble lord became slightly pensive. "Wonder if it's unfair my
+keeping Shotover so long out of the property?" he said to himself.
+"Amusing fellow Shotover, very fond of Shotover--but extravagant
+fellow, monstrously extravagant."
+
+"Lord Denier's death gave our host here a seat on the local bench just
+at the right moment," the doctor went on. "One man's loss is another
+man's opportunity. Rather rough, perhaps, on the outgoing man, but then
+things usually are pretty rough on the outgoing man in my experience."
+
+"I suppose they are," Lord Fallowfeild said, rather ruefully, his face
+becoming preternaturally solemn.
+
+"Not a doubt of it. The individual may get justice. I hope he does. But
+mercy is kept for special occasions--few and far between. One must take
+things on the large scale. Then you find they dovetail very neatly,"
+Knott continued, with a somewhat sardonic mirthfulness. The simplicity
+and perplexity of this handsome, kindly gentleman, amused him hugely.
+"But to return to Lord Denier--let alone my skill, that of the whole
+medical faculty put together couldn't have saved him."
+
+"Couldn't it, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild.
+
+"That's just the bother with your self-made man. He makes
+himself--true. But he spends himself physically in the making. All his
+vitality goes in climbing the ladder, and he's none left over by the
+time he reaches the top. Lord Denier had worked too hard as a youngster
+to make old bones. It's a long journey from the shop in the Strand to
+the woolsack you see, and he took sick at two-and-thirty I believe. Oh
+yes! early death, or premature decay, is the price most outsiders pay
+for a great professional success. Isn't that so, Mr. Ormiston?"
+
+But at this juncture the conversation suffered interruption by the
+throwing open of the door and entrance of Madame de Vallorbes.
+
+"Pray let no one move," she said, rather as issuing an order than
+preferring a request--for her father, Lord Fallowfeild, all the
+gentlemen, had risen on her appearance--save Richard.--Richard, his
+blue eyes ablaze, the corners of his mouth a-tremble, his heart going
+forth tumultuously to meet her, yet he alone of all present denied the
+little obvious act of outward courtesy from man to woman.
+
+"Pinned to his chair, like a specimen beetle to a collector's card,"
+John Knott said grimly to himself. "Poor dear lad--and with that face
+on him too. I hoped he might have been spared taking fire a little
+longer. However, here's the conflagration. No question about that. Now
+let's have a look at the lady."
+
+And the lady, it must be conceded, manifested herself under a new and
+somewhat agitating aspect, as she swept up the room and into the vacant
+place at Richard's right hand with a rush of silken skirts. She
+produced a singular effect at once of energy and self-concentration--her
+lips thin and unsmiling, an ominous vertical furrow between the spring
+of her arched eyebrows, her eyes narrow, unresponsive, severe with
+thought under their delicate lids.
+
+"I am sorry to be late, but it was unavoidable. I was kept by some
+letters forwarded from Newlands," she said, without giving herself the
+trouble of looking at Richard as she spoke.
+
+"What does it matter? Luncheon's admittedly a movable feast, isn't it?"
+
+Madame de Vallorbes made no response. A noticeable hush had descended
+upon the whole company, while the men-servants moved to and fro serving
+the newcomer. Even Lady Louisa Barking ceased to hold high discourse,
+political or other, and looked disapprovingly across the table. An hour
+earlier she had resented the younger woman's merry wit, now she
+resented her sublime indifference. Both then and now she found her
+perfect finish of appearance unpardonable. Lord Fallowfeild's disjointed
+conversation also suffered check. He fidgeted, vaguely conscious that
+the atmosphere had become somewhat electric.--"Monstrously pretty
+woman--effective woman--very effective--rather dangerous though.
+Changeable too. Made me laugh a little too much before luncheon. Louisa
+didn't like it. Very correct views, my daughter Louisa. Now seems in a
+very odd temper. Quite the grand air, but reminds me of somebody I've
+seen on the stage somehow. Suppose all that comes of living so much in
+France," he said to himself. But for the life of him he could not think
+of anything to say aloud, though he felt it would be eminently tactful
+to throw in a casual remark at this juncture. Little Lady Constance was
+disquieted likewise. For she, girl-like, had fallen dumbly and
+adoringly in love with this beautiful stranger but a few years her
+senior. And now the stranger appeared as an embodiment of unknown
+emotions and energies altogether beyond the scope of her small
+imagination. Her innocent stare lost its ruminant quality, became
+alarmed, tearful even, while she instinctively edged her chair closer
+to her father's. There was a great bond of sympathy between the
+simple-hearted gentleman and his youngest child. Mr. Quayle looked on
+with lifted eyebrows and his air of amused forbearance. And Dr. Knott
+looked on also, but that which he saw pleased him but moderately. The
+grace of every movement, the distinction of face and figure, the charm
+of that finely-poised, honey-coloured head showing up against the
+background of gray-blue tapestried wall, were enough, he owned--having
+a very pretty taste in women as well as in horses--to drive many a man
+crazy.--"But if the mother's a baggage, the daughter's a vixen," he
+said to himself. "And, upon my soul if I had to choose between 'em--which
+God Almighty forbid--I'd take my chance with the baggage." As climax
+Lady Calmady's expression was severe. She sat very upright, and made no
+effort at conversation. Her nerves were a little on edge. There had
+been awkward moments during this meal, and now her niece's entrance
+struck her as unfortunately accentuated, while there was that in
+Richard's aspect which startled the quick fears and jealousies of her
+motherhood.
+
+And to Richard himself, it must be owned, this meeting so hotly
+desired, and against the dangers of which he had so wisely guarded,
+came in fashion altogether different to that which he had pictured.
+Helen's manner was cold to a point far from flattering to his
+self-esteem. The subtle intimacies of the scene in the Long Gallery
+became as though they had never been. Dickie thinking over his restless
+night, his fierce efforts at self-conquest, those long hours in the
+saddle designed for the reduction of a perfervid imagination, wrote
+himself down an ass indeed. And yet--yet--the charm of Helen's presence
+was great. And surely she wasn't quite herself just now, there was
+something wrong with her? Anybody could see that. Everybody did see it
+in fact, he feared, and commented upon it in no charitable spirit.
+Hostility towards her declared itself on every side. He detected
+that--or imagined he did so--in Lady Louisa's expression, in Ludovic
+Quayle's extra-superfine smile, in the doctor's close and rather
+cynical attitude of observation, and, last but not least, in the
+reserve of his mother's bearing and manner. And this hostility, real or
+imagined, begot in Richard a new sensation--one of tenderness, wholly
+unselfish and protective, while the fighting blood stirred in him. He
+grew slightly reckless.
+
+"What has happened? We appear to have fallen most unaccountably
+silent," he said, looking round the table, with an air of gallant
+challenge pretty to see.
+
+"So we have, though," exclaimed Lord Fallowfeild, half in relief, half
+in apology. "Very true--was just thinking the same thing myself."
+
+While Mr. Ouayle, leaning forward, inquired with much sweetness:--"To
+whom shall I talk? Madame de Vallorbes is far more profitably engaged
+in discussing her luncheon, than she could be in discussing any
+conceivable topic of conversation with such as I. And Dr. Knott is so
+evidently diagnosing an interesting case that I have not the effrontery
+to interrupt him."
+
+Disregarding these comments Richard turned to his neighbour on the
+left.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Lady Louisa," he said, "but before this singular
+dumbness overtook us all, you were saying?"--
+
+The lady addressed, electing to accept this as a tribute to the
+knowledge, and the weight, and distinction, of her discourse, thawed,
+became condescending and gracious again.
+
+"I believe we were discussing the prospects of the party," she replied.
+"I was saying that, you know, of course there must be a large Liberal
+majority."
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"You consider that assured?" Julius put in civilly.
+
+"It is not a matter of personal opinion, I am thankful to say--because
+of course every one must feel it is just everything for the country.
+There is no doubt at all about the majority among those who really
+know--Mr. Barking, for instance. Nobody can be in a better position to
+judge than he is. And then I was speaking the other night to Augustus
+Tremiloe at Lord Combmartin's--not William, you know, but Augustus
+Tremiloe, the man in the Treasury, and he----"
+
+"Uncommonly fine chrysanthemums those," Lord Fallowfeild had broken
+forth cheerfully, finding sufficient, if tardy, inspiration in the
+table decorations. "Remarkably perfect blossoms and charming colour.
+Nothing nearly so good at Whitney this autumn. Excellent fellow my head
+gardener, but rather past his work--no enterprise, can't make him go in
+for new ideas."
+
+Mr. Ormiston, leaning across Dr. Knott, addressed himself to Ludovic,
+while casting occasional and rather anxious glances upon his daughter.
+Thus did voices rise, mingle, and the talk get fairly upon its legs
+again. Then Richard permitted himself to say quietly--
+
+"You had no bad news, I hope, in those letters, Helen?"
+
+"Why should you suppose I have had bad news?" she demanded, her teeth
+meeting viciously in the morsel of kissing-crust she held in her
+rosy-tipped fingers.
+
+It was as pretty as a game to see her eat. Dickie laughed a little,
+charmed even with her naughtiness, embarrassed too, by the directness
+of her question.
+
+"Oh! I don't exactly know why--I thought perhaps you seemed----"
+
+"You do know quite exactly why," the young lady asserted, looking full
+at him. "You saw that I was in a detestable, a diabolic temper."
+
+"Well, perhaps I did think I saw something of the sort," Richard
+answered audaciously, yet very gently.
+
+Helen continued to look at him, and as she did so her cheek rounded,
+her mouth grew soft, the vertical line faded out from her
+forehead.--"You are very assuaging, Cousin Richard," she said, and she
+too laughed softly.
+
+"Understands the vineries very well though," Lord Fallowfeild was
+saying; "and doesn't grow bad peaches, not at all bad peaches, but is
+stupid about flowers. He ought to retire. Never shall have really
+satisfactory gardens till he does retire. And yet I haven't the heart
+to tell him to go. Good fellow, you know, good, honest, hard-working
+fellow, and had a lot of trouble. Wife ailing for years, always ailing,
+and youngest child got hip disease--nasty thing hip disease, very
+nasty--quite a cripple, poor little creature, I am afraid a hopeless
+cripple. Terrible anxiety and burden for parents in that rank of life,
+you know."
+
+"It can hardly be otherwise in any rank of life," Lady Calmady said
+slowly, bitterly. An immense weariness was upon her--weariness of the
+actual and present, weariness of the possible and the future. Her
+courage ebbed. She longed to go away, to be alone for a while, to shut
+eyes and ears, to deaden alike perception and memory, to have it all
+cease. Then it was as though those two beautiful, and now laughing,
+faces of man and woman in the glory of their youth, seen over the
+perspective of fair, white damask, glittering glass and silver, rich
+dishes, graceful profusion of flowers and fruit, at the far end of the
+avenue of guests, mocked at her. Did they not mock at the essential
+conditions of their own lives too? Katherine feared, consciously or
+unconsciously they did that. Her weariness dragged upon her with almost
+despairing weight.
+
+"Do you get your papers the same day here, Sir Richard?" Lady Louisa
+asked imperatively.
+
+"Yes, they come with the second post letters, about five o'clock,"
+Julius March answered.
+
+But Lady Louisa Barking intended to be attended to by her host.
+
+"Sir Richard," she paused, "I am asking whether your papers reach you
+the same day?"
+
+And Dickie replied he knew not what, for he had just registered the
+discovery that barriers are quite useless against a certain sort of
+intimacy. Be the crowd never so thick about you, in a sense at least,
+you are always alone, exquisitely, delicately, alone with the person
+you love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+RICHARD PUTS HIS HAND TO A PLOUGH FROM WHICH THERE IS NO TURNING BACK
+
+
+"Dearest mother, you look most deplorably tired."
+
+Richard sat before the large study table, piled up with letters,
+papers, county histories, racing calendars, in the Gun-Room, amid a
+haze of cigar smoke. "I don't wonder," he went on, "we've had a regular
+field-day, haven't we? And I'm afraid Lord Fallowfeild bored you
+atrociously at luncheon. He does talk most admired foolishness half his
+time, poor old boy. All the same Ludovic shouldn't show him up as he
+does. It's not good form. I'm afraid Ludovic's getting rather spoilt by
+London. He's growing altogether too finicking and elaborate. It's a
+pity. Lady Louisa Barking is a rather exterminating person. Her
+conversation is magnificently deficient in humour. It is to be hoped
+Barking is not troubled by lively perceptions or he must suffer at
+times. Lady Constance is a pretty little girl, don't you think so? Not
+oppressed with brains, I dare say, but a good little sort."
+
+"You liked her?" Katherine said. She stood beside him, that mortal
+weariness upon her yet.
+
+"Oh yes!--well enough--liked her in passing, as one likes the wild
+roses in the hedge. But you look regularly played out, mother, and I
+don't like that in the least."
+
+Richard twisted the revolving-chair half round, and held out his arms
+in invitation. As his mother leaned over him, he stretched upward and
+clasped his hands lightly about her neck.--"Poor dear," he said
+coaxingly, "worn to fiddle-strings with all this wild dissipation! I
+declare it's quite pathetic."--He let her go, shrugging his shoulders
+with a sigh and a half laugh. "Well, the dissipation will soon enough
+be over now, and we shall resume the even tenor of our way, I suppose.
+You'll be glad of that, mother?"
+
+The caress had been grateful to Katherine, the cool cheek dear to her
+lips, the clasp of the strong arms reassuring. Yet, in her present
+state of depression, she was inclined to distrust even that which
+consoled, and there seemed a lack in the fervour of this embrace. Was
+it not just a trifle perfunctory, as of one who pays toll, rather than
+of one who claims a privilege?
+
+"You'll be glad too, my dearest, I trust?" she said, craving further
+encouragement.
+
+Richard twisted the chair back into place again, leaned forward to note
+the hour of the clock set in the centre of the gold and enamel
+inkstand.
+
+"Oh! I'm not prophetic. I don't pretend to go before the event and
+register my sensations until both they and I have fairly arrived. It's
+awfully bad economy to get ahead of yourself and live in the day after
+to-morrow. To-day's enough--more than enough for you, I'm afraid, when
+you've had a large contingent of the Whitney people to luncheon. Do go
+and rest, mother. Uncle William is disposed of. I've started him out
+for a tramp with Julius, so you need not have him on your mind."
+
+But neither in Richard's words nor in his manner did Lady Calmady find
+the fulness of assurance she craved.
+
+"Thanks dearest," she said. "That is very thoughtful of you. I will see
+Helen and find out----"
+
+"Oh! don't trouble about her either," Richard put in. Again he studied
+the jewel-rimmed dial of the little clock. "I found she wanted to go to
+Newlands to bid Mrs. Cathcart good-bye. It seems Miss St. Quentin is
+back there for a day or two. So I promised to drive her over as soon as
+we were quit of the Fallowfeild party."
+
+"It is late for so long a drive."
+
+Richard looked up quickly and his face wore that expression of
+challenge once again.
+
+"I know it is--and so I am afraid we ought to start at once. I expect
+the carriage round immediately." Then repenting:--"You'll take care of
+yourself won't you, mother, and rest?"
+
+"Oh yes! I will take care of myself," Katherine said. "Indeed, I appear
+to be the only person I have left to take care of, thanks to your
+forethought. All good go with you, Dick."
+
+It followed--perhaps unreasonably enough--that Richard, some five
+minutes later, drove round the angle of the house and drew the
+mail-phaeton up at the foot of the gray, griffin-guarded flight of
+steps--whereon Madame de Vallorbes, wrapped in furs, the cavalier hat
+and its trailing plumes shadowing the upper part of her face and her
+bright hair, awaited his coming--in a rather defiant humour. His cousin
+was troubled, worried, and she met with scant sympathy. This aroused
+all his chivalry. Whatever she wished for, that he could give her, she
+should very certainly have. Of after consequences to himself he was
+contemptuous. The course of action which had shown as wisdom a couple
+of hours ago, showed now as selfishness and pusillanimity. If she
+wanted him, he was there joyfully to do her bidding, at whatever cost
+to himself in subsequent unrest of mind seemed but a small thing. If
+heartache and insidious provocations of the flesh came later, let them
+come. He was strong enough to bear the one and crush out the other, he
+hoped. It would give him something to do--he told himself, a little
+bitterly--and he had been idle of late!
+
+And so it came about that Richard Calmady held out his hand, to help
+his cousin into her place at his side, with more of meaning and welcome
+in the gesture than he was quite aware. He forgot the humiliation of
+the broad strap about his waist, of the high, ingeniously contrived
+driving-iron against which his feet rested, steadying him upon the
+sharply sloping seat. These were details, objectionable ones it was
+true, but, to-day, of very secondary importance. In the main he was
+master of the situation. For once it was his to render, rather than
+receive, assistance. Helen was under his care, in a measure dependent
+on him, and this gratified his young, masculine pride, doomed too often
+to suffer sharp mortification. A fierce pleasure possessed him. It was
+fine to bear her thus away, behind the fast trotting horses, through
+the pensive, autumn brightness. Boyish self-consciousness and
+self-distrust died down in Richard, and the man's self-reliance,
+instinct of possession and of authority, grew in him. His tone was that
+of command, for all its solicitude, as he said:--
+
+"Look here, are you sure you've got enough on? Don't go and catch cold,
+under the impression that there's any meaning in this sunshine. It is
+sure to be chilly driving home, and it's easy to take more wraps."
+
+Helen shook her head, unsmiling, serious.
+
+"I could face polar snows."
+
+Richard let the horses spring forward, while little pebbles rattled
+against the body of the phaeton, and the groom, running a few steps,
+swung himself up on to the back seat, immediately becoming immovable as
+a wooden image, with rigidly folded arms.
+
+"Oh! the cold won't quite amount to that," Richard said. "But I observe
+women rarely reckon with the probabilities of the return journey."
+
+"The return journey is invariably too hot, or too cold, too soon, or
+too late--for a woman. So it is better not to remember its existence
+until you are compelled to do so. For myself, I confess to the
+strongest prejudice against the return journey."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes' speech was calm and measured, yet there was a
+conviction in it suggestive of considerable emotion. She sat well back
+in the carriage, her head turned slightly to the left, so that Richard,
+looking down at her, saw little but the pure firm line of her jaw, the
+contour of her cheek, and her ear--small, lovely, the soft hair curling
+away from above and behind it in the most enticing fashion. Physical
+perfection, of necessity, provoked in him a peculiar envy and delight.
+And nature appeared to have taken ingenious pleasure, not only in
+conferring an unusual degree of beauty upon his companion, but in
+finishing each detail of her person with unstinted grace. For a while
+the young man lost himself in contemplation of that charming ear and
+partially averted face. Then resolutely he bestowed his attention upon
+the horses again, finding such contemplation slightly enervating to his
+moral sense.
+
+"Yes, return journeys are generally rather a nuisance, I suppose," he
+said, "though my experience of that particular form of nuisance is
+limited. I have not been outward-bound often enough to know much of the
+regret of being homeward-bound. And yet, I own, I should not much mind
+driving on and on everlastingly on a dreamy afternoon like this,
+and--and as I find myself just now--driving on and seeking some El
+Dorado--of the spirit, I mean, not of the pocket--seeking the Fortunate
+Isles that lie beyond the sunset. For it would be not a little
+fascinating to give one's accustomed self, and all that goes to make up
+one's accepted identity, the slip--to drive clean out of one's old
+circumstances and find new heavens, a new earth, and a new personality
+elsewhere. What do you say, Helen, shall we try it?"
+
+But Helen sat immobile, her face averted, listening intently, revolving
+many things in her mind, meditating how and when most advantageously to
+speak.
+
+"It would be such an amiable and graceful experiment to try on my own
+people, too, wouldn't it?" the young man continued, with a sudden
+change of tone. "And I am so eminently fitted to lose myself in a crowd
+without fear of recognition, just the person for a case of mistaken
+identity!"
+
+"Do not say such things, Richard, please. They distress me," Madame de
+Vallorbes put in quickly. "And, believe me, I have no quarrel with the
+return journey in this case. At Brockhurst I could fancy myself to have
+found the Fortunate Isles of which you spoke just now. I have been very
+happy there--too happy, perhaps, and therefore, to-day, the whip has
+come down across my back, just to remind me."
+
+"Ah! now you say the painful things," Dick interrupted. "Pray
+don't--I--I don't like them."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes turned her head and looked at him with the
+strangest expression.
+
+"My metaphor was not out of place. Do you imagine horses are the only
+animals a man drives, _mon beau cousin_? Some men drive the woman who
+belongs to them, and that not with the lightest bit, I promise you. Nor
+do they forget to tie blood-knots in the whip-lash when it suits them
+to do so."
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"Merely that the letters, which so stupidly endangered my self-control
+at luncheon, contained examples of that kind of driving."
+
+"How--how damnable," the young man said between his teeth.
+
+The red and purple trunks of the great fir trees reeled away to right
+and left as the carriage swept forward down the long avenue. To
+Richard's seeing they reeled away in disgust, even as did his thought
+from the images which his companion's words suggested. While, to her
+seeing, they reeled, smitten by the eternal laughter, the echoes of
+which it stimulated her to hear.--"The drama develops," she said to
+herself, half triumphant, half abashed. "And yet I am telling the
+truth, it is all so--I hardly even doctor it."--For she had been
+angered, genuinely and miserably angered, and had found that odious to
+the point of letting feeling override diplomacy. There was subtle
+pleasure in now turning her very lapse of self-control to her own
+advantage. And then, this young man's heart was the finest,
+purest-toned instrument upon which she had ever had the chance to play
+as yet. She was ravished by the quality and range of the music it gave
+forth. Madame de Vallorbes pressed her hands together within the warm
+comfort of her sable muff, averted her face again, lest it should
+betray the eager excitement that gained on her, and continued:--
+
+"Yes, whip and rein and bit are hardly pretty in that connection, are
+they? If you would willingly give your identity the slip at times, dear
+cousin, I have considerably deeper cause to wish to part company with
+mine! You, in any case, are morally and materially free. A whole class
+of particularly irritating and base cares can never approach you. And
+it was in connection with just such cares that I spoke of the
+hatefulness of return journeys."
+
+Helen paused, as one making an effort to maintain her equanimity.
+
+"My letters recall me to Paris," she said, "where detestable scenes and
+most ignoble anxieties await me."
+
+"How soon must you go?"
+
+"That is what I asked myself," she said, in the same quiet, even voice.
+"I have not yet arrived at a decision, and so I asked you to bring me
+out Dickie, this afternoon."--She looked up at him, smiling, lovely and
+with a certain wistful dignity, wholly coercive. "Can you understand
+that the orderly serenity of your splendid house became a little
+oppressive? It offered too glaring a contrast to my own state of mind
+and outlook. I fancied my brain would be clearer, my conclusions more
+just, here out of doors, face to face with this half-savage nature."
+
+"Ah, I know all that," Richard said. Had not the blankness of the fog
+brought him help this very morning?--"I know it, but I wish you did not
+know it too."
+
+"I know many things better not known," Helen replied. Her conscience
+pricked her. She thanked her stars confession had ceased with
+enlargement from the convent-school, and was a thing of the past. "You
+see, I want to decide just how long I dare stay--if you will keep me?"
+
+"We will keep you," Richard said.
+
+"You are very charming to me, Dick," she exclaimed impulsively,
+sincerely, again slightly abashed. "How long can I stay, I wonder,
+without making matters worse in the end, both for my father and for
+myself? I am young, after all, and I suppose I am tough. The cuticle of
+the soul--if souls can have a cuticle--like that of the body, thickens
+under repeated blows. But my father is no longer young. He is terribly
+sensitive where I am concerned. And he is inevitably drawn into the
+whirlpool of my wretched affair sooner or later. On his account I
+should be glad to defer the return journey as long----"
+
+"But--but--I don't understand," Richard broke out, pity and deep
+concern for her, a blind fury against a person, or persons, unknown,
+getting the better of him. "Who on earth has the power to plague you
+and make you miserable, or your father either?"
+
+The young man's face was white, his eyes full of pain, full of a great
+love, burning down on her. As once, long ago, Helen de Vallorbes could
+have danced and clapped her hands in naughty glee. For her hunting had
+prospered above her fondest hopes. She had much ado to stifle the
+laughter which bubbled up in her pretty throat. She was in the humour
+to pelt peacocks royally, had such pastime been possible. As it was,
+she closed her eyes for a little minute and waited, biting the inside
+of her lip. At last, she said slowly, almost solemnly:--
+
+"Don't you know that for certain mistakes, and those usually the most
+generous, there is no redress?"
+
+"What do you mean?" he demanded.
+
+"Mean?--the veriest commonplace in my own case," she answered. "Merely
+an unhappy marriage. There are thousands such."
+
+They had left the shadow of the fir woods now. The carriage crossed the
+white-railed culvert--bridging the little stream that takes its rise
+amid the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bog, and meanders down the
+valley--and entered the oak plantation just inside the park gate.
+Russet leaves in rustling, hurrying companies, fled up and away from
+the rapidly turning wheels and quick horse hoofs. The sunshine was wan
+and chill as the smile on a dead face. Lines of pale, lilac
+cloud--shaped like those flights of cranes which decorate the oriental
+cabinets of the Long Gallery--crossed the western sky above the bare
+balsam poplars, the cluster of ancient half-timbered cottages at the
+entrance to Sandyfield church lane, and the rise of the gray-brown
+fallow beyond, where sheep moved, bleating plaintively, within a
+wattled fold.
+
+The scene, altogether familiar though it was, impressed itself on
+Richard's mind just now, as one of paralysing melancholy. God help us,
+what a stricken, famished world it is! Will you not always find sorrow
+and misfortune seated at the root of things if, disregarding overlaying
+prettiness of summer days, of green leaf and gay blossom, you dare draw
+near, dig deep, look close? And can nothing, no one, escape the
+blighting touch of that canker stationed at the very foundations of
+being? Certainly it would seem not--Richard reasoned--listening to the
+words of the radiant woman beside him, ordained, in right of her talent
+and puissant grace, to be a queen and idol of men. For sadder than the
+thin sunshine, bare trees and complaint of the hungry flock, was that
+assured declaration that loveless and unlovely marriages--of which her
+own was one--exist by the thousand, are, indeed, the veriest
+commonplace!
+
+These reflections held Richard, since he had been thinker and poet--in
+his degree--since childhood; lover only during the brief space of these
+last ten surprising days. Thus the general application claimed his
+attention first. But hard on the heels of this followed the personal
+application. For, as is the way of all true lovers, the universality of
+the law under which it takes its rise mitigates, by most uncommonly
+little, either the joy or sorrow of the particular case. Poignant
+regret that she suffered, strong admiration that she bore suffering so
+adherent with such lightness of demeanour--then, more dangerous than
+these, a sense of added unlooked-for nearness to her, and a resultant
+calling not merely of the spirit of youth in him to that same spirit
+resident in her, but the deeper, more compelling, more sonorous call
+from the knowledge of tragedy in him to that same terrible knowledge
+now first made evident in her.--And here Richard's heart--in spite of
+pity, in spite of tenderness which would have borne a hundred miseries
+to save her five minutes' discomfort--sang _Te Deum_, and that lustily
+enough! For by this revelation of the infelicity of her state, his
+whole relation to, and duty towards her changed and took on a greater
+freedom. To pour forth worship and offers of service at the feet of a
+happy woman is at once an impertinence to her and a shame to yourself.
+But to pour forth such worship, such offers of service, at the feet of
+an unhappy woman--age-old sophistry, so often ruling the speech and
+actions of men to their fatal undoing!--this is praiseworthy and
+legitimate, a matter not of privilege merely, but of obligation to
+whoso would claim to be truly chivalrous.
+
+The perception of his larger liberty, and the consequences following
+thereon, kept Richard silent till Sandyfield rectory, the
+squat-towered, Georgian church and the black-headed, yew trees in the
+close-packed churchyard adjoining, the neighbouring farm and its goodly
+show of golden-gray wheat-ricks were left behind, and the carriage
+entered on the flat, furze-dotted expanse of Sandyfield common. Flocks
+of geese, arising from damp repose upon the ragged autumn turf, hissed
+forth futile declarations of war. A gipsy caravan painted in staring
+colours, and hung all over with heath-brooms and basket-chairs, caused
+the horses to swerve. Parties of home-going school-children backed on
+to the loose gravel at the roadside, bobbing curtsies or pulling
+forelocks, staring at the young man and his companion, curious and half
+afraid. For in the youthful, bucolic mind a mystery surrounded Richard
+Calmady and his goings and comings, causing him to rank with crowned
+heads, ghosts, the Book of Daniel, funerals, the Northern Lights, and
+kindred matters of dread fascination. So wondering eyes pursued him
+down the road.
+
+And wondering eyes, as the minutes passed, glanced up at him from
+beneath the sweeping plumes and becoming shadow of the cavalier's hat.
+For his prolonged silence rendered Madame de Vallorbes anxious. Had she
+spoken unadvisedly with her tongue? Had her words sounded crude and of
+questionable delicacy? Given his antecedents and upbringing, Richard
+was bound to hold the marriage tie in rather superstitious reverence,
+and was likely to entertain slightly superannuated views regarding the
+obligation of reticence in the discussion of family matters. She feared
+she had reckoned insufficiently with all this in her eagerness,
+forgetting subtle diplomacies. Her approach had lacked tact and
+_finesse_. In dealing with an adversary of coarser fibre her attack
+would have succeeded to admiration. But this man was refined and
+sensitive to a fault, easily disgusted, narrowly critical in questions
+of taste.
+
+Therefore she glanced up at him again, trying to divine his thought,
+her own mind in a tumult of opposing purposes and desires. And just as
+the contemplation of her beauty had so deeply stirred him earlier this
+same afternoon, so did the contemplation of his beauty now stir her. It
+satisfied her artistic sense. Save that the nose was straighter and
+shorter, the young man reminded her notably of a certain antique,
+terracotta head of the young Alexander which she had once seen in a
+museum at Munich, and which had left an ineffaceable impression upon
+her memory. But, the face of the young Alexander beside her was of
+nobler moral quality than that other--undebauched by feasts and
+licentious pleasures as yet, masculine yet temperate, the sanctuary of
+generous ambitions--merciless it might be, she fancied, but never base,
+never weak. Thus was her artistic sense satisfied, morally as well as
+physically. Her social sense was satisfied also. For the young man's
+high-breeding could not be called in question. He held himself
+remarkably well. She approved the cut of his clothes moreover, his sure
+and easy handling of the spirited horses.
+
+And then her eyes, following down the lines of the fur rug, received
+renewed assurance of the fact of his deformity--hidden as far as might
+be, with decent pride, yet there, permanent and unalterable. This
+worked upon her strongly. For, to her peculiar temperament, the
+indissoluble union in one body of elements so noble and so monstrous,
+of youthful vigour and abject helplessness, the grotesque in short,
+supplied the last word of sensuous and dramatic attraction. As last
+evening, in the Long Gallery, so now, she hugged herself, at once
+frightened and fascinated, wrought upon by excitement as in the
+presence of something akin to the supernatural, and altogether beyond
+the confines of ordinary experience.
+
+And to think that she had come so near holding this inimitable creature
+in her hand, and by overhaste, or clumsiness of statement should lose
+it! Madame de Vallorbes was wild with irritation, racked her brain for
+means to recover her--as she feared--forfeited position. It would be
+maddening did her mighty hunting prove but a barren pastime in the end.
+And thereupon the little scar on her temple, deftly concealed under the
+soft, bright hair, began to smart and throb. Ah! well, the hunting
+should not prove quite barren anyhow, of that she was determined, for,
+failing her late gay purpose, that small matter of long-deferred
+revenge still remained in reserve. If she could not gratify one
+passion, she would gratify quite another. For in this fair lady's mind
+it was--perhaps unfortunately--but one step from the Eden bowers of
+love to the waste places of vindictive hate.--"Yet I would rather be
+good to him, far rather," she said to herself, with a movement of quite
+pathetic sincerity.
+
+But here, just at the entrance to the village street, an altogether
+unconscious _deus ex machina_--destined at once to relieve Helen of
+further anxiety, and commit poor Dickie to a course of action affecting
+the whole of his subsequent career--presented itself in the shape of a
+white-tented miller's waggon, which, with somnolent jingle of harness
+bells and most admired deliberation, moved down the centre of the road.
+A yellow-washed garden-wall on one side, the brook on the other, there
+was not room for the phaeton to pass.
+
+"Whistle," Richard commanded over his shoulder. And the wooden image
+thereby galvanised into immediate activity whistled shrilly, but
+without result as far as the waggon was concerned.
+
+"The fellow's asleep. Go and tell him to pull out of the way."
+
+Then, while the groom ran neatly forward in twinkling, white breeches
+and flesh-coloured tops, Richard, bending towards her, as far as that
+controling strap about his waist permitted, shifted the reins into his
+right hand and laid his left upon Madame de Vallorbes' sable muff.
+
+"Look here, Helen," he said, rather hoarsely, "I am indescribably
+shocked at what you have just told me. I supposed it was all so
+different with you. I'd no suspicion of this. And--and--if I may say
+so, you've taught me a lesson which has gone home--steady
+there--steady, good lass"--for the horses danced and snorted--"I don't
+think I shall ever grumble much in future about troubles of my own,
+having seen how splendidly you bear yours. Only I can't agree with you
+no remedy is possible for generous mistakes. The world isn't quite so
+badly made as all that. There is a remedy for every mistake except--a
+few physical ones, which we euphuistically describe as visitations of
+God.--Steady, steady there--wait a bit.--And I--I tell you I can't sit
+down under this unhappiness of yours and just put up with it. Don't
+think me a meddling fool, please. Something's got to be done. I know I
+probably appear to you the last person in the world to be of use. And
+yet I'm not sure about that. I have time--too much of it--and I'm not
+quite an ass. And you--you must know, I think, there's nothing in
+heaven or earth I would not do for you that I could----"
+
+The miller hauled his slow-moving team aside, with beery-thick
+objurgations and apologies. The groom swung himself up at the back of
+the carriage again. The impatient horses, getting their heads, swung
+away down Sandyfield Street--scattering a litter of merry, little,
+black pigs and remonstrant fowls to right and left--past modest village
+shop, and yellow-washed tavern, and red, lichen-stained cottage,
+beneath the row of tall Lombardy poplars that raised their brown-gray
+spires to the blue-gray of the autumn sky. Richard's left hand held the
+reins again.
+
+"Half confidences are no good," he said. "So, as you've trusted me thus
+far, Helen, don't you think you will trust somewhat further? Be
+explicit. Tell me the rest?"
+
+And hearing him, seeing him just then, Madame de Vallorbes' heart
+melted within her, and, to her own prodigious surprise, she had much
+ado not to weep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+WHICH TOUCHES INCIDENTALLY ON MATTERS OF FINANCE
+
+
+As Richard had predicted the fog reappeared towards sun sunset. At
+first, as a frail mist, through which the landscape looked colourless
+and blurred. Later it rose, growing in density, until all objects
+beyond a radius of some twenty paces were engulfed in its nothingness
+and lost. Later still--while Helen de Vallorbes paid her visit at
+Newlands--it grew denser yet, heavy, torpid, close yet cold, penetrated
+by earthy odours as the atmosphere of a vault, oppressive to the
+senses, baffling to sight and hearing alike. From out it, half-leafless
+branches, like gaunt arms in tattered draperies, seemed to claw and
+beckon at the passing carriage and its occupants. The silver mountings
+of the harness showed in points and splashes of hard, shining white as
+against the shifting, universal dead-whiteness of it, while the breath
+from the horses' nostrils rose into it as defiant jets of steam, that
+struggled momentarily with the opaque, all-enveloping vapour, only to
+be absorbed and obliterated as light by darkness, or life by death.
+
+The aspect presented by nature was sinister, had Richard Calmady been
+sufficiently at leisure to observe it in detail. But, as he slowly
+walked the horses up and down the quarter of a mile of woodland drive,
+leading from the thatched lodge on the right of the Westchurch road to
+the house, he was not at leisure. He had received enlightenment on many
+subjects. He had acquired startling impressions, and he needed to place
+these, to bring them into line with the general habit of his thought.
+The majority of educated persons--so-called--think in words, words
+often arbitrary and inaccurate enough, prolific mothers of mental
+confusion. The minority, and those of by no means contemptible
+intellectual calibre,--since the symbol must count for more than the
+mere label,--think in images and pictures. Dickie belonged to the
+minority. And it must be conceded that his mind now projected against
+that shifting, impalpable background of fog, a series of pictures which
+in their cynical pathos, their suggestions at once voluptuous and
+degraded, were hardly unworthy of the great master, William Hogarth,
+himself.
+
+For Helen, in the reaction and relief caused by finding her relation to
+Richard unimpaired, caused too by that joyous devilry resident in her
+and constantly demanding an object on which to wreak its derision, had
+by no means spared her lord and master, Angelo Luigi Francesco, Vicomte
+de Vallorbes. And this only son of a thrifty, hard-bitten, Savoyard
+banker-noble and a Neopolitan princess of easy morals and ancient
+lineage, this Parisian _viveur_, his intrigues, his jealousies, his
+practical ungodliness and underlying superstition, his outbursts of
+temper, his shrewd economy in respect of others, and extensive personal
+extravagance, offered fit theme, with aid of little romancing, for such
+a discourse as it just now suited his very brilliant, young wife to
+pronounce.
+
+The said discourse opened in a low key, broken by pauses, by tactful
+self-accusations, by questionings as to whether it were not more
+merciful, more loyal, to leave this or that untold. But as she
+proceeded, not only did Helen suffer the seductions of the fine art of
+lying, but she really began to have some ado to keep her exuberant
+sense of fun within due limits. For it proved so excessively
+exhilarating to deal thus with Angelo Luigi Francesco! She had old
+scores to settle. And had she not this very day received an odiously
+disquieting letter from him, in which he not only made renewed
+complaint of her poor, little miseries of debts and flirtations, but
+once more threatened retaliation by a cutting-off of supplies? In
+common justice did he not deserve villification? Therefore, partly out
+of revenge, partly in self-justification, she proceeded with increasing
+enthusiasm to show that to know M. de Vallorbes was a lamentably
+liberal education in all civilised iniquities. With a hand, sure as it
+was light, she dissected out the unhappy gentleman, and offered up his
+mangled and bleeding reputation as tribute to her own so-perpetually
+outraged moral sense and feminine delicacy, not to mention her
+so-repeatedly and vilely wounded heart. And there really was truth--as
+at each fresh flight of her imagination she did not fail to remind
+herself--in all that which she said. Truth?--yes, just that misleading
+sufficiency of it in which a lie thrives. For, as every artist "in this
+kind" is aware, precisely as you would have the overgrowth of your
+improvisation richly phenomenal and preposterous, must you be careful
+to set the root of it in the honest soil of fact. To omit this
+precaution is to court eventual detection and consequent confusion of
+face.
+
+As it was, Helen entered the house at Newlands, a house singularly
+unused to psychological aberrations, in buoyant spirits, mischief
+sitting in her discreetly downcast eyes, laughter perplexing her lips.
+She had placed her cargo of provocation, of resentment, to such
+excellent advantage! She was, moreover, slightly intoxicated by her own
+eloquence. She was at peace with herself and all mankind, with de
+Vallorbes even since his sins had afforded her so rare an opportunity.
+And this occasioned her to congratulate herself on her own conspicuous
+magnanimity. It is so exceedingly pleasing not only to know yourself
+clever, but to believe yourself good! She would be charming to these
+dear kind, rather dull people. Not that Honoria was dull, but she had
+inconveniently austere notions of honour and loyalty at moments. And
+then the solitary drive home with Richard Calmady lay ahead, full of
+possible drama, full of, well, heaven knew what! Oh! how entrancing a
+pastime is life!
+
+But to Richard, walking the snorting and impatient horses slowly up and
+down the woodland drive in the blear and sightless fog, life appeared
+quite other than an entrancing pastime. The pictures projected by his
+thought, and forming the medium of it, caused him black indignation and
+revolt, desolated him, too, with a paralysing disgust of his own
+disabilities. For poor Dick had declined somewhat in the last few
+hours, it must be owned, from the celestial altitudes he had reached
+before luncheon. Some part of his cousin's discourse had been
+dangerously intimate in character, suggesting situations quite other
+than platonic. To him there appeared a noble innocence in her treatment
+of matters not usually spoken of. He had listened with a certain
+reverent amazement. Only out of purity of mind could such speech come.
+And yet an undeniable effect remained, and it was not altogether
+elevating. Richard was no longer the young Sir Galahad of the noontide
+of this eventful day. He was just simply a man--in a sensible degree
+the animal man--loving a woman, hating that other man to whom she was
+legally bound. Hating that other man, not only because he was unworthy
+and failed to make her happy, but because he stood in his--Richard's--way.
+Hating the man all the more fiercely because, whatever the uncomeliness
+of his moral constitution, he was physically very far from uncomely.
+And so, along with nobler incitements to hatred, went the fiend envy,
+which just now plucked at poor Dickie's vitals as the vulture at those
+of the chained Titan of old. Whereupon he fell into a meditation
+somewhat morbid. For, contemplating in pictured thought that other
+man's bodily perfection, contemplating his property and victim,--the
+fair modern Helen, who by her courage and her trials exercised so
+potent a spell over his imagination,--Richard loathed his own maimed
+body, maimed chances and opportunities, as he had never loathed them
+before. How often since his childhood had some casual circumstance or
+trivial accident brought the fact of his misfortune home to him,
+causing him--as he at the moment supposed--to reckon, once and for all,
+with the sum total of it! But as years passed and experience widened,
+below each depth of this adhering misery another deep disclosed itself.
+Would he never reach bottom? Would this inalienable disgrace continue
+to show itself more restricting and impeding to his action, more
+repulsive and contemptible to his fellow-men, through all the
+succeeding stages and vicissitudes of his career, right to the very
+close?
+
+To her hosts Madame de Vallorbes appeared in her gayest and most
+engaging humour. It was only a flying visit, she mustn't stay, Richard
+was waiting for her. Only she felt she must just have two words with
+Honoria. And say good-bye? Yes, ten thousand sorrows, it was good-bye.
+She was recalled to Paris, home, and duty. She made an expressive
+little grimace at Miss St. Quentin.
+
+"Your husband will be"--began Mrs. Cathcart, in her large, gently
+authoritative manner.
+
+"Enchanted to see me, of course, dear Cousin Selina, or he would not
+have required my return thus urgently. We may take that for said.
+Meanwhile what strange sprigs of nobility flourish in the local soil
+here."
+
+And she proceeded to give an account of the Fallowfeild party at
+luncheon more witty, perhaps, than veracious. Helen could be extremely
+entertaining on occasion. She gave reins to her tongue, and it galloped
+away with her in most surprising fashion.
+
+"My dear, my dear," interrupted her hostess, "you are a little unkind
+surely! My dear, you are a little flippant!"
+
+But Madame de Vallorbes enveloped her in the most assuaging embrace.
+
+"Let me laugh while I can, dearest Cousin Selina," she pleaded. "I have
+had a delightful little holiday. Every one has been charming to me.
+You, of course--but then you always are that. Your presence breathes
+consolation. But Aunt Katherine has been charming too, and that, quite
+between ourselves, was a little more than I anticipated. Now the
+holiday draws to a close and pay-day looms large ahead. You know
+nothing about such pay-days, thank heaven, dear Cousin Selina. They are
+far from joyous inventions; and so"--the young lady spread abroad her
+hands, palms upward, and shrugged her shoulders under their weight of
+costly furs--"and so I laugh, don't you understand, I laugh!"
+
+Miss St. Quentin's delicate, square-cut face wore an air of solicitude
+as she followed her friend out of the room. There was a trace of
+indolence in her slow, reflective speech, as in her long, swinging
+stride--the indolence bred of unconscious strength rather than of
+weakness, the leisureliness which goes with staying power both in the
+moral and the physical domain.
+
+"See here, Nellie," she said, "forgive brutal frankness, but which is
+the real thing to-day--they're each delightful in their own way--the
+tears or the laughter?"
+
+"Both! oh, well-beloved seeker after truth," Madame de Vallorbes
+answered. "There lies the value of the situation."
+
+"Fresh worries?"
+
+"No, no, the old, the accustomed, the well-accredited, the normal, the
+stock ones--a husband and a financial crisis."
+
+As she spoke Madame de Vallorbes fastened the buttons of her long
+driving-coat. Miss St. Quentin knelt down and busied herself with the
+lowest of these. Her tall, slender figure was doubled together. She
+kept her head bent.
+
+"I happen to have a pretty tidy balance just now," she remarked
+parenthetically, and as though with a certain diffidence. "So you know,
+if you are a bit hard up--why--it's all perfectly simple, Nellie, don't
+you know."
+
+For a perceptible space of time Madame de Vallorbes did not answer. A
+grating of wheels on the gravel arrested her attention. She looked down
+the long vista of ruddily lighted hall, with its glowing fire and
+cheerful lamps to the open door, where, against the blear whiteness of
+the fog, the mail-phaeton and its occupant showed vague, in outline and
+in proportions almost gigantic against the thick, shifting atmosphere.
+Miss St. Quentin raised her head, surprised at her companion's silence.
+Helen de Vallorbes bent down, took the upturned face in both hands and
+kissed the soft cheeks with effusion.
+
+"You are adorable," she said. "But you are too generous. You shall lend
+me nothing more. I believe I see my way. I can scrape through this
+crisis."
+
+Miss St. Quentin rose to her feet.
+
+"All right," she said, smiling upon her friend from her superior height
+with a delightful air of affection and apology. "I only wanted you just
+to know, in case--don't you see. And--and--for the rest, how goes it
+Helen? Are you turning all their poor heads at Brockhurst? You're
+rather an upsetting being to let loose in an ordinary, respectable,
+English country-house. A sort of _Mousquetaire au couvent_ the other
+way about, don't you know. Are you making things fly generally?"
+
+"I am making nothing fly," the other lady rejoined gaily. "I am as
+inoffensive as a stained-glass saint in a chapel window. I am
+absolutely angelic."
+
+"That's worst of all," Honoria exclaimed, still smiling. "When you're
+angelic you are most particularly deadly. For the preservation of local
+innocents, somebody ought to go and hoist danger signals."
+
+Miss St. Quentin, after just a moment's hesitation, followed her friend
+through the warm, bright hall to the door. Then Helen de Vallorbes
+turned to her.
+
+"_Au revoir_, dearest Honoria," she said, "and the sooner the better.
+Leave your shopgirls and distressed needlewomen, and all your other
+good works for a still better one--namely for me. Come and reclaim, and
+comfort, and support me for a while in Paris."
+
+Again she kissed the soft cheek.
+
+"I am as good as gold. I am just now actually mawkish with virtue," she
+murmured, between the kisses.
+
+Richard witnessed this exceedingly pretty leave-taking not without a
+movement of impatience. The fog was thickening once more. It grew late.
+He wished his cousin would get through with these amenities. Then,
+moreover, he did not covet intercourse with Miss St. Quentin. He pulled
+the fur rug aside with his left hand, holding reins and whip in his
+right.
+
+"I say, are you nearly ready?" he asked. "I don't want to bother you;
+but really it's about time we were moving."
+
+"I come, I come," Madame de Vallorbes cried, in answer. She put one
+neatly-shod foot on the axle, and stepped up--Richard holding out his
+hand to steady her. A sense, at once pleasurable and defiant, of
+something akin to ownership, came over him as he did so. Just then his
+attention was claimed by a voice addressing him from the further side
+of the carriage. Honoria St. Quentin stood on the gravel close beside
+him, bare-headed, in the clinging damp and chill of the fog.
+
+"Give my love to Lady Calmady," she said. "I hope I shall see her again
+some day. But, even if I never have the luck to do that, in a way it'll
+make no real difference. I've written her name in my private calendar,
+and shall always remember it."--She paused a moment. "We got rather
+near each other somehow, I think. We didn't dawdle or beat about the
+bush, but went straight along, passed the initial stages of
+acquaintance in a few hours, and reached that point of friendship where
+forgetting becomes impossible.
+
+"My mother never forgets," Richard asserted, and there was, perhaps, a
+slight edge to his tone. Looking down into the girl's pale,
+finely-moulded face, meeting the glance of those steady, strangely
+clear and observant eyes, he received an impression of something
+uncompromisingly sincere and in a measure protective. This, for cause
+unknown, he resented. Notwithstanding her high breeding. Miss St.
+Quentin's attitude appeared to him a trifle intrusive just then.
+
+"I am very sure of that--that your mother never forgets, I mean. One
+knows, at once, one can trust her down to the ground and on to the end
+of the ages."--Again she paused, as though rallying herself against a
+disinclination for further speech. "All captivating women aren't made
+on that pattern, unfortunately, you know, Sir Richard. A good many of
+them it's wisest not to trust anything like down to the ground, or
+longer than--well--the day before yesterday."
+
+And without waiting for any reply to this cryptic utterance, she
+stepped swiftly round behind the carriage again, waved her hand from
+the door-step and then swung away, with lazy, long-limbed grace, past
+the waiting men-servants and through to the ruddy brightness of the
+hall.
+
+Madame de Vallorbes settled herself back rather languidly in her place.
+She was pricked by a sharp point of curiosity, regarding the tenor of
+Miss St. Quentin's mysterious colloquy with Richard Calmady. She had
+been able to catch but a word here and there, and these had been
+provokingly suggestive. Had the well-beloved Honoria, in a moment of
+overscrupulous conscientiousness permitted herself to hoist danger
+signals? She wanted to know, for it was her business to haul such down
+again with all possible despatch. She intended the barometer to
+register set fair whatever the weather actually impending. Yet to
+institute direct inquiries might be to invite suspicion. Helen,
+therefore, declined upon diplomacy, upon the inverted sweetnesses
+calculated nicely to mask an intention quite other than sweet. She
+really held her friend in very warm affection. But Madame de Vallorbes
+never confused secondary and primary issues. When you have a really big
+deal on hand--and of the bigness of her present deal the last quarter
+of an hour had brought her notably increased assurance--even the
+dearest friend must stand clear and get very decidedly out of the way.
+So, while the muffled thud of the horses' hoofs echoed up from the hard
+gravel of the carriage drive through the thick atmosphere, and the bare
+limbs of the trees clawed, as with lean arms clothed in tattered
+draperies, at the passing carriage and its occupants, she contented
+herself by observing:--
+
+"I am grateful to you for driving me over, Richard. Honoria is very
+perfect in her own way. It always does me good to see her. She's quite
+unlike anybody else, isn't she?"
+
+But Richard's eyes were fixed upon the blank wall of fog just ahead,
+which, though always stable, always receded before the advancing
+carriage. The effect of it was unpleasant somehow, holding, as it did
+to his mind, suggestions of other things still more baffling and
+impending, from which--though you might keep them at arm's
+length--there was no permanent or actual escape. The question of Miss
+St. Quentin's characteristics did not consequently greatly interest
+him. He had arrived at conclusions. There was a matter of vital
+importance on which he desired to speak to his cousin. But how to do
+that? Richard was young and excellently modest. His whole purpose was
+rather fiercely focused on speech. But he was diffident, fearing to
+approach the subject which he had so much at heart clumsily and in a
+tactless, tasteless manner.
+
+"Miss St. Quentin? Oh yes!" he replied, rather absently. "I really know
+next to nothing about her. And she seems merely to regard me as a
+vehicle of communication between herself and my mother. She sent her
+messages just now--I hope to goodness I shan't forget to deliver them!
+She and my mother appear to have fallen pretty considerably in love
+with one another."
+
+"Probably," Madame de Vallorbes said softly. An agreeable glow of
+relief passed over her. She looked up at Richard with a delightful
+effect of pensiveness from beneath the sweeping brim of her cavalier
+hat.--"I can well believe Aunt Katherine would be attracted by her,"
+she continued. "Honoria is quite a woman's woman. Men do not care very
+much about her as a rule. There is a good deal of latent vanity
+resident in the members of your sex, you know, Richard; and men are
+usually conscious that Honoria does not care so very much about them.
+They are quite right, she does not. I really believe when poor,
+dreadful, old Lady Tobermory left her all that money Honoria's first
+thought was that now she might embrace celibacy with a good conscience.
+The St. Quentins are not precisely millionaires, you know. Her wealth
+left her free to espouse the cause of womanhood at large. She is a
+little bit Quixotic, dear thing, and given to tilting at windmills. She
+wants to secure to working women a fair business basis--that is the
+technical expression, I believe. And so she starts clubs, and forms
+circles. She says women must be encouraged to combine and to agitate.
+Whether they are capable of combining I do not pretend to say. These
+high matters transcend my small wit. But, as I have often pointed out
+to her, agitation is the natural attitude of every woman. It would seem
+superfluous to encourage or inculcate that, for surely wherever two or
+three petticoats are gathered together, there, as far as my experience
+goes, is agitation of necessity in the midst of them."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes leaned back with a little sigh and air of exquisite
+resignation.
+
+"All the same, the majority of women are unhappy enough, heaven knows!
+If Honoria, or any other sweet, feminine Quixote, can find means to
+lighten the burden of our lives, she has my very sincere thanks, well
+understood."
+
+Richard drew his whip across the backs of the trotting horses, making
+them plunge forward against that blank, impalpable wall of
+all-encircling, ever-receding, ever-present fog. The carriage had just
+crossed the long, white-railed bridge, spanning the little river and
+space of marsh on either side, and now entered Sandyfield Street. The
+tops of the tall Lombardy poplars were lost in gloom. Now and again the
+redness of a lighted cottage window, blurred and contorted in shape,
+showed through the gray pall. Slow-moving, country figures, passing
+vehicles, a herd of some eight or ten cows--preceded by a diabolic
+looking billy-goat, and followed by a lad astride the hind-quarters of
+a bare-backed donkey--grew out of pallid nothingness as the carriage
+came abreast of them, and receded with mysterious rapidity into
+nothingness again. The effect was curiously fantastic and unreal. And
+as the minutes passed that effect of unreality gained upon Richard's
+imagination, until now--as last evening in the stately solitude of the
+Long Gallery--he became increasingly aware of the personality of his
+companion, increasingly penetrated by the feeling of being alone with
+that personality, as though the world, so strangely blotted out by
+these dim, obliterating vapours, were indeed vacant of all human
+interest, human purpose, human history, save that incarnate in this
+fair woman and his own relation to her. She alone existed, concrete,
+exquisite, sentient, amid the vague, shifting immensities of fog. She
+alone mattered. Her near neighbourhood worked upon him strongly,
+causing an excitement in him which at once hindered and demanded
+speech.
+
+Night began to close in in good earnest. Passing the broad, yellowish
+glare streaming out from the rounded tap-room window of the Calmady
+Arms, and passing from the end of the village street on to the open
+common, the light had become so uncertain that Richard could no longer
+see his companion's face clearly. This was almost a relief to him, so
+that, mastering at once his diffidence and his excitement, he spoke.
+
+"Look here, Helen," he said, "I have been thinking over all that you
+told me. I don't want to dwell on subjects that must be very painful to
+you, but I can't help thinking about them. It's not that I won't leave
+them alone, but that they won't leave me. I don't want to presume upon
+your confidence, or take too much upon myself. Only, don't you see, now
+that I do know it's impossible to sit down under it all and let things
+go on just the same.--You're not angry with me?"
+
+The young man spoke very carefully and calmly, yet the tones of his
+voice were heavily charged with feeling.
+
+Madame de Vallorbes clasped her hands rather tightly within her sable
+muff. Unconsciously she began to sway a little, just a very little, as
+a person will sway in time to strains of stirring music. An excitement,
+not mental merely but physical, invaded her. For she recognised that
+she stood on the threshold of developments in this very notable drama.
+Still she answered quietly, with a touch even of weariness.
+
+"Ah! dear Richard, it is so friendly and charming of you to take my
+infelicities thus to heart! But to what end, to what end, I ask you?
+The conditions are fixed. Escape from them is impossible. I have made
+my bed--made it most abominably uncomfortably, I admit, but that is not
+to the point--and I must lie on it. There is no redress. There is
+nothing to be done."
+
+"Yes, there is this," he replied. "I know it is wretchedly inadequate,
+it doesn't touch the root of the matter. Oh! it's miserably
+inadequate--I should think I did know that! Only it might smooth the
+surface a bit, perhaps, and put a stop to one source of annoyance.
+Forgive me if I say what seems coarse or clumsy--but would not your
+position be easier if, in regard to--to money, you were quite
+independent of that--of your husband, I mean--M. de Vallorbes?"
+
+For a moment the young lady remained very still, and stared very hard
+at the fog. The most surprising visions arose before her. She had a
+difficulty in repressing an exclamation.
+
+"Ah! there now, I have blundered. I've hurt you. I've made you angry,"
+Dickie cried impulsively.
+
+"No, no, dear Richard," she answered, with admirable gentleness, "I am
+not angry. Only what is the use of romancing?"
+
+"I am not romancing. It is the simplest thing out, if you will but have
+it so."
+
+He hesitated a little. The horses were pulling, the fog was in his
+throat thick and choking--or was it, perhaps, something more
+unsubstantial and intangible even than fog? The spacious barns and
+rickyards of the Church Farm were just visible on the right. In less
+than five minutes more, at their present pace, the horses would reach
+the first park gate. The young man felt he must give himself time. He
+quieted the horses down into a walk.
+
+"If I were your brother, Helen, I should save you all these sordid
+money worries as a matter of course. You have no brother--so, don't you
+see, I come next. It's a perfectly obvious arrangement. Just let me be
+your banker," he said.
+
+Madame de Vallorbes shut her pretty teeth together. She could have
+danced, she could have sung aloud for very gaiety of heart. She had not
+anticipated this turn to the situation; but it was a delicious one. It
+had great practical merits. Her brain worked rapidly. Immediately those
+practical merits ranged themselves before her in detail. But she would
+play with it a little--both diplomacy and good taste, in which last she
+was by no means deficient, required that.
+
+"Ah! you forget, dear Richard," she said, "in your friendly zeal you
+forget that, in our rank of life, there is one thing a woman cannot
+accept from a man. To take money is to lay yourself open to slanderous
+tongues, is to court scandal. Sooner or later it is known, the fact
+leaks out. And however innocent the intention, however noble and honest
+the giving, however grateful and honest the receiving, the world puts
+but one construction upon such a transaction."
+
+"The world's beastly evil-minded then," Richard said.
+
+"So it is. But that is no news, Dickie dear," Madame de Vallorbes
+answered. "Nor is it exactly to the point."
+
+Inwardly she trembled a little. What if she had headed him off too
+cleverly, and he should regard her argument as convincing, her refusal
+as final? Her fears were by no means lessened by the young man's
+protracted silence.
+
+"No, I don't agree," he said at last. "I suppose there are always risks
+to be run in securing anything at all worth securing, and it seems to
+me, if you look at it all round, the risks in this case are very
+slight. Only you--and M. de Vallorbes need know. I suppose he must. But
+then, if you will pardon my saying so, after what you have told me I
+can't imagine he is the sort of person who is likely to object very
+much to an arrangement by which he would benefit, at least indirectly.
+As for the world,"--Richard ceased to contemplate his horses. He tried
+to speak lightly, while his eyes sought that dimly seen face at his
+elbow. "Oh, well, hang the world, Helen! It's easy enough for me to say
+so, I dare say, being but so slightly acquainted with it and the ways
+of it. But the world can't be so wholly hide-bound and idiotic that it
+denies the existence of exceptional cases. And this case, in some of
+its bearings at all events, is wholly exceptional, I am--happy to
+think."
+
+"You are a very convincing special pleader, Richard," Madame de
+Vallorbes said softly.
+
+"Then you accept?" he rejoined exultantly. "You accept?"
+
+The young lady could not quite control herself.
+
+"Ah! if you only knew the prodigious relief it would be," she
+exclaimed, with an outbreak of impatience. "It would make an
+incalculable difference. And yet I do not see my way. I am in a cleft
+stick. I dare not say Yes. And to say No----" Her sincerity was
+unimpeachable at that moment. Her eyes actually filled with tears.
+"Pah! I am ashamed of myself," she cried, "but to refuse is
+distracting."
+
+The gate of the outer park had been reached. The groom swung himself
+down and ran forward, but confused by the growing darkness and the
+thick atmosphere he fumbled for a time before finding the heavy latch.
+The horses became somewhat restive, snorting and fidgeting.
+
+"Steady there, steady, good lass," Richard said soothingly. Then he
+turned again to his companion. "Believe me it's the very easiest thing
+out to accept, if you'll only look at it all from the right point of
+view, Helen."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes withdrew her right hand from her muff and laid it,
+almost timidly, upon the young man's arm.
+
+"Do you know, you are wonderfully dear to me, Dick?" she said, and her
+voice shook slightly. She was genuinely touched and moved. "No one has
+ever been quite so dear to me before. It is a new experience. It takes
+my breath away a little. It makes me regret some things I have done.
+But it is a mistake to go back on what is past, don't you think so?
+Therefore we will go forward. Tell me, expound. What is this so
+agreeably reconciling point of view?"
+
+But along with the touch of her hand, a great wave of emotion swept
+over poor Richard, making his grasp on the reins very unsteady. The
+sensations he had suffered last evening in the Long Gallery again
+assailed him. The flesh had its word to say. Speech became difficult.
+Meanwhile his agitation communicated itself strangely to the horses.
+They sprang forward against that all-encircling, ever-present, yet
+ever-receding, blank wall of fog, to which the overarching trees lent
+an added gloom and mystery, as though some incarnate terror pursued
+them. The gate clanged-to behind the carriage. The groom scrambled
+breathlessly into his place. Sir Richard's driving was rather reckless,
+he ventured to think, on such a nasty, dark night, and with a lady
+along of him too. He was not sorry when the pace slowed down to a walk.
+That was a long sight safer, to his thinking.
+
+"The right point of view is this," Richard said at last; "that in
+accepting you would be doing that which, in some ways, would make just
+all the difference to my life."
+
+He held himself very upright on the sloping driving-seat, rather
+cruelly conscious of the broad strap about his waist, and the high,
+unsightly driving-iron against which, concealed by the heavy, fur rug,
+his feet pushed as he steadied himself. He paused, gazing away into the
+silent desolation of the now invisible woods, and when he spoke again
+his voice had deepened in tone.
+
+"It must be patent to you--it is rather detestably patent to every one,
+I suppose, if it comes to that--that I am condemned to be of precious
+little use to myself or any one else. I share the fate of the immortal
+Sancho Panza in his island of Barataria. A very fine feast is spread
+before me, while I find myself authoritatively forbidden to eat first
+of this dish and then of that, until I end by being every bit as hungry
+as though the table was bare. It becomes rather a nuisance at times,
+you know, and taxes one's temper and one's philosophy. It seems a
+little rough to possess all that so many men of my age would give just
+anything to have, and yet be unable to get anything but unsatisfied
+hunger, and--in plain English--humiliation, out of it."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes sat very still. Her charming face had grown keen.
+She listened, drawing in her breath with a little sobbing sound--but
+that was only the result of accentuated dramatic satisfaction.
+
+"You see I have no special object or ambition. I can't have one. I just
+pass the time. I don't see any prospect of my ever being able to do
+more than that. There's my mother, of course. I need not tell you she
+and I love one another. And there are the horses. But I don't care to
+bet, and I never attend a race-meeting. I--I do not choose to make an
+exhibition of myself."
+
+Again Helen drew her hand out of her muff, but this time quickly,
+impulsively, and laid it on Richard's left hand which held the reins.
+The young man's breath caught in his throat, he leaned sideways towards
+her, her shoulder touching his elbow, the trailing plumes of her
+hat--now limp from the clinging moisture of the fog--for a moment
+brushing his cheek.
+
+"Helen," he said rapidly, "don't you understand it's in your power to
+alter all this? By accepting you would do infinitely more for me than I
+could ever dream of doing for you. You'd give me something to think of
+and plan about. If you'll only have whatever wretched money you need
+now, and have more whenever you want it--if you'll let me feel, however
+rarely we meet, that you depend on me and trust me and let me make
+things a trifle easier and smoother for you, you will be doing such an
+act of charity as few women have ever done. Don't refuse, for pity's
+sake don't! I don't want to whine, but things were not precisely gay
+before your coming, you know. Need it be added they promise to be less
+so than ever after you are gone? So listen to reason. Do as I ask you.
+Let me be of use in the only way I can."
+
+"Do you consider what you propose?" Madame de Vallorbes asked, slowly.
+"It is a good deal. It is dangerous. With most men such a compact would
+be wholly inadmissible."
+
+Then poor Dickie lost himself. The strain of the last week the young,
+headlong passion aroused in him, the misery of his deformity, the
+accumulated bitterness and rebellion of years arose and overflowed as a
+great flood. Pride went down before it, and reticence, and decencies of
+self-respect. Richard turned and rent himself, without mercy and, for
+the moment, without shame. He pelted himself with cruel words, with
+scorn and self-contempt, while he laughed, and the sound of that
+laughter wandered away weirdly through the chill density of the fog,
+under the tall, shadowy firs of the great avenue, over the
+sombre-heather, out into the veiled, crowded darkness of the wide
+woods.
+
+"But I am not as other men are," he answered. "I am a creature by
+myself, a unique development as much outside the normal social, as I am
+outside the normal physical law. I--alone by myself--think of
+it!--abnormal, extraordinary! You are safe enough with me, Helen. Safe
+to indulge and humour me as you might a monkey or a parrot. All the
+world will understand that! Only my mother, and a few old friends and
+old servants take me seriously. To every one else I am an
+embarrassment, a more or less distressing curiosity."--He met little
+Lady Constance Quale's ruminant stare again in imagination, heard Lord
+Fallowfeild's blundering speech.--"Remember our luncheon to-day. It was
+flattering, at moments, wasn't it? And so if I do queer things, things
+off the conventional lines, who will be surprised? No one, I tell you,
+not even the most strait-laced or censorious. Allow me at least the
+privileges of my disabilities. I am a dwarf--a cripple. I shall never
+be otherwise. Had I lived a century or two ago I should have made sport
+for you, and such as you, as some rich man's professional fool. And so,
+if I overstep the usual limits, who will comment on that? Queer things,
+crazy things, are in the part. What do I matter?"
+
+Richard laughed aloud.
+
+"At least I have this advantage, that in my case you can do what you
+can do in the case of no other man. With me you needn't be afraid. No
+one will think evil. With me--yes, after all, there is a drop of
+comfort in it--with me, Helen, you're safe enough."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MR. LUDOVIC QUAYLE AMONG THE PROPHETS
+
+
+That same luncheon party at Brockhurst, if not notably satisfactory to
+the hosts, afforded much subsequent food for meditation to one at least
+of the guests. During the evening immediately following it, and even in
+the watches of the night, Lady Louisa Barking's thought was
+persistently engaged with the subject of Richard Calmady, his looks,
+his character, his temper, his rent-roll, the acreage of his estates,
+and his prospects generally. Nor did her interest remain hidden and
+inarticulate. For, finding that in various particulars her knowledge
+was superficial and clearly insufficient, on her journey from
+Westchurch up to town next day, in company with her brother Ludovic,
+she put so many questions to that accomplished young gentleman that he
+shortly divined some serious purpose in her inquiry.
+
+"We all recognise, my dear Louisa," he remarked presently, laying aside
+the day's Times, of which he had vainly essayed the study, with an air
+of gentle resignation, crossing his long legs and leaning back in his
+corner of the railway carriage, "that you are the possessor of an
+eminently practical mind. You have run the family for some years now,
+not without numerous successes, among which may be reckoned your
+running of yourself into the arms--if you will pardon my mentioning
+them--of my estimable brother-in-law, Barking."
+
+"Really, Ludovic!" his sister protested.
+
+"Let me entreat you not to turn restive, Louisa," Mr. Quayle rejoined
+with the utmost suavity. "I am paying a high compliment to your
+intelligence. To have run into the arms of Mr. Barking, or indeed of
+anybody else, casually and involuntarily, to have blundered into
+them--if I may so express myself--would have been a stupidity. But to
+run into them intentionally and voluntarily argues considerable powers
+of strategy, an intelligent direction of movement which I respect and
+admire."
+
+"You are really exceedingly provoking, Ludovic!"
+
+Lady Louisa pushed the square, leather-covered dressing-case, on which
+her feet had been resting, impatiently aside.
+
+"Far from it," the young man answered. "Can I put that box anywhere
+else for you? You like it just where it is?--Yes? But I assure you I am
+not provoking. I am merely complimentary. Conversation is an art,
+Louisa. None of my sisters ever can be got to understand that. It is
+dreadfully crude to rush in waist-deep at once. There should be feints
+and approaches. You should nibble at your sugar with a graceful
+coyness. You should cut a few frills and skirmish a little before
+setting the battle actively in array. And it is just this that I have
+been striving to do during the last five minutes. But you do not appear
+to appreciate the commendable style of my preliminaries. You want to
+engage immediately. There is usually a first-rate underlying reason for
+your interest in anybody----"
+
+Again the lady shifted the position of the dressing-case.
+
+"To the right?" inquired Mr. Quayle extending his hand, his head a
+little on one side, his long neck directed forward, while he regarded
+first his sister and then the dressing-case with infuriating urbanity.
+"No? Let us come to Hecuba, then. Let us dissemble no longer, but put
+it plainly. What, oh, Louisa! what are you driving at in respect of my
+very dear friend, Dickie Calmady?"
+
+Now it was unquestionably most desirable for her to keep on the
+fair-weather side of Mr. Quayle just then. Yet the flesh is weak. Lady
+Louisa Barking could not control a movement of self-justification. She
+spoke with dignity, severely.
+
+"It is all very well for you to say those sort of things, Ludovic----"
+
+"What sort of things?" he inquired mildly.
+
+"But I should be glad to know what would have become of the family by
+now, unless some one had come forward and taken matters in hand? Of
+course one gets no thanks for it. One never does get any thanks for
+doing one's duty, however wearing it is to oneself and however much
+others profit. But somebody had to sacrifice themselves. Mama is
+unequal to any exertion. You know what papa is----"
+
+"I do, I do," murmured Mr. Quayle, raising his gaze piously to the roof
+of the railway carriage.
+
+"If he has one of the boys to tramp over the country with him at
+Whitney, and one of the girls to ride with him in London, he is
+perfectly happy and content. He is alarmingly improvident. He would
+prefer keeping the whole family at home doing nothing----"
+
+"Save laughing at his jokes. My father craves the support of a
+sympathetic audience."
+
+"Shotover is worse than useless."
+
+"Except to the guileless Israelite he is. Absolutely true, Louisa."
+
+"Guy would never have gone into the army when he left Eton unless I had
+insisted upon it. And it was entirely through the Barkings'
+influence--at my representation of course--that Eddie got a berth in
+that Liverpool cotton-broker's business. I am sure Alicia is very
+comfortably married. I know George Winterbotham is not the least
+interesting, but he is perfectly gentlemanlike and presentable, and so
+on, and he makes her a most devoted husband. And from what Mr. Barking
+heard the other day at the Club from somebody or other, I forget who,
+but some one connected with the Government, you know, there is every
+probability of George getting that permanent under-secretaryship."
+
+"Did I not start by declaring you had achieved numerous successes?"
+Ludovic inquired. "Yet we stray from the point, Louisa. For do I not
+still remain ignorant of the root of your sudden interest in my friend
+Dickie Calmady? And I thirst to learn how you propose to work him into
+the triumphant development of our family fortunes."
+
+The proportions of Lady Louisa's small mouth contracted still further
+into an expression of great decision, while she glanced at the
+landscape reeling away from the window of the railway carriage. In the
+past twelve hours autumn had given place to winter. The bare hedges
+showed black, while the fallen leaves of the hedgerow trees formed
+unsightly blotches of sodden brown and purple upon the dirty green of
+the pastures. Over all brooded an opaque, gray-brown sky, sullen and
+impenetrable. Lady Louisa saw all this. But she was one of those
+persons happily, for themselves, unaffected by such abstractions as the
+aspects of nature. Her purposes were immediate and practical. She
+followed them with praiseworthy persistence. The landscape merely
+engaged her eyes because she preferred, just now, looking out of the
+window to looking her brother in the face.
+
+"Something must be done for the younger girls," she announced. "I feel
+pretty confident about Emily's future. We need not go into that.
+Maggie, if she marries at all--and she really is very useful at home,
+in looking after the servants and entertaining, and so on--if she
+marries at all, will marry late. She has no particular attractions as
+girls go. Her figure is too solid, and she talks too much. But she will
+make a very presentable middle-aged woman--sensible, dependable, an
+excellent _menagere_. Certainly she had better marry late."
+
+"A mature clergyman when she is rising forty--a widowed bishop, for
+instance. Yes, I approve that," Mr. Quayle rejoined reflectively. "It
+is well conceived, Louisa. We must keep an eye on the Bench and
+carefully note any episcopal matrimonial vacancy. Bishops have a little
+turn, I observe, for marrying somebody who _is_ somebody--specially _en
+secondes noces_, good men. Yes, it is well thought of. With careful
+steering we may bring Maggie to anchor in a palace yet. Maggie is
+rather dogmatic, she would make not half a bad Mrs. Proudie. So she is
+disposed of, and then?"
+
+For a few seconds the lady held silent converse with herself. At last
+she addressed her companion in tones of unwonted cordiality.
+
+"You are by far the most sensible of the family, Ludovic," she began.
+
+"And in a family so renowned for intellect, so conspicuous for 'parts
+and learning,' as Macaulay puts it, that is indeed a distinction!"--Mr.
+Quayle bowed slightly in his comfortable corner. "A thousand thanks,
+Louisa," he murmured.
+
+"I would not breathe a syllable of this to any of the others," she
+continued. "You know how the girls chatter. Alicia, I am sorry to say,
+is as bad as any of them. They would discuss the question without
+intermission--simply, you know, talk the whole thing to death."
+
+"Poor thing!--Yet, after all, what thing?" the young man inquired
+urbanely.
+
+Lady Louisa bit her lip. He was very irritating, while she was very
+much in earnest. It was her misfortune usually to be a good deal in
+earnest.
+
+"There is Constance," she remarked, somewhat abruptly.
+
+"Precisely--there is poor, dear, innocent, rather foolish, little
+Connie. It occurred to me we might be coming to that."
+
+In his turn Mr. Quayle fell silent, and contemplated the reeling
+landscape. Pasture had given place to wide stretches of dark moorland
+on either side the railway line, with a pallor of sour bog-grasses in
+the hollows. The outlook was uncheerful. Perhaps it was that which
+caused the young man to shake his head.
+
+"I recognize the brilliancy of the conception, Louisa. It reflects
+credit upon your imagination and--your daring," he said presently. "But
+you won't be able to work it."
+
+"Pray why not?" almost snapped Lady Louisa.
+
+Mr. Quayle settled himself back in his corner again. His handsome face
+was all sweetness, indulgent though argumentative. He was nothing,
+clearly, unless reasonable.
+
+"Personally, I am extremely fond of Dickie Calmady," he began. "I
+permit myself--honestly I do--moments of enthusiasm regarding him. I
+should esteem the woman lucky who married him. Yet I could imagine a
+prejudice might exist in some minds--minds of a less emancipated and
+finely comprehensive order than yours and my own of course--against
+such an alliance. Take my father's mind, for instance--and unhappily my
+father dotes on Connie. And he is more obstinate than nineteen
+dozen--well, I leave you to fill in the comparison mentally, Louisa. It
+might be slightly wanting in filial respect to put it into words."
+
+Again he shook his head in pensive solemnity.
+
+"I give you credit for prodigious push and tenacity, for a remarkable
+capacity of generalship, in short. Yet I cannot disguise from myself
+the certainty that you would never square my father."
+
+"But suppose she wishes it herself. Papa would deny Connie nothing,"
+the other objected. She was obliged to raise her voice to a point of
+shrillness, hardly compatible with the dignity of the noble house of
+Fallowfeild, _double_ with all the gold of all the Barkings, for the
+train was banging over the points and roaring between the platforms of
+a local junction. Mr. Quayle made a deprecating gesture, put his hands
+over his ears, and again gently shook his head, intimating that no
+person possessed either of nerves or self-respect could be expected to
+carry on a conversation under existing conditions. Lady Louisa
+desisted. But, as soon as the train passed into the comparative quiet
+of the open country, she took up her parable again, and took it up in a
+tone of authority.
+
+"Of course I admit there is something to get over. It would be
+ridiculous not to admit that. And I am always determined to be
+perfectly straightforward. I detest humbug of any kind. So I do not
+deny for a moment that there is something. Still it would be a very
+good marriage for Constance, a very good marriage, indeed. Even papa
+must acknowledge that. Money, position, age, everything of that kind,
+in its favour. One could not expect to have all that without some
+make-weight. I should not regret it, for I feel it might really be bad
+for Connie to have so much without some make-weight. And I remarked
+yesterday--I could not help remarking it--that she was very much
+occupied about Sir Richard Calmady."
+
+"Connie is a little goose," Mr. Quayle permitted himself to remark, and
+for once there was quite a sour edge to his sweetness.
+
+"Connie is not quick, she is not sensitive," his sister continued.
+"And, really, under all the circumstances, that perhaps is just as
+well. But she is a good child, and would believe almost anything you
+told her. She has an affectionate and obedient disposition, and she
+never attempts to think for herself. I don't believe it would ever
+occur to her to object to his--his peculiarities, unless some
+mischievous person suggested it to her. And then, as I tell you, I
+remarked she was very much occupied about him."
+
+Once again Mr. Quayle sought counsel of the landscape which once again
+had changed in character. For here civilisation began to trail her
+skirts very visibly, and the edges of those skirts were torn and
+frayed, notably unhandsome. The open moorland had given place to flat
+market-gardens and leafless orchards sloppy with wet. Innumerable
+cabbages, innumerable stunted, black-branched apple and pear trees,
+avenues of dilapidated pea and bean sticks, reeled away to right and
+left. The semi-suburban towns stretched forth long, rawly-red arms of
+ugly, little, jerry-built streets and terraces. Tall chimneys and
+unlovely gasometers--these last showing as collections of some
+monstrous spawn--rose against the opaque sky, a sky rendered
+momentarily more opaque, dirtier and more dingy, by the masses of
+London smoke hanging along the eastern horizon.
+
+Usually Ludovic knew his own mind clearly enough. The atmosphere of it
+was very far from being hazy. Now that atmosphere bore annoying
+resemblance to the opacity obtaining overhead and along the eastern
+horizon. The young man's sympathies--or were they his prejudices?--had
+a convenient habit of ranging themselves immediately on one side or
+other of any question presenting itself to him. But in the present case
+they were mixed. They pulled both ways, and this vexed him. For he
+liked to suppose himself very ripe, cynical, and disillusioned, while,
+in good truth, sentiment had more than a word to say in most of his
+opinions and decisions. Now sentiment ruled him strongly and pushed
+him--but, unfortunately, in diametrically opposite directions. The
+sentiment of friendship compelled him hitherward. While another
+sentiment, which he refused to define--he recognised it as wholesome,
+yet he was a trifle ashamed of it--compelled him quite other-where. He
+took refuge in an adroit begging of the question.
+
+"After all are you not committing the fundamental error of reckoning
+without your host, Louisa?" he inquired. "Connie may be a good deal
+occupied about Calmady, but thereby may only give further proof of her
+own silliness. I certainly discovered no particular sign of Calmady
+being occupied about Connie. He was very much more occupied about the
+fair cousin, Helen de Vallorbes, than about any one of us, my
+illustrious self included, as far as I could see."
+
+In her secret soul his hearer had to own this statement just. But she
+kept the owning to herself, and, with a rapidity upon which she could
+not help congratulating herself, instituted a flanking movement.
+
+"You hear all the gossip, Ludovic," she said. "Of course it is no good
+my asking Mr. Barking about that sort of thing. Even if he heard it he
+would not remember it. His mind is too much occupied. If a woman
+marries a man with large political interests she must just give herself
+to them generously. It is very interesting, and one feels, of course,
+one is helping to make history. But still one has to sacrifice
+something. I hear next to nothing of what is going on--the gossip, I
+mean. And so tell me, what do you hear about her, about Madame de
+Vallorbes?"
+
+"At first hand only that which you must know perfectly well yourself,
+my dear Louisa. Didn't you sit opposite to her at luncheon,
+yesterday?--That she is a vastly good-looking and attractive woman."
+
+"At second hand, then?"
+
+"At second hand? Oh! at second hand I know various amiable little odds
+and ends such as are commonly reported by the uncharitable and
+censorious," Ludovic answered mildly. "Probably more than half of these
+little treasures are pure fiction, generated by envy, conceived by
+malice."
+
+"Pray, Ludovic!" his sister exclaimed. But she recovered herself, and
+added:--"you may as well tell me all the same. I think, under the
+circumstances, it would be better for me to hear."
+
+"You really wish to hear? Well, I give it you for what it is worth. I
+don't vouch for the truth of a single item. For all we can tell, nice,
+kind friends may be recounting kindred anecdotes of Alicia and the
+blameless Winterbotham, or even of you, Louisa, and Mr. Barking."
+
+Mr. Quayle fixed a glance of surpassing graciousness upon his sister as
+he uttered these agreeable suggestions, and fervid curiosity alone
+enabled her to resist a rejoinder and to maintain a dignified silence.
+
+"It is said--and this probably is true--that she never cared two straws
+for de Vallorbes, but was jockeyed in the marriage--just as you might
+jockey Constance, you know, Louisa--by her mother, who has the
+reputation of being a somewhat frisky matron with a keen eye to the
+main chance. She is not quite all, I understand, a tender heart could
+desire in the way of a parent. It is further said that _la belle
+Helene_ makes the dollars fly even more freely than did de Vallorbes in
+his best days, and he has the credit of having been something of a
+_viveur_. He knew not only his Paris, but his Baden-Baden, and his
+Naples, and various other warm corners where great and good men do
+commonly congregate. It is added that _la belle Helene_ already gives
+promise of being playful in other ways beside that of expenditure. And
+that de Vallorbes has been heard to lament openly that he is not a
+native of some enlightened country in which the divorce court
+charitably intervenes to sever overhard connubial knots. In short, it
+is rumoured that de Vallorbes is not a conspicuous example of the
+wildly happy husband."
+
+"In short, she is not respec----"
+
+But the young man held up his hands and cried out feelingly:--
+
+"Don't, pray don't, my dear Louisa. Let us walk delicately as Agag--my
+father's morning ministrations to the maids again! For how, as I
+pointed out just now, do we know what insidious little tales may not be
+in circulation regarding yourself and those nearest and dearest to
+you?"
+
+Ludovic Quayle turned his head and once again looked out of the window,
+his beautiful mouth visited by a slightly malicious smile. The train
+was sliding onward above crowded, sordid courts and narrow alleys,
+festering, as it seemed, with a very plague of poverty-stricken and
+unwholesome humanity. Here the line runs parallel to the river--sullen
+to-day, blotted with black floats and lines of grimy barges, which
+straining, smoke-vomiting steam-tugs towed slowly against a strong
+flowing tide. On the opposite bank the heavy masses of the Abbey, the
+long decorated facade and towers of the Houses of Parliament, stood out
+ghostly and livid in a gleam of frail, unrelated sunshine against the
+murk of the smoky sky.
+
+"I should have supposed Sir Richard Calmady was steady," Lady Louisa
+remarked, inconsequently and rather stiffly. Ludovic really was
+exasperating.
+
+"Steady? Oh! perfectly. Poor, dear chap, he hasn't had much chance of
+being anything else as yet."
+
+"Still, of course, Lady Calmady would prefer his being settled. Clearly
+it would be much better in every way. All things considered, he is
+certainly one of the people who should marry young. And Connie would be
+an excellent marriage for him, excellent--thoroughly suitable, better,
+really, than on the face of it he could hope for. Ludovic, just look
+out please and see if the carriage is here. Pocock always loses her
+head at a terminus, and misses the men-servants. Yes, there is
+Frederic--with his back to the train, looking the wrong way, of course.
+He really is too stupid."
+
+Mr. Quayle, however, succeeded in attracting the footman's attention,
+and, assisted by that functionary and the lean and anxious Pocock--her
+arms full of bags and umbrellas--conveyed his sister out of the railway
+carriage and into the waiting brougham. She graciously offered to put
+him down at his rooms, in St. James's Place, on her way to the Barking
+mansion in Albert Gate, but the young man declined that honour.
+
+"Good-bye, Louisa," he said, leaning his elbows on the open window of
+the brougham and thereby presenting the back view of an irreproachably
+cut overcoat and trousers to the passers-by. "I have to thank you for a
+most interesting and instructive journey. Your efforts to secure the
+prosperity of the family are wholly praiseworthy. I commend them. I
+have a profound respect for your generalship. Still, pauper though I
+am, I am willing to lay you a hundred to one in golden guineas that you
+will never square papa."
+
+Subsequently the young man bestowed himself in a hansom, and rattled
+away in the wake of the Barking equipage down the objectionably steep
+hill which leads from the roar and turmoil of the station into the
+Waterloo Bridge road.
+
+"I might have offered heavier odds," he said to himself, "for never,
+never will she square papa."
+
+And, not without a light sense of shame, he was conscious that he made
+this reflection with a measure of relief.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+CONTAINING SAMPLES BOTH OF EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY LOVE
+
+
+Katherine stood in the central space of the great, state bedroom. It
+was just upon midnight, yet she still wore her jewels and her handsome,
+trailing, black, velvet dress. She was very tired. But that tiredness
+proceeded less from physical than mental weariness. This she
+recognised, and foresaw that weariness of this character was not likely
+to find relief and extinction within the shelter of the curtains of the
+stately bed, whereon the ancient Persian legend of the flight of the
+Hart through the tangled Forest of This Life was so deftly and quaintly
+embroidered. For, unhappily to-night, the leopard, Care, followed very
+close behind. And Katherine, taking the ancient legend as very
+literally descriptive of her existing state of mind feared that, should
+she undress and seek the shelter of the rose-lined curtains the leopard
+would seek it also, and, crouching at her feet, his evil yellow eyes
+would gaze into her own, wide open, all through that which remained of
+the night. The night, moreover, was very wild. A westerly gale, with
+now and again tumultuous violence of rain, rattled the many panes of
+the windows, wailed in every crevice of door and casement, roared
+through the mile-long elm avenue below, and roared in the chimneys
+above. The Prince of the Power of the Air was let loose, and announced
+his presence as with the shout of battle. Sleep was out of the question
+under present conditions and in her present humour. Therefore Lady
+Calmady had dismissed Clara--now promoted to the dignified office of
+lady's-maid--and that bright-eyed and devoted waiting-woman had
+departed reluctant, almost in tears, protesting that:--"it was quite
+too bad, for her ladyship was being regularly worn out with all the
+talking and company. And she, for her part, should be heartily glad
+when the entertaining was over and they were all comfortably to
+themselves again."
+
+Nor could Katherine honestly assert that she would be altogether sorry
+when the hour struck, to-morrow, for the departure of her guests. For
+it appeared to her that, notwithstanding the courtesy and affection of
+her brother and the triumphant charm of her niece, a spirit of unrest
+had entered Brockhurst along with their entry. Would that same spirit
+depart along with their departing? She questioned it. She was oppressed
+by a fear that that spirit of unrest had come to stay. And so it was
+that as she walked the length and breadth of the lofty, white-paneled
+room, for all the rage and fury of the storm without, she still heard
+the soft padding of Care, the leopard, close behind.
+
+Then a singular desolation and sense of homelessness came upon
+Katherine. Turn where she would there seemed no comfort, no escape, no
+sure promise of eventual rest. Things human and material were emptied
+not of joy only, but of invitation to effort. For something had
+happened from which there was no going back. A fair woman from a far
+country had come and looked upon her son, with the inevitable result,
+that youth had called to youth. And though the fair woman in question,
+being already wedded wife,--Katherine was rather pathetically
+pure-minded,--could not in any dangerously practical manner steal away
+her son's heart, yet she would, only too probably, prepare that heart
+and awaken in it desires of subsequent stealing away on the part of
+some other fair woman, as yet unknown, whose heart Dickie would do his
+utmost to steal in exchange. And this filled her with anxiety and
+far-reaching fears, not only because it was bitter to have some woman
+other than herself hold the chief place in her son's affections, but
+because she--as John Knott, even as Ludovic Quayle, though from quite
+other causes--could not but apprehend possibilities of danger, even of
+disaster, surrounding all question of love and marriage in the strange
+and unusual case of Richard Calmady.
+
+And thinking of these things, her sensibilities heightened and
+intensified by fatigue and circumstances of time and place, a certain
+feverishness possessed her. That bedchamber of many memories--exquisite
+and tragic--became intolerable to her. She opened the double doors and
+passed into the Chapel-Room beyond, the light thrown by the tall wax
+candles set in silver branches upon her toilet-table, passing with her
+through the widely open doors and faintly illuminating the near end of
+the great room. There was other subdued light in the room as well. For
+a glowing mass of coal and wood still remained in the brass basket upon
+the hearth, and the ruddy brightness of it touched the mouldings of the
+ceiling, glowed on the polished corners and carvings of tables,
+what-nots, and upon the mahogany frames of solid, Georgian sofas and
+chairs.
+
+At first sight, notwithstanding the roaring of wind and ripping of rain
+without, there seemed offer of comfort in this calm and spacious place,
+the atmosphere of it sweet with bowls of autumn violets and
+greenhouse-grown roses. Katherine sat down in Richard's low armchair
+and gazed into the crimson heart of the fire. She made a valiant effort
+to put away haunting fears, to resume her accustomed attitude of
+stoicism, of tranquil, if slightly defiant, courage. But Care, the
+leopard, refused to be driven away. Surely, stealthily he had followed
+her out of her bedchamber and now crouched at her side, making his
+presence felt so that all illusion of comfort speedily fled. She knew
+that she was alone, consciously and bitterly alone, waking in the midst
+of the sleeping house. No footstep would echo up the stairs, hot to
+find her. No voice would call her name, in anxiety for her well-being
+or in desire. It seemed to Katherine that a desert lay outstretched
+about her on every hand, while she sat desolate with Care for her sole
+companion. She recognised that her existing isolation was, in a measure
+at all events, the natural consequence of her own fortitude and
+ability. She had ruled with so strong and discreet a hand that the
+order she had established, the machinery she had set agoing, could now
+keep going without her. Hence her loneliness. And that loneliness as
+she sat by the dying fire, while the wind raved without, was dreadful
+to her, peopled with phantoms she dared not look upon. For, not only
+the accustomed burden of her motherhood was upon her, but that other
+unaccustomed burden of admitted middle-age. And this other burden,
+which it is appointed a woman shall bear while her heart often is still
+all too sadly young, dragged her down. The conviction pressed home on
+her that for her the splendid game was indeed over, and that, for very
+pride's sake, she must voluntarily stand aside and submit to rank
+herself with things grown obsolete, with fashions past and out of date.
+
+Katherine rose to her feet, filled, for the moment, by an immense
+compassion for her own womanhood, by an overmastering longing for
+sympathy. She was so tired of the long struggle with sorrow, so tired
+of her own attitude of sustained courage. And now, when surely a little
+respite and repose might have been granted her, it seemed that a new
+order of courage was demanded of her, a courage passive rather than
+active, a courage of relinquishment and self-effacement. That was a
+little too much. For all her valiant spirit, she shrank away. She grew
+weak. She could not face it.
+
+And so it happened that to-night--as once long ago, when poor Richard
+suffered his hour of mental and physical torment at the skilful, yet
+relentless hands of Dr. Knott, in the bedchamber near by--Katherine's
+anguish and revolt found expression in restless pacings, and those
+pacings brought her to the chapel door. It stood ajar. Before the altar
+the three hanging lamps showed each its tongue of crimson flame. A
+whiteness of flowers, set in golden vases upon the re-table, was just
+distinguishable. But the delicately carved spires and canopies of
+stalls, the fair pictured saints, and figure of the risen Christ--His
+wounded feet shining like pearls upon the azure floor of heaven--in the
+east window, were lost in soft, thick, all-pervading gloom. The place
+was curiously still, as though waiting silently, in solemn and strained
+expectation for the accomplishment of some mysterious visitation. And,
+all the while without, the gale flung itself wailing against the angles
+of the masonry, and the rain beat upon the glass of the high, narrow
+windows as with a passion of despairing tears.
+
+For some time Katherine waited in the doorway, a sombre figure in her
+trailing, velvet dress. The hushed stillness of the chapel, the
+confusion and clamour of the tempest, taken thus in connection, were
+very telling. They exercised a strong influence over her already
+somewhat exalted imagination. Could it be, she asked herself, that
+these typified the rest of the religious, and the unrest of the secular
+life? Julius March would interpret the contrast they afforded in some
+such manner no doubt. And what if Julius, after all, were right? What
+if, shutting God out of the heart, you also shut that heart out from
+all peaceful dwelling-places, leaving it homeless, at the mercy of
+every passing storm? Katherine was bruised in spirit. The longing for
+some sure refuge, some abiding city was dominant in her. The needs of
+her soul, so long ignored and repudiated, asserted themselves. Yes,
+what if Julius were right, and if content and happiness--the only
+happiness which has in it the grace of continuance--consisted in
+submission to, and glad acquiescence in, the will of God?
+
+Thus did she muse, gazing questioningly at the whiteness of the altar
+flowers and those steady tongues of flame, hearing the silence, as of
+reverent waiting, which dwelt in the place. But, on the other hand, to
+give, in this her hour of weakness, that which she had refused in the
+hours of clear-seeing strength;--to let go, because she was alone and
+the unloveliness of age claimed her, that sense of bitter injury and
+injustice which she had hugged to her breast when young and still aware
+of her empire,--would not such action be contemptibly poor spirited?
+She was no child to be humbled into confession by the rod, frightened
+into submission by the dark. To abase herself, in the hope of receiving
+spiritual consolation, appeared to her as an act of disloyalty to her
+dead love and her maimed and crippled son. She turned away with a
+rather superb lift of her beautiful head, and went back to her own
+bedchamber again. She hardened herself in opposition, putting the
+invitations of grace from her as she might have put those of
+temptation. She would yield to weakness, to feverish agitations and
+aimless longings, no more. Whether sleep elected to visit her or not,
+she would undress and seek her bed.
+
+But hardly had she closed the door and, standing before her
+toilet-table, began to unclasp the pearls from her throat and bracelets
+from her wrists, than a sound, quite other than agreeable or
+reassuring, saluted her ears from close by. It proceeded from the room
+next door, now unoccupied, since Richard, some five or six years ago,
+jealous of the dignity of his youth, had petitioned to be permitted to
+remove himself and his possessions to the suite of rooms immediately
+below. This comprised the Gun-Room, a bed and dressing-room, and a
+fourth room connecting with the offices, which came in handy for his
+valet. Since his decline upon this more commodious apartment, the old
+nursery had stood vacant. Katherine could not find it in her heart to
+touch it. It was furnished now as in Dickie's childish days, when,
+night and morning, she had visited it to make sure of her darling's
+health and safety.
+
+And it was in this shrine of tender recollections that disquieting
+sounds now arose. Hard claws rattled upon the boarded spaces of the
+floor. Some creature snored and panted against the bottom of the door,
+pushed it with so heavy a weight that the panels creaked, flung itself
+down uneasily, then moved to and fro again, with that harsh rattling of
+claws. The image of Care, the leopard, as embroidered upon the curtains
+of her bed, was so present to Katherine's imagination to-night that,
+for a moment, she lost her hold on probability and common sense. It
+appeared to her that the anxieties and perturbations which oppressed
+her had taken on bodily form, and, in the shape of a devouring beast,
+besieged her chamber door. The conception was grisly. Both mind and
+body being rather overstrained, it filled her with something
+approaching panic. No one was within call. To rouse her brother, or
+Julius, she must make a tour of half the house. Again the creature
+pushed against the creaking panels, and, then, panting and snoring,
+began ripping away the matting from the door-sill.
+
+The terror of the unknown is, after all, greater than that of the
+known. It was improbable, though the hour was late and the night wild,
+that savage beasts or cares incarnate should actually be in possession
+of Dickie's disused nursery. Katherine braced herself and turned the
+handle. Still the vision disclosed by the opening door was at first
+sight monstrous enough. A moving mass of dirty white, low down against
+the encircling darkness, bandy legs, and great grinning mouth. The
+bull-dog stood up, whining, fawning upon her, thrusting his heavy head
+into her hand.
+
+"Why Camp, good old friend, what brings you here? Are you, too,
+homeless to-night? But why have you deserted your master?"
+
+And then Lady Calmady's panic fears took on another aspect. Far from
+being allayed they were increased. An apprehension of something
+actively evil abroad in the great, sleeping house assailed her. She
+trembled from head to foot. And yet, even while she shrank and
+trembled, her courage reawoke. For she perceived that as yet she need
+not rank herself wholly among fashions passed and things grown
+obsolete. She had her place and value still. She was wanted, she was
+called for--that she knew--though by whom wanted and for what purpose
+she, as yet, knew not.
+
+The bull-dog, meanwhile, his heavy head carried low, his crooked tail
+drooping, trotted slowly away into the darkness and then trotted back.
+He squatted upon his haunches, looking up with anxious, bloodshot eyes.
+He trotted away again, and again returned and stood waiting, his whole
+aspect eloquent in its dumb appeal. He implored her to follow, and
+Katherine, fetching one of the silver candlesticks from her
+dressing-table, obeyed.
+
+She followed her ugly, faithful guide across the vacant disused
+nursery, and on down the uncarpeted turning staircase which opens into
+the square lobby outside the Gun-Room. The diamond panes of the
+staircase windows chattered in their leaded frames, and the wind
+shrieked in the spouts, and angles, and carved stonework, of the inner
+courtyard as she passed. The gale was at its height, loud and
+insistent. Yet the many-toned violence of it seemed to bear strange and
+intimate relation--as that of a great orchestra to a single dominant
+human voice--to the subtle, evil influence which she felt to be at
+large within the sleeping house. And so, without pausing to consider
+the wisdom of her action, pushed by the conviction that something of
+profound import was taking place, and that some one, or something, must
+be saved by her from threatening danger, Katherine threw open the
+Gun-Room door.
+
+The shout of the storm seemed far away. This place was quick with
+stillness too, with the hush of waiting for the accomplishment of some
+mysterious event or visitation, even as the dark chapel up-stairs had
+been. Only here moving effect of soft, brilliant light, of caressing
+warmth, of vague, insidious fragrance met her. Katherine Calmady had
+only known passion in its purest and most legitimate form. It had been
+for her, innocent of all grossness, or suggestion of degradation, fair
+and lovely and natural, revelation of highest and most enchanting
+secrets. But having once known it in its fulness, she could not fail to
+recognise its presence, even though it wore a diabolic, rather than
+angelic face. That passion met her now, exultant, effulgent, along with
+that light and heat and fragrance, she did not for an instant doubt.
+And the splendour of its near neighbourhood turned her faint with dread
+and with poignant memories. She paused upon the threshold, steadying
+herself with one hand against the cold, stone jamb of the arched
+doorway, while in the other she held the massive candlestick and its
+flickering, draught-driven lights.
+
+A mist was before her eyes, a singing in her ears, so that she had much
+ado to see clearly and reckon justly with that which she did see. Helen
+de Vallorbes, clothed in a flowing, yet clinging, silken garment of
+turquoise, shot with blue purple and shimmering glaucous green--a
+garment in colour such as that with which the waves of Adriatic might
+have clothed the rosy limbs of new-born Aphrodite, as she rose from the
+cool, translucent sea-deeps--knelt upon the tiger-skin before the
+dancing fire. Her hands grasped the two arms of Richard's chair. She
+leaned down right across it, the lines and curves of her beautiful body
+discernible under her delicate draperies. The long, open sleeves of her
+dress fell away from her outstretched arms, showing them in their
+completeness from wrist to shoulder. Her head was thrown back, so that
+her rounded throat stood out, and the pure line of her lower jaw was
+salient. Her eyes were half closed, while all the mass of her
+honey-coloured hair was gathered low down on the nape of her neck into
+a net of golden thread. A golden, netted girdle was knotted loosely
+about her loins, the tasseled ends of it dragging upon the floor. She
+wore no jewels, nor were they needed, for the loveliness of her person,
+discovered rather than concealed by those changeful sea-blue draperies,
+was already dangerously potent.
+
+All this Katherine saw--a radiant vision of youth, an incarnation, not
+of care and haunting fears, but of pleasure and haunting delights. And
+she saw more than this. For in the depths of that long, low armchair
+Richard sat, stiffly erect, his face dead white, thin, and
+strained--Richard, as she had never beheld him before, though she knew
+the face well enough. It was his father's face as she had seen it on
+her marriage night, and on his death night too, when his fingers had
+been clasped about her throat to the point of strangulation. Katherine
+dared look no longer. Her heart stood still. Shame and anger took her,
+and along with these an immense nostalgia for that which had once been
+and was not. Her instinct was of flight. But Camp trotted forward,
+growling, and squatted between the pedestals of the library-table, his
+red eyes blinking sullenly in the square shadow. Involuntarily
+Katherine followed him part way across the room.
+
+Richard looked full at his cousin, absorbed, rigid, an amazement of
+question in his eyes. Not a muscle of his face moved. But Madame de
+Vallorbes' absorption was less complete. She started slightly and half
+turned her head.
+
+"Ah! there is that dog again," she said. "What has brought him back? He
+hates me."
+
+"Damn the dog!" Richard exclaimed, hoarsely under his breath. Then he
+said:--"Helen, Helen, you know----"
+
+But Madame de Vallorbes had turned her head yet further, and her arched
+eyelids opened quite wide for once, while she smiled a little, her lips
+parting and revealing her pretty teeth tightly set.
+
+"Ah! the advent of the bull-dog explains itself," she exclaimed. "Here
+is Aunt Katherine herself!"
+
+Slowly, and with an inimitable grace, she rose to her feet. Her long,
+winged sleeves floated back into place, covering her bare arms. Her
+composure was astonishing, even to herself. Yet her breath came a
+trifle quick as she contemplated Lady Calmady with the same enigmatic
+smile, her chin carried high--the finest suggestion of challenge and
+insolence in it--her eyes still unusually wide open and startlingly
+bright.
+
+"Richard holds a little court to-night," she continued airily, "thanks
+to the storm. You also have come to seek the protection of his presence
+it appears, Aunt Katherine. Indeed, I am not surprised, for you
+certainly brew very wild weather at Brockhurst, at times."
+
+Something in the young lady's bearing had restored Katherine's
+self-control.
+
+"The wind is going down," she replied calmly. "The storm need not alarm
+you, or keep you watching any longer, Helen."
+
+"Ah! pardon me--you know you are accustomed to these tempests," the
+younger woman rejoined. "To me it still sounds more than sufficiently
+violent."
+
+"Yes, but merely on this side of the house, where Richard's and my
+rooms are situated. The wind has shifted, and I believe on your side
+you will suffer no further disturbance. You will find it quite quiet.
+Then, moreover, you have to rise early to-morrow--or rather to-day. You
+have a long journey before you and should secure all the rest you can."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes gathered her silken draperies about her absently.
+For a moment she looked down at the tiger-skin, then back at Lady
+Calmady.
+
+"Ah yes!" she said, "it is thoughtful of you to remind me of that.
+To-day I start on my homeward journey. It should give me very much
+pleasure, should it not? But--do not be shocked, Aunt Katherine--I
+confess I am not altogether enraptured at the prospect. I have been too
+happy, too kindly treated, here at Brockhurst, for it to be other than
+a sorrow to me to depart."
+
+She turned to Richard, her expression serious, intimate, appealing.
+Then she shook back her fair head, and as though in obedience to an
+irresistible movement of tenderness, stooped down swiftly over
+him--seeming to drown him in the shimmering waves of some azure, and
+thin, clear green, and royal, blue-purple sea--while she kissed him
+full and daringly upon the mouth.
+
+"Good-night, good-bye, dear Dickie," she said. "Yes, good-bye--for I
+almost hope I may not see you in the morning. It would be a little
+chilly and inadequate, any other farewell after this. I am grateful to
+you.--And remember, I too am among those who, to their sorrow, never
+forget."
+
+She approached Lady Calmady, her manner natural, unabashed, playful
+even, and gay.
+
+"See, I am ready to go to bed like a good child, Aunt Katherine," she
+said, "supported by your assurance that my side of the house is no
+longer rendered terrific by wind and rain. But--I am so distressed to
+trouble you--but all the lamps are out, and I am none too sure of my
+way. It would be a rather tragic ending to my happy visit if I
+incontinently lost myself and wandered till dawn, disconsolate, up and
+down the passages and stairways of Richard's magnificent house. I might
+even wander in here by mistake again, and that would be unpardonably
+indiscreet, wouldn't it? So, will you light me to my own quarters, Aunt
+Katherine? Thank you--how charmingly kind and sweet you are!"
+
+As she spoke Madame de Vallorbes moved lightly away and passed on to
+the lobby, the heels of her pretty, cloth-of-gold slippers ringing
+quite sharply on the gray, stone quarries without. And, even as a
+little while back she had followed the heavy-headed and ungainly
+bull-dog, so now Lady Calmady, in her trailing, black, velvet dress,
+silver candlestick in hand, followed this radiant, fleet-footed
+creature, whose every movement was eloquent of youth and health and an
+almost prodigal joy of living. Neither woman spoke as they crossed the
+lobby, and passed the pierced and arcaded stone screen which divides
+the outer from the inner hall. Now and again the flickering
+candle-light glinted on the younger woman's girdle or the net which
+controlled the soft masses of her honey-coloured hair. Now and again a
+draught taking the folds of her silken raiment blew it hither and
+thither, disclosing her beautiful arms or quick-moving slippered feet.
+She was clothed with splendour of the sea, crowned, and shod, and girt
+about the loins, with gold. And she fled on silently, till the wide,
+shallow-stepped stairway, leading up to the rooms she occupied, was
+reached. There, for a moment, she paused.
+
+"Pray come no further," she said, and went on rapidly up the flight. On
+the landing she stopped, a dimly discerned figure, blue and gold
+against the dim whiteness of high paneled walls, moulded ceiling,
+stairway, and long descending balustrade.
+
+"I have arrived!" she cried, and her clear voice took strange
+inflections of mockery and laughter. "I have arrived! I am perfectly
+secure now and safe. Let us hope all other inmates of Brockhurst are
+equally so this stormy night. A thousand thanks, dear Aunt Katherine,
+for your guidance, and a thousand apologies for bringing you so far.
+Now let me trouble you no longer."
+
+The Gun-Room Katherine found just as she had left it, save that Camp
+stood on the tiger-skin before the fire, his fore-paws and his great,
+grinning muzzle resting on the arm of Richard's chair. Camp whined a
+little. Mechanically the young man raised his hand and pulled the dog's
+long, drooping ears. His face was still dead white, and there were
+lines under his eyes and about the corners of his mouth, as of one who
+tries to subdue expression of physical pain. He looked straight at Lady
+Calmady.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "so you have come back! You observe I have changed
+partners!"
+
+And again he pulled the dog's ears, while it appeared to his listener
+that his voice curiously echoed that other voice which had so lately
+addressed and dismissed her, taking on inflections of mockery. But as
+she nerved herself to answer, he continued, hastily:--
+
+"I want nothing, dear mother, nothing in the world. Pray don't concern
+yourself any more about me to-night. Haven't I Camp for company? Lamps?
+Oh! I can put them out perfectly well myself. You were right, of
+course, perfectly right, to come if you were anxious about me. But now
+surely you are satisfied?"
+
+Suddenly Richard bowed his head, putting both hands over his eyes.
+
+"Only now, mother, if you love me, go," he said, with a great sob in
+his voice. "For God's sake go, and leave me to myself."
+
+But after sleepless hours, in the melancholy, blear dawn of the
+November day, Katherine lying, face downwards, within the shelter of
+the embroidered curtains of the state bed, made her submission at last
+and prayed.
+
+"I am helpless, oh, Father Almighty! I have neither wit nor
+understanding, nor strength. Have mercy, lest my reason depart from me.
+I have sinned, for years I have sinned, setting my will, my judgment,
+my righteousness against Thine. Take me, forgive me, teach me. I bring
+nothing. I ask everything. I am empty. Fill me with Thyself, even as
+with water one fills an empty cup. Give me the courage of patience
+instead of the courage of battle. Give me the courage of meekness in
+place of the courage of pride."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+A SLIP BETWIXT CUP AND LIP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+LADY LOUISA BARKING TRACES THE FINGER OF PROVIDENCE
+
+
+The spirit of unrest, which had entered Brockhurst in the dim October
+weather, along with certain guests, did not--Lady Calmady had foreseen
+as much--leave with their leaving. It remained a constant quantity.
+Further, it engendered events very far away from and, at first sight,
+wholly at variance with those which had accompanied its advent.
+
+For example, Lady Louisa Barking, passing through Lowndes Square one
+bleak, March morning on her way from Albert Gate to do a little quiet
+shopping in Sloane Street, observed that the Calmadys' house--situated
+at the corner of the square and of ---- Street--was given over to a
+small army of work-people. During Richard's minority it had been let
+for a term of years to Sir Reginald Aldham, of Aldham Revel in
+Midlandshire. Since Dickie's coming of age it had stood empty, pending
+a migration of the Brockhurst establishment, which migration had, in
+point of fact, never yet taken place. But now, as Lady Louisa, walking
+with a firm and distinguished tread along the gray, wind-swept
+pavements, remarked, the house was in process of redecoration, of
+painting within and without. And, looking on these things, Lady
+Louisa's soul received very sensible comfort. She was extremely
+tenacious of purpose. And, in respect of one purpose at least, heaven
+had not seen fit, during the last four or five months, to smile upon
+her. Superstitious persons might have regarded this fact as a warning.
+Lady Louisa, however, merely regarded it as an oversight. Now at last,
+so it appeared to her, heaven had awakened to a consciousness of its
+delinquencies, with the satisfactory result that her own commendable
+patience touched on reasonable hope of reward. And this was the more
+agreeable and comforting to her because the Quayle family affairs were
+not, it must be owned, at their brightest and best just at present.
+Clouds lowered on the family horizon. For some weeks she had felt the
+situation called for effective action on her part. But then, how to act
+most effectively she knew not. Now the needed opportunity stared her in
+the face, along with those high ladders and scaffolding poles
+surrounding the Calmady mansion. She decided, there and then, to take
+the field; but to take it discreetly, to effect a turning movement, not
+attempt a front attack.
+
+So, on her return to Albert Gate, after the completion of her morning
+shopping, she employed the half hour before luncheon in writing an
+affectionate, sisterly letter to Ludovic Quayle. That accomplished,
+young gentleman happened, as she was aware, to be staying at
+Brockhurst. She asked his opinion--in confidence--on the present very
+uncomfortable condition of the family fortunes, declaring how
+implicitly she trusted his good sense and respected his judgment. Then,
+passing adroitly to less burning questions, she ended thus--
+
+"Pray let Lady Calmady know how really _delighted everybody_ is to hear
+she and Sir Richard will be up this season. I do trust, as I am such a
+near neighbour, that if there is _anything_ I can do for her, either
+now, or later when they are settling, she will not hesitate to let me
+know. It would be such a _sincere_ pleasure to me. Mr. Barking is too
+busy with tiresome, parliamentary committees to be able to allow
+himself more than a week at Easter. I should be _thankful_ for a longer
+rest, for I am feeling dreadfully fagged. But you know how
+conscientious he always is; and of course one _must_ pay a certain
+price for the confidence the leaders of one's party repose in one. So
+do tell Lady Calmady we are _quite sure_ to be back immediately after
+Easter."
+
+Reading which sentences Mr. Quayle permitted himself a fine smile on
+more than one count.
+
+"Louisa reminds me of the sweet little poem of 'Bruce and the Spider,'"
+he said to himself. "She displays heroic persistence. Her methods are a
+trifle crude though. To provoke statements by making them is but a
+primitive form of diplomacy. Yet why be hard upon Louisa? Like my poor,
+dear father, she, more often than not, means well."
+
+It followed that some few days later, on his return to Whitney, Ludovic
+indited a voluminous letter to his sister, in his very best style. "It
+is rather a waste," he reflected regretfully. "She will miss the
+neatest points. The happiest turns of phrase will be lost upon Louisa!"
+To recoup himself for which subjective loss the young man amused
+himself by giving a very alarmist account of certain matters, though he
+was constrained to admit the pleasing fact that Sir Richard and Lady
+Calmady really had it in contemplation to go up to town somewhere about
+Easter.
+
+And, truth to tell, the main subject of Mr. Quayle's letter could
+hardly be otherwise than disquieting, for it was undeniable that Lord
+Shotover's debts were causing both himself and others serious
+embarrassment at this period. There was nothing new in this, that young
+nobleman's indebtedness being a permanent factor in his family's
+financial situation. This spring his indebtedness had passed from the
+chronic to the acute stage, that was all. With the consequence that it
+became evident Lord Shotover's debts must be paid, or his relations
+must submit to the annoyance of seeing him pass through the Bankruptcy
+Court. Which of these objectionable alternatives was least
+objectionable Lord Fallowfeild still stood in doubt, when, in obedience
+to the parental summons, the young man reached Whitney. Lord
+Fallowfeild had whipped himself up into a laudable heat of righteous
+indignation before the arrival of the prodigal. Yet he contrived to be
+out when the dog-cart conveying the said prodigal, and Mr. Decies of
+the 101st Lancers--a friend of Guy Quayle, home on leave from India,
+whence he brought news of his fellow-subaltern--actually drove up to
+the door. When, pushed thereto by an accusing conscience, he did at
+last come in, Lord Fallowfeild easily persuaded himself that there
+really was not time before dinner for the momentous conversation.
+Moreover, being very full of the milk of human kindness, he found it
+infinitely more agreeable to hear the praises of the absent son, Guy,
+than to fall foul of the present son, Shotover. So that it was not till
+quite late that night, by which time he was slightly sleepy, while his
+anger had sensibly evaporated, that the interview did, actually, take
+place.
+
+"Now then, Shotover, march off to the place of execution," Ludovic
+Quayle said sweetly, as he picked up his bedroom candlestick. "It was a
+deep and subtle thought that of bringing down Decies. Only, query, did
+you think of it, or was it just a bit of your usual luck?"
+
+Lord Shotover smiled rather ruefully upon his prosperous, and, it may
+be added, slightly parsimonious, younger brother.
+
+"Well, I don't deny it did occur to me it might work," he admitted.
+"And after all, you know, one mercy is there's no real vice about his
+dear old lordship."
+
+Lord Fallowfeild fidgeted about the library, his expression that of a
+well-nourished and healthy, but rather fretful infant.
+
+"Oh! ah!--well--so here you are, Shotover," he said. "Unpleasant
+business this of yours--uncommonly disagreeable business for both of
+us."
+
+"Deuced unpleasant business," the younger man echoed heartily. He
+closely resembled his father in looks, save that he was clean shaven
+and of a lighter build. Both father and son had the same slight lisp in
+speaking. "Deuced unpleasant," he repeated. "Nobody can feel that more
+than I do."
+
+"Can't they though," said Lord Fallowfeild, with a charmingly innocent
+air of surprise. "There, sit down, Shotover, won't you? It's a painful
+thing to do, but we've got to talk it over, I suppose."
+
+"Well, of course, if you're kind enough to give me the time, you
+know,--that's rather what I came down here for."
+
+"So you did though," the elder man returned, brightening as though
+making an illuminating discovery. Then, fearing he was forgetting his
+part and becoming amiable too rapidly, he made a gallant effort to whip
+up his somnolent indignation. "It's very distressing to me to put it so
+plainly, but in my opinion it's a disgraceful business."
+
+"Oh! I give you my word I know it," Lord Shotover replied, with most
+disarming candour. His father affected, with difficulty, not to hear
+the remark.
+
+"It doesn't do for a man in your position to be owing money all over
+the country. It brings the aristocracy into contempt with the
+shop-keeping class. They're always on the lookout for the shortcomings
+of their superiors, those people. And they do pay their debts, you
+see."
+
+"They've always got such a thundering lot of money," Lord Shotover put
+in. "Don't know how they'd contrive to spend it unless they did pay
+their debts."
+
+"Oh! ah!--yes----" His father hesitated. It struck him Shotover was a
+reasonable fellow, very reasonable, and he took the whole matter in a
+very proper spirit. In short, it was not easy to blow up Shotover. Lord
+Fallowfeild thrust his hands far down into his trouser pockets and
+turned sideways in the great, leather-covered chair.
+
+"I'm not narrow-minded or prejudiced," he began. "I always have kept on
+civil terms with those sort of people and always will. Courtesy is an
+obligation on the part of a gentleman and a Christian. I'd as soon be
+rude to my tailor as eat with my knife. But a man must respect his own
+rank or others won't respect it, especially in these nasty, radical,
+leveling times. You must stand by your class. There's a vulgar proverb
+about the bird that fouls its own nest, you know. Well, I never did
+that. I've always stood by my own class. Helped my poor brother
+Archibald--you can't remember him--weren't born at the time--to run
+away with Lady Jane Bateman. Low, common fellow Bateman. I never liked
+Bateman. She left Ludovic all that money, you know----"
+
+"Wish to goodness she'd left it to me," murmured Lord Shotover.
+
+"Eh?" inquired his father. Then he fell into a moralising vein. "Nasty,
+disreputable things elopements. I never did approve of elopements.
+Leave other men's wives alone, Shotover."
+
+The younger man's mouth worked a little.
+
+"The nuisance is sometimes they won't leave you alone."
+
+Lord Fallowfeild gazed at him a moment, very genially.
+
+"Oh! ah!--well--I suppose they won't," he said, and he chuckled.
+"Anyhow I stood by your poor Uncle Archibald. He was my brother of
+course, and she was a second cousin of your mother's, so I felt bound
+to. And I saw them across the Channel and into the Paris train.
+Dreadfully bad crossing that night I remember, no private cabins to be
+had, and Lady Jane was dreadfully ill. Never take your wife to sea on
+your honeymoon, Shotover. It's too great a risk. That business cost me
+a lot of money one way and another, and let me in for a most painful
+scene with Bateman afterwards. But, as I say, you're bound to stand by
+your own class. That'll be my only reason for helping you, you
+understand, Shotover, if I do help you."
+
+"And I am sure I hope you will."--The young man rose and stood with his
+back to the fire and his hands under his coat-tails. He stooped a
+little, looking down pensively at the hearth-rug between his feet. His
+clothes--not yet paid for, or likely to be--claimed admiration, so did
+the length of his legs and the neatness of his narrow hips.
+
+"I can only assure you I shall be most awfully grateful if you do help
+me," he said quietly. "I don't pretend to deserve it--but that doesn't
+lessen gratitude--rather the other way, don't you know. I shall never
+forget it."
+
+"Won't you though?"
+
+And for the life of him Lord Fallowfeild could not help beaming upon
+this handsome prodigal. "Uncommonly highbred looking fellow, Shotover,"
+he said to himself. "Don't wonder women run after him. Uncommonly high
+bred, and shows very nice feeling too."
+
+And then the kindly and simple gentleman drew himself up with a mental
+jerk, remembering that he was there to curse rather than to bless. He
+fidgeted violently.
+
+"Not that I have actually made up my mind to help you yet," he went on.
+"I am very much inclined to cast you adrift. It distresses me to put it
+to you so plainly, but you are disgracefully extravagant, you know,
+Shotover."
+
+"Oh! I know," the young man admitted.
+
+"You're a selfish fellow."--Lord Fallowfeild became relentless. "Yes,
+it's extremely painful to me to say it to you, but you are downright
+selfish. And that, in the long run, comes uncommonly hard on your
+sisters. Good girls, your sisters. Never given your mother or me any
+trouble, your sisters. But money has to come from somewhere, and each
+time I pay your debts I have to cut down your sisters' portions."
+
+"Yes, I know, and that's what's made me so infernally unwilling to come
+to you about my affairs," Lord Shotover said, in tones of perfectly
+genuine regret.
+
+"Is it though?" his father commented. "Good fellow at heart," he added
+to himself. "Displays very proper feeling. Always was a good-hearted
+fellow."
+
+"I can only tell you I've been awfully wretched about it for the last
+three months."
+
+"Have you though?" said Lord Fallowfeild, with sympathy.
+
+"I got just about as low as I well could. I felt I was nothing but a
+nuisance and encumbrance. It was beastly to think of fleecing the
+girls, don't you know. I came precious near cutting my throat--only
+that seemed rather a dirty way of getting out of it all."
+
+"So it is--poor boy--quite right. Nasty mean way of shirking your
+responsibilities. Quite agree with you. I have never had any opinion of
+a man who cut his throat. Never mention such a thing, Shotover." He
+blew his nose resonantly.--"Never talk of such a thing," he repeated.
+"And--poor boy--I--I'll pay your debts. Only I tell you this really is
+the last time. There must be no misunderstanding about that. You must
+reform, Shotover, if it's only on account of your sisters. I don't want
+to take an unfair advantage of you in alluding to your sisters. Only
+you must understand clearly this is the last time. You see it's
+becoming too frequent. I don't want to press the case unduly against
+you, but you recollect--I'm sure you do--I paid your debts in
+fifty-eight, and again in sixty-two, or sixty-three, was it? Yes, it
+must have been sixty-three, because that was the year my poor friend
+Tom Henniker died. Good fellow Henniker--I missed Henniker. And they
+wanted me to take over the hounds. Nice fellow in the hunting-field,
+Henniker. Never saw him lose his temper but once, and that was when
+Image rode over the hounds on the edge of Talepenny Wood."
+
+"Rather coarse sort of brute, Image," put in Lord Shotover.
+
+"And Henniker had such an excellent manner with the farmers, genial and
+cheery, very cheery at times and yet without any loss of dignity. Great
+test of a man's breeding that, being cheery without loss of dignity.
+Now my poor friend, Henniker--oh! ah! yes, where was I though? Your
+debts now, Shotover. Yes, it must have been sixty-three, because they
+all wanted me to succeed him as master, and I had to tell them I could
+not afford it, so it must have been just after I cleared you."
+
+He looked at his erring son with the most engaging air of appeal and
+remonstrance.
+
+"Really it won't do, Shotover," he repeated. "You must reform. It's
+becoming too frequent. You'd better travel for a time. That's the
+proper thing for a man in your position to do when he's in low water.
+Not scuttle, of course. I wouldn't on any account have you scuttle.
+But, three weeks or a month hence when things are getting into shape,
+just travel for a time. I'll arrange it all for you. Only never talk of
+cutting your throat again. And you quite understand this is positively
+the last time. I am very much in earnest, my dear boy, nothing will
+move me. This settlement is final. And we'll just run up quietly to
+town to-morrow and have a talk with my lawyers, Fox and Goteway. Very
+civil and accommodating fellow, Goteway--he may be able to make some
+suggestions. Very nice, confidential-mannered person, Goteway. Knows
+how to hold his tongue and doesn't ask unnecessary questions--useful
+man, Goteway----"
+
+Which things coming to the knowledge of Lady Louisa Barking moved her
+at once to wrath, and to deepened conviction that the moment for
+decisive action had arrived. It appeared to her that her father had put
+himself out of court. His weakness regarding his eldest son had
+practically delivered him into her hand. She congratulated herself upon
+the good which is thus beneficently permitted to spring out of evil.
+Yet while recognising that a just Providence sometimes, at all events,
+overrules human folly to the production of happy results, she was by no
+means disposed to spare the mortal whose individual foolishness had
+given the divine wisdom its opportunity. Therefore when, some few days
+later, Lord Fallowfeild called on her, after a third or fourth
+interview with Messrs. Fox and Goteway--beaming, expansive, from the
+sense of a merciful action accomplished--she received him in a
+distinctly repressive manner. The great, white and gold drawing-rooms
+in Albert Gate were not more frigid or unbending than the bearing of
+their mistress as she suffered her father's embrace. And that amiable
+nobleman, notwithstanding his large frame and exalted social position,
+felt himself shiver inwardly in the presence of his daughter, even as
+he could remember shivering when, as a small schoolboy, he had been
+summoned to the dread presence of the headmaster.
+
+"Very good rooms these of yours, Louisa," he began hastily. "Always
+have admired these rooms. Capital space for entertaining. Barking was
+quite right to secure the house as soon as it was in the market. I told
+him at the time he would never regret it."
+
+Lady Louisa did not answer, but called after the retreating footman,
+who had just brought in a stately and limited tea-tray, much silver and
+little food:--"I am not at home, William."
+
+Then, as she put small and accurate measures of tea into a massive
+teapot, she added severely:--"What is all this I hear about Shotover,
+papa?"
+
+"Oh! ah! yes--poor Shotover. Came up to town together again to-day.
+Good-hearted fellow, your brother Shotover, but thoughtless. However I
+have had a most satisfactory talk with my men of business, Fox and
+Goteway. I know Barking does not think much of Fox and Goteway. Wanted
+me to go to his own lawyers, Hodges and Banquet. But if any one serves
+you conscientiously you should not leave them. It's against my
+principles to turn off those who serve me conscientiously. I told
+Barking so at the time, I remember. It came out of the business about
+your settlements, wasn't it--or the last time I paid Shotover's----" He
+cleared his throat hurriedly. "I see the Calmadys' house is being done
+up," he continued. "Nice young fellow, Calmady. But I never can help
+feeling a certain awkwardness with him. Takes you up rather short in
+conversation too sometimes. Terribly distressing thing his deformity
+and all that, both for himself and Lady Calmady. Hope, perhaps, she
+doesn't feel it as some women would though--tactful woman, Lady
+Calmady, and very good woman of business. Still, never feel quite at my
+ease with Lady Calmady. Can't help wondering how they'll do in London,
+you know. Rather difficult thing his going about much with that----"
+
+Lady Louisa held out a small teacup. Her high penetrating voice
+asserted itself resolutely against her father's kindly, stumbling
+chatter, as she asked:--
+
+"Is it true you are not coming up from Whitney this season?"
+
+"Oh!--tea--yes, thank you very much, my dear. No--well, I think
+possibly we may not come up this year. Goteway believes he has heard of
+a very eligible tenant for the Belgrave Square house, very eligible.
+And so, nothing actually decided yet, but I think very possibly we may
+not come up."
+
+He spoke apologetically, regarding his daughter, over the small teacup,
+with an expression of entreaty. Every feature of his handsome, innocent
+countenance begged her not to deal harshly with him. But Lady Louisa
+remained obdurate.
+
+"Shotover's conduct is becoming a positive scandal," she said.
+
+"Not conduct, my dear--no, not conduct, only money," protested Lord
+Fallowfeild.
+
+"If money is not conduct I really don't know what is," retorted his
+daughter. "I do not pretend to go in for such fine distinctions. In any
+case Mr. Barking heard the most shocking rumours at his club the other
+day."
+
+"Did he though?" ejaculated Lord Fallowfeild.
+
+"He was too considerate to tell me anything very definite, but he felt
+that, going out and seeing everybody as of course I have to, it was
+only right I should have some hint of what was being said. Every one is
+talking about Shotover. You can imagine how perfectly intolerable it is
+for me to feel that my brother's debts are being canvassed in this sort
+of way."
+
+"I am very sorry there should be any gossip," Lord Fallowfeild said
+humbly. "Nasty thing gossip--lies, too, mostly, all of it. Nasty, low,
+unprofitable thing gossip."
+
+"And, of course, your all not coming up will give colour to it."
+
+"Will it though? I never thought of that. You always see straight
+through things, Louisa. You have by far the best head in the family,
+except Ludovic--uncommonly clever fellow Ludovic. Wonder if I had
+better talk it all over with Ludovic. If you and he agree in thinking
+our not coming up will make more talk, why, if only on Shotover's
+account, I----"
+
+But this was not in the least the turn which his daughter desired the
+conversation to take.
+
+"Pray remember you have other children besides Shotover, papa!" she
+said hastily. "And for every one's sake run no further risk of
+impoverishing yourself. It is obvious that you must save where you can.
+If there is the chance of a good let for the Belgrave Square house, it
+would be madness to refuse it. And, after all, you do not really care
+about London. If there are any important debates in the Lords, you can
+always come up for a night or so. It does not matter about you."
+
+"Oh! doesn't it though?" Lord Fallowfeild put in quite humbly and
+gently.
+
+"And mama would always rather stay on at Whitney. Only it must not
+appear as if we were the least uncomfortable at meeting people. I shall
+make it a point to go everywhere. I shall be dreadfully fagged, of
+course, but I feel it a duty to all of you to do so. And I should like
+the girls to go out too. People must not suppose they have no gowns to
+their backs. Maggie and Emily have had several seasons. I am less
+worried about them. But Connie must be seen. She is looking extremely
+pretty."
+
+"Isn't she though?" Lord Fallowfeild chimed in, brightening. The
+picture of those reportedly gownless backs had depressed him
+abominably.
+
+"Yes, and she must have every advantage. I have quite decided that. She
+must come up to me at once. I shall write to mama and point out to her
+how necessary it is that one of the girls, at least, should be very
+much _en evidence_ this year. And I am most anxious it should be
+Connie. As I undertake all the fatigue and responsibility I feel I have
+a right of choice. I will see that she is properly dressed. I undertake
+everything. Now, papa, if you are going down by the 6:10 train you
+ought to start. Will you have a hansom?"
+
+Then, as she shook hands with him, and presented an unresponsive cheek
+to the paternal lips, Lady Louisa clinched the matter.
+
+"I may consider it quite settled, then, about Constance?" she said. "I
+mentioned it to Mr. Barking yesterday, and we agreed it ought to be
+done even if it entailed a little inconvenience and expense. It is not
+right to be indifferent to appearances. The other two girls can come up
+for a little while later. Alicia must help. Of course there is not much
+room in that wretched, little Chelsea house of hers, but George
+Winterbotham can turn out of his dressing-room. Alicia must exert
+herself for once. And, papa, Connie need not bring a maid. Those
+country girls from Whitney don't always fit in quite well with the
+upper servants, and yet there is a difficulty about keeping them out of
+the housekeeper's room. I will provide a maid for her. I'll write to
+mama about everything to-morrow. And, papa, I do beg you will
+discourage Shotover from coming here, for really I would much rather
+not see him at present. Good-bye. Pray start at once. You have barely
+time to get to Waterloo."
+
+And so Lord Fallowfeild started, a little flustered, a little
+crestfallen, on his homeward journey.
+
+"Able woman, Louisa," he said to himself. "Uncommonly clear-sighted
+woman, Louisa. But a trifle hard. Wonder if Barking ever feels that,
+now? Not very sensitive man, Barking, though. Suppose that hardness in
+Louisa comes of her having no children. Always plenty of children in
+our family--except my poor brother Archibald and Lady Jane, they had no
+children. Yet somebody told me she'd had one by Bateman, which died.
+Never understood about that. Capital thing for Ludovic she never did
+have any by Archibald. But it's always curious to me Louisa should have
+no children. Shouldn't have expected that somehow of Barking and
+Louisa. Sets her more free, of course, in regard to her sisters. Very
+thoughtful for her sisters, Louisa. I suppose she must have Connie.
+Nuisance all this gossip about Shotover. Pretty child, Connie--best
+looking of the lot. People say she's like me. Wonderfully pretty child,
+Connie. That young fellow Decies thinks so too, or I'm very much
+mistaken. Very much attracted by Connie. Fine young fellow,
+Decies--comfort to hear of Guy from him. Suppose she must go up to
+Louisa. Gentlemanlike fellow, Decies. I shouldn't care to part with
+Connie----"
+
+And then, his reflections becoming increasingly interjectional as the
+train trundled away southwestward, Lord Fallowfeild leaned back in the
+corner of the railway carriage and fell very fast asleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+TELLING HOW VANITY FAIR MADE ACQUAINTANCE WITH RICHARD CALMADY
+
+
+There was no refusing belief to the fact. The old, cloistered life at
+Brockhurst, for good or evil, was broken up. Katherine Calmady
+recognised that another stage had been reached on the relentless
+journey, that new prospects opened, new horizons invited her anxious
+gaze. She recognised also that all which had been was dead, according
+to its existing form, and should receive burial, silent, somewhat
+sorrowful, yet not without hope of eventual resurrection in regard to
+the nobler part of it. The fair coloured petals of the flower fall away
+from the maturing fruit, the fruit rots to set free the seed. Yet the
+vital principle remains, life lives on, though the material clothing of
+it change. And, therefore, Katherine--an upspringing of patience and
+chastened fortitude within her, the result of her reconciliation to the
+Divine Light and resignation of herself to its indwelling--set herself,
+not to arrest the falling of the flower, but to help the ripening of
+the seed. If the old garments were out of date, too straight and narrow
+for her child's growth, then let others be found him. She did not wait
+to have him ask, she offered, and that without hint of reproach or of
+unwillingness.
+
+Yet so to offer cost her not a little. For it was by no means easy to
+sink her natural pride, and go forth smiling with this son of hers, at
+once beautiful and hideous in person, for all the world to see.
+Something of personal heroism is demanded of whoso prescribes heroic
+remedies, if those remedies are to succeed. At night, alone in the
+darkness, Katherine, suddenly awaking, would be haunted by perception
+of the curious glances, and curious comments, which must of necessity
+attend Richard through all the brilliant pageant of the London season.
+How would he bear it? And then--self-distrust laying fearful hands upon
+her--how would she bear it, too? Would her late acquired serenity of
+soul depart, her faith in the gracious purposes of Almighty God suffer
+eclipse? Would she fall back into her former condition of black anger
+and revolt? She prayed not. So long as these evils did not descend upon
+her, she could bear the rest well enough. For, could she but keep her
+faith, Katherine was beginning to regard all other suffering which
+might be in store for her as a negligible quantity. With her healthy
+body, and wholesome memories of a great and perfect human love, it was
+almost impossible that she should adopt a morbid and self-torturing
+attitude. Yet any religious ideal, worth the name, will always have in
+it an ascetic element. And that element was so far present with her
+that personal suffering had come to bear a not wholly unlovely aspect.
+She had ceased to gird against it. So long as Richard was amused and
+fairly content, so long as the evil which had been abroad in Brockhurst
+House, that stormy autumn night, could be frustrated, and the
+estrangement between herself and Richard,--unacknowledged, yet sensibly
+present,--which that evil had begotten, might be lessened she cared
+little what sacrifices she made, what fatigue, exertion, even pain, she
+might be called on to endure. An enthusiasm of self-surrender animated
+her.
+
+During the last five months, slowly and with stumbling feet; yet very
+surely, she had carried her life and the burden of it up to a higher
+plane. And, from that more elevated standpoint, she saw both past
+events and existing relationships in perspective, according to their
+just and permanent values. Only one object, one person, refused to
+range itself, and stood out from the otherwise calm, if pensive,
+landscape as a threatening danger, a monument of things wicked and
+fearful. Katherine tried to turn her eyes from that object, for it
+provoked in her a great hatred, a burning indignation, sadly at
+variance with the saintly ideals which had so captivated her mind and
+heart. Katherine remained--always would remain, happily for
+others--very much a woman. And, as woman and mother, she could not but
+hate that other woman who had, as she feared, come very near seducing
+her son.
+
+Therefore very various causes combined to reconcile her to the coming
+adventure. Indeed she set forth on it with so cheerful a countenance,
+that Richard, while charmed, was also a trifle surprised by the
+alacrity with which she embraced it. He regarded her somewhat
+critically, questioning whether his mother was of a more worldly and
+light-minded disposition than he had heretofore supposed.
+
+There had been some talk of Julius March joining the contemplated
+exodus. But he had declined, smiling rather sadly.
+
+"No, no," he said. "To go would be a mistake and a weakly selfish one
+on my part. I have long ceased to be a man of cities, and am best
+employed, and indeed am most at my ease, herding my few sheep here in
+the wilderness. I am part and parcel of just all that which we have
+agreed it is wise you shall leave behind you for a while. My presence
+would lessen the thoroughness of the change of scene and of thought.
+You take up a way of life which was familiar to you years ago. The
+habits of it will soon come back. I have never known them. I should be
+a hindrance, rather than a help. No, I will wait and keep the lamps
+burning before the altar, and the fire burning upon the hearth
+until--and, please God, it may be in peace, crowned with good
+fortune--you both come back."
+
+But the adventure, fairly embarked on, displayed quite other
+characteristics--as is the way with such skittish folk--than Katherine
+had anticipated. Against possibilities of mortification, against
+possibilities of covert laughter and the pointing fingers of the crowd,
+she had steeled herself. But it had not occurred to her that both
+Richard's trial and her own might take the form of an exuberant and
+slightly vulgar popularity, and that, far from being shoved aside into
+the gutter, the young man might be hoisted, with general acclamation,
+on to the very throne of Vanity Fair.
+
+The Brockhurst establishment moved up to town at the beginning of
+April. And by the end of the month, Sir Richard Calmady, his wealth,
+his house, his horses, his dinners, his mother's gracious beauty, and a
+certain mystery which surrounded him, came to be in every one's mouth.
+A new star had arisen in the social firmament, and all and sundry
+gathered to observe the reported brightness of its shining. Rich,
+young, good-looking, well-connected, and strangely unfortunate, here
+indeed was a novel and telling attraction among the somewhat fly-blown
+shows of Vanity Fair! Many-tongued rumour was busy with Dickie's name,
+his possessions and personality. The legend of the man--a thing often
+so very other than the man himself--grew, Jonah's gourd-like, in wild
+luxuriance. All those many persons who had known Lady Calmady before
+her retirement from the world, hastened to renew acquaintance with her.
+While a larger, and it may be added less distinguished, section of
+society, greedy of intimacy with whoso, or whatsoever, might represent
+the fashion of the hour, crowded upon their heels. Invitations showered
+down thick as snowflakes in January. To _get_ Sir Richard and Lady
+Calmady was to secure the success of your entertainment, whatever that
+entertainment might be--to secure it the more certainly because the two
+persons in question exercised a rather severe process of selection, and
+were by no means to be had for the asking.
+
+All these things Ludovic Quayle noted, in a spirit which he flattered
+himself was cynical, but which was, in point of fact, rather anxiously
+affectionate. It had occurred to him that this sudden and unlooked-for
+popularity might turn Richard's head a little, and develop in him a
+morbid self-love, that _vanite de monstre_ not uncommon to persons
+disgraced by nature. He had feared Richard might begin to plume
+himself--as is the way of such persons--less upon the charming
+qualities and gifts which he possessed in common with many other
+charming persons, than upon those deplorable peculiarities which
+differentiated him from them. And it was with a sincerity of relief, of
+which he felt a trifle ashamed, that, as time went on, Mr. Quayle found
+himself unable to trace any such tendency, that he observed his
+friend's wholesome pride and carefulness to avoid all exposure of his
+deformity. Richard would drive anywhere, and to any festivity, where
+driving was possible. He would go to the theatre and opera. He would
+dine at a few houses, and entertain largely at his own house. But he
+would not put foot to ground in the presence of the many women who
+courted him, or in that of the many men who treated him with rather
+embarrassed kindness and courtesy to his face and spoke of him with
+pitying reserve behind his back.
+
+Other persons, besides Mr. Quayle, watched Richard Calmady's social
+successes with interest. Among them was Honoria St. Quentin. That young
+lady had been spending some weeks with Sir Reginald and Lady Aldham in
+Midlandshire, and had now accompanied them up to town. Lady Aldham's
+health was indifferent, confining her often for days together to the
+sofa and a darkened room. Her husband, meanwhile, possessed a craving
+for agreeable feminine society, liable to be gratified in a somewhat
+errant manner abroad, unless gratified in a discreet manner at home. So
+Honoria had taken over the duty, for friendship's sake, of keeping the
+well-favoured, genial, middle-aged gentleman innocently amused. To
+Honoria, at this period, no experience came amiss. For the past three
+years, since the death of her godmother, Lady Tobermory, and her
+resultant access of fortune, she had wandered from place to place,
+seeing life, now in stately English country houses, now among the
+overtaxed, under-fed women-workers of Whitechapel and Soho, now in some
+obscure Italian village among the folds of the purple Apennines. Now
+she would patronise a middle-class British lodging-house, along with
+some girl friend richer in talent than in pence, in some seaside town.
+Now she would fancy the stringent etiquette of a British embassy at
+foreign court and capital. Honoria was nothing if not various. But,
+amid all mutations of occupation and of place, her fearlessness, her
+lazy grace, her serious soul, her gallant bearing, her loyalty to the
+oppressed, remained the same. "Chaste and fair" as Artemis,
+experimental as the Comte de St. Simon himself, Honoria roamed the
+world--fascinating yet never quite fascinated, enthusiastic yet
+evasive, seeking earnestly to live yet too self-centred as yet to be
+able to recognise in what, after all, consists the heart of living.
+
+She and Mr. Quayle had met at Aldham Revel during the past winter. She
+attracted, while slightly confusing, that accomplished young
+gentleman--confusing his judgment, well understood, since Mr. Quayle
+himself was incapable of confusion. Her views of men and things struck
+him as distinctly original. Her attitude of mind appeared
+unconventional, yet deeply rooted prejudices declared themselves where
+he would least have anticipated their existence. And so it became a
+favourite pastime of Mr. Quayle's to present to her cases of
+conscience, of conduct, of manners or morals--usually those of a common
+acquaintance--for discussion, that he might observe her verdict. He
+imagined this a scientific, psychologic exercise. He desired, so he
+supposed, to gratify his own superior, masculine intelligence, by
+noting the aberrations and arriving at the rationale of her thought.
+From which it may be suspected that even Ludovic Quayle had his hours
+of innocent self-deception. Be that, however, as it may, certain it is
+that in pursuit of this pastime he one day presented to her the
+peculiar case of Richard Calmady for discussion, and that, not without
+momentous, though indirect, result.
+
+It happened thus. One noon in May, Ludovic had the happiness of finding
+himself seated beside Miss St. Quentin in the Park, watching the
+endless string of passing carriages and the brilliant crowd on foot.
+Sir Reginald Aldham had left his green chair--placed on the far side of
+the young lady's--and leaned on the railings talking to some
+acquaintance.
+
+"A gay maturity," Ludovic remarked with his air of patronage,
+indicating the elder gentleman's shapely back. "The term 'old boy' has,
+alas, declined upon the vernacular, and been put to base uses of
+jocosity, so it is a forbidden one. Else, in the present instance, how
+applicable, how descriptive a term! Should we, I wonder, give thanks
+for it, Miss St. Quentin, that the men of my generation will mature
+according to a quite other pattern?"
+
+"Will not ripen, but sour?" Honoria asked maliciously. Her companion's
+invincible self-complacency frequently amused her. Then she
+added:--"But, you know, I'm very fond of him. It isn't altogether easy
+to keep straight as a young boy, is it? Depend upon it, it is ten times
+more difficult to keep straight as an old one. For a man of that
+temperament it can't be very plain sailing between fifty and sixty."
+
+Mr. Quayle looked at her in gentle inquiry, his long neck directed
+forward, his chin slightly raised.
+
+"Sailing? The yacht is?"--
+
+"The yacht is laid up at Cowes. And you understand perfectly well what
+I mean," Honoria replied, somewhat loftily. Her delicate face
+straightened with an expression of sensitive pride. But her anger was
+short-lived. She speedily forgave him. The sunshine and fresh air, the
+radiant green of the young leaves, the rather superb spectacle of
+wealth, vigour, beauty, presented to her by the brilliant London world
+in the brilliant, summer noon was exhilarating, tending to lightness of
+heart. There was poetry of an opulent, resonant sort in the brave show.
+Just then a company of Life Guards clattered by, in splendour of white
+and scarlet and shining helmets. The rattle of accoutrements, and thud
+of the hoofs of their trotting horses, detached itself arrestingly from
+the surrounding murmur of many voices and ceaseless roar of the traffic
+at Hyde Park Corner. A light came into Honoria's eyes. It was good to
+be alive on such a day! Moreover, in her own purely platonic fashion,
+she really entertained a very great liking for the young man seated at
+her side.
+
+"You have missed your vocation," she said, while her eyes narrowed and
+her upper lip shortened into a delightful smile. "You were born to be a
+schoolmaster, a veritable pedagogue and terror of illiterate youth. You
+love to correct. And my rather sketchy English gives you an opportunity
+of which I observe you are by no means slow to take advantage. You care
+infinitely more for the manner of saying, than for the thing said.
+Whereas I"--she broke off abruptly, and her face straightened, became
+serious, almost severe, again. "Do you see who Sir Reginald is speaking
+to?" she added. "There are the Calmadys."
+
+A break had come in the loitering procession of correctly clothed men
+and gaily clothed women, of tall hats and many coloured parasols, and
+in the space thus afforded, the Brockhurst mail-phaeton became apparent
+drawn up against the railings. The horses, a noticeably fine and
+well-matched pair of browns, were restless, notwithstanding the groom
+at their heads. Foam whitened the rings of their bits and falling
+flakes of it dabbled their chests. Lady Calmady leaned sideways over
+the leather folds of the hood, answering some inquiry of Sir Reginald,
+who, hat in hand, looked up at her. She wore a close-fitting, gray,
+velvet coat, which revealed the proportions of her full, but still
+youthful figure. The air and sunshine had given her an unusual
+brightness of complexion, so that in face as well as in figure, youth
+still, in a sensible measure, claimed her. She turned her head,
+appealing, as it seemed, to Richard, and the nimble breeze playing
+caressingly with the soft white laces and gray plumes of her bonnet
+added thereby somehow to the effect of glad and gracious content
+pervading her aspect. Richard looked round and down at her, half
+laughing. Unquestionably he was victoriously handsome, seen thus,
+uplifted above the throng, handling his fine horses, all trace of
+bodily disfigurement concealed, a touch of old-world courtliness and
+tender respect in his manner as he addressed his mother.
+
+Ludovic Quayle watched the little scene with close attention. Then, as
+the ranks of the smart procession closed up again, hiding the carriage
+and its occupants from sight, he leaned back with a movement of quiet
+satisfaction and turned to his companion. Miss St. Quentin sat round in
+her chair, presenting her long, slender, dust-coloured lace-and-silk-clad
+person in profile to the passers-by, and so tilting her parasol as to
+defy recognition. The expression of her pale face and singular eyes was
+far from encouraging.
+
+"Indeed--and why?" Ludovic permitted himself to remark, in tones of
+polite inquiry. "I had been led to believe that you and Lady Calmady
+were on terms of rather warm friendship."
+
+"We are," Honoria answered, "that is, at Brockhurst."
+
+"Forgive my indiscretion--but why not in London?"
+
+The young lady looked full at him.
+
+"Mr. Quayle," she asked, "is it true that you are responsible for this
+new departure of theirs, for their coming up, I mean?"
+
+"Responsible? You do me too great an honour. Who am I that I should
+direct the action of my brother man? But Lady Calmady is good enough to
+trust me a little, and I own that I advocated a modification of the
+existing _regime_."--Ludovic crossed his long legs and fell to nursing
+one knee. "It is not breach of confidence to tell you--since you know
+the fact already--that fate decreed an alien element should obtrude
+itself into the situation at Brockhurst last autumn. I need name no
+names, I think?"
+
+Honoria's head was raised. She regarded him steadfastly, but made no
+sign.
+
+"Ah! I need not name names," he repeated; "I thought not. Well, after
+the alien element removed itself--the two facts may have no
+connection--Lady Calmady very certainly never implied that they
+had--but, as I remarked, after the alien element removed itself, it was
+observable that our poor, dear Dickie Calmady became a trifle
+difficult, a trifle distrait, in plain English most remarkably grumpy,
+and far from delightful to live with. And his mother----"
+
+"It's too bad, altogether too bad!" broke out Honoria hotly.
+
+"Too bad of whom?" Mr. Quayle asked, with the utmost suavity. "Of the
+nameless, obtrusive, alien element, or of poor, dear Dick?"
+
+The young lady closed her parasol slowly, and turning, faced the
+sauntering crowd again.
+
+"Of Sir Richard Calmady, of course," she said.
+
+Her companion did not answer immediately. His eyes pursued a receding
+carriage far down the string, amid the gaily shifting sunshine and
+shadow, and the fluttering lace and gray feathers of a woman's bonnet.
+When he spoke, at last, it was with an unusual trace of feeling.
+
+"After all, you know, there are a good many excuses for Richard
+Calmady."
+
+"If it comes to that there are a good many excuses for Helen de
+Vallorbes," Honoria put in quickly.
+
+"For? For?" the young man repeated, relaxing into the blandest of
+smiles. "Yes, thanks--I see I was right. It was unnecessary to name
+names.--Oh! undoubtedly, innumerable excuses, and of the most valid
+description, were they needed--were they not swallowed up in the
+single, self-evident excuse that the lady you mention is a supremely
+clever and captivating person."
+
+"You think so?" said Honoria.
+
+"Think so? Show me the man so indifferent to his reputation for taste
+that he could venture to think otherwise!"
+
+"Still she should have left him alone."--Honoria's indolent, reflective
+speech took on a peculiar intonation, and she pressed her long-fingered
+hands together, as though controlling a shudder. "I--I'm ashamed to
+confess it, I do not like him. But, as I told you, just on that
+account----"
+
+"Pardon me, on what account?"
+
+Miss St. Quentin was quick to resent impertinence, and now momentarily
+anger struggled with her natural sincerity. But the latter conquered.
+Again she forgave Mr. Quayle. But a dull flush spread itself over her
+pale skin, and he perceived that she was distinctly moved. This piqued
+his curiosity.
+
+"I know I'm awfully foolish about some things," she said. "I can't bear
+to speak of them. I dread seeing them. The sight of them takes the
+warmth out of the sunshine."
+
+Again Ludovic fell to nursing his knee.--What an amazing invention is
+the feminine mind! What endless entertainment is derivable from
+striving to follow its tergiversations!
+
+"And you saw that which takes the warmth out of the sunshine just now?"
+he said. "Ah! well--alas, for Dickie Calmady!"
+
+"Still I can't bear any one not to play fair. You should only hit a man
+your own size. I told Helen de Vallorbes so. I'm very, very fond of
+her, but she ought to have spared him."--She paused a moment. "All the
+same if I had not promised Lady Aldham to stay on--as she's so poorly I
+should have gone out of town when I found the Calmadys had come up."
+
+"Oh! it goes as far as that, does it?" Ludovic murmured.
+
+"I don't like to see them with all these people. The extent to which he
+is petted and fooled becomes rather horrible."
+
+"Are you not slightly--I ask it with all due deference and
+humility--just slightly merciless?"
+
+"No, no," the girl answered earnestly. "I don't think I'm that. The
+women who run after him, and flatter him so outrageously, are really
+more merciless than I am. I do not pretend to like him--I can't like
+him, somehow. But I'm growing most tremendously sorry for him. And
+still more sorry for his mother. She was very grand--a person
+altogether satisfying to one's imagination and sense of fitness, at
+home, with that noble house and park and racing stable for setting. But
+here, she is shorn of her glory somehow."
+
+The girl rose to her feet with lazy grace.
+
+"She is cheapened. And that's a pity. There are more than enough pretty
+cheap people among us already.--I must go. There's Sir Reginald looking
+for me.--If I could be sure Lady Calmady hated it all I should be more
+reconciled."
+
+"Possibly she does hate it all, only that it presents itself as the
+least of two evils."
+
+"There is a touch of dancing dogs about it, and that distresses me,"
+Miss St. Quentin continued. "It is Lady Calmady's _role_ to be apart,
+separate from and superior to the rest."
+
+"The thing's being done as well as it can be," Mr. Quayle put in
+mildly.
+
+"It shouldn't be done at all," the girl declared.--"Here I am, Sir
+Reginald. You want to go on? I'm quite ready."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IN WHICH KATHERINE TRIES TO NAIL UP THE WEATHERGLASS TO SET FAIR
+
+
+It is to be feared that intimate acquaintance with Lady Calmady's
+present attitude of mind would not have proved altogether satisfactory
+to that ardent idealist Honoria St. Quentin. For, unquestionably, as
+the busy weeks of the London season went forward, Katherine grew
+increasingly far from "hating it all." At first she had found the
+varied interests and persons presented to her, the rapid interchange of
+thought, the constant movement of society, slightly bewildering. But,
+as Julius March had foretold, old habits reasserted themselves. The
+great world, and the ways of it, had been familiar to her in her youth.
+She soon found herself walking in its ways again with ease, and
+speaking its language with fluency. And this, though in itself of but
+small moment to her, procured her, indirectly, a happiness as greatly
+desired as it had been little anticipated.
+
+For to Richard the great world was, as yet, something of an
+undiscovered country. Going forth into it he felt shy and diffident,
+though a lively curiosity possessed him. The gentler and more modest
+elements of his nature came into play. He was sensible of his own
+inexperience, and turned with instinctive trust and tender respect to
+her in whom experience was not lacking. He had never, so he told
+himself, quite understood how fine a lady his mother was, how
+conspicuous was her charm and distinguished her intelligence. And he
+clung to her, grown man though he was, even as a child, entering a
+bright room full of guests, clings to its mother's hand, finding
+therein much comfort of encouragement and support. He desired she
+should share all his interests, reckoning nothing worth the doing in
+which she had not a part. He consulted her before each undertaking,
+talked and laughed over it with her in private afterwards, thereby
+unconsciously securing to her halcyon days, a honeymoon of the heart of
+infinite sweetness, so that she, on her part, thanked God and took
+courage.
+
+And, indeed, it might very well appear to Katherine that her heroic
+remedy was on the road to work an effectual cure. The terror of lawless
+passion and of evil, provoked by that fair woman clothed as with the
+sea waves, crowned and shod with gold, whom she had withstood so
+manfully in spirit in the wild autumn night, departed from her. She
+began to fear no more. For surely her son was wholly given back to
+her--his heart still free, his life still innocent? And, not only did
+this terror depart, but her anguish at his deformity was strangely
+lessened, the pain of it lulled as by the action of an anodyne. For,
+witnessing the young man's popularity, seeing him so universally
+courted and welcomed, observing his manifest power of attraction, she
+began to ask herself whether she had not exaggerated the misfortune of
+that same deformity and the impediment that it offered to his career
+and chances of personal happiness. She had been morbid, hypersensitive.
+The world evidently saw in his disfigurement no such horror and
+hopeless bar to success as she had seen. It was therefore a dear world,
+a world rich in consolation and promise. It smiled upon Richard, and so
+she smiled upon it, gratefully, trustfully, finding in the plenitude of
+her thankfulness no wares save honest ones set out for sale in the
+booths of Vanity Fair. A large hopefulness arose in her. She began to
+form projects calculated, as she believed, to perpetuate the gladness
+of the present.
+
+Among other tender customs of Richard's boyhood into which Katherine,
+at this happy period, drifted back was that of going, now and again, to
+his room at night, and gossiping with him, for a merry, yet somewhat
+pathetic half-hour, before herself retiring to rest. It fell out that,
+towards the middle of June, there had been a dinner party at the
+Barkings on a scale of magnificence unusual even in that opulent house.
+It was not the second, or even the third, time Richard and his mother
+had dined in Albert Gate. For Lady Louisa had proved the most
+assiduously attentive of neighbours. Little Lady Constance Quayle was
+with her. The young girl had brightened notably of late. Her prettiness
+was enhanced by a timid and appealing playfulness. She had been seized,
+moreover, with one of those innocent and absorbing devotions towards
+Lady Calmady, that young girls often entertain towards an elder woman,
+following her about with a sort of dog-like fidelity, and watching her
+with eyes full of wistful admiration. On the present occasion the
+guests at the Barking dinner had been politicians of distinction--members
+of the then existing government. A contingent of foreign diplomatists
+from the various embassies had been present, together with various
+notably smart women. Later there had been a reception, largely
+attended, and music, the finest that Europe could produce and money
+could buy.
+
+"Louisa climbs giddy heights," Mr. Quayle had said to himself, with an
+attempt at irony. But, in point of fact, he was far from displeased,
+for it appeared to him the house of Barking showed to uncommon
+advantage to-night. "Louisa has no staying power in conversation, and
+her voice is too loud, but in snippets she is rather impressive," he
+added. "And, oh! how very diligent is Louisa!"
+
+Driving home, Richard kept silence until just as the brougham drew up,
+then he said abruptly:--
+
+"Tired? No--that's right. Then come and sit with me. I want to talk. I
+haven't an ounce of sleep in me somehow to-night."
+
+It was hot, and when, some three-quarters of an hour later, Katherine
+entered the big bedroom on the ground floor, the upper sashes of the
+window were drawn low behind the blinds, letting in the muffled roar of
+the great city as an undertone to the intermittent sound of footsteps,
+or the occasional passing of a belated carriage or cab. It formed an
+undertone, also, to Richard's memory of the music to which he had
+lately listened, and the delight of which was still in his ears and
+pulsing in his blood, making his blue eyes bright and dark and curving
+his handsome lips into a very eloquent smile as he lay back against the
+piled-up pillows of the bed.
+
+"Good heavens, how divinely Morabita sang," he said, looking up at his
+mother as she stood looking down on him, "better even than in _Faust_
+last night! I want to hear her again just as often as I can. Her voice
+carries one right away, out of oneself, into regions of pure and
+unmitigated romance. All things are possible for the moment. One
+becomes as the gods, omnipotent. We've got the box as usual on
+Saturday, mother, haven't we? Do you remember if she sings?"
+
+Katherine replied that the great soprano did sing.
+
+"I'm glad," Richard said; "and yet I don't know that it's particularly
+wholesome to hear her. After being as the gods, one descends with
+rather too much of a run to the level of the ordinary mortal."--He
+turned on his elbow restlessly, and the movement altered the lie of the
+bedclothes, thereby disclosing the unsightly disproportion of his
+person through the light blanket and sheet. "And if one's own level
+happens unfortunately to be below that of even the ordinary
+mortal--well--well--don't you know----"
+
+"My dear!" Katherine put in softly.
+
+Richard lay straight on his back again, and held out his hand to her.
+
+"Sit down, do," he said. "Turn the big chair round so that I may see
+you. I like you in that frilly, white dressing-gown thing. Don't be
+afraid, I'm not going to be a brute and grumble. You're much too good
+to me, and I know I am disgustingly selfish at times. I was this
+winter, but----"
+
+"The past is past," Katherine put in again very softly.
+
+"Yes, please God, it is," he said,--"in some ways."--He paused, and
+then spoke as though with an effort returning from some far distance of
+thought:--"Yes, I like you in that white, frilly thing. But I liked
+that new, black gown of yours to-night too. You looked glorious, do you
+mind my saying so? And no woman walks as well as you do. I compared, I
+watched. There's nothing more beautiful than seeing a woman walk really
+well--or a man either, for that matter."
+
+Then he caught at her hand again, laughing a little.--"No, I'm not
+going to grumble," he said. "Upon my word, mother, I swear I'm not.
+Here let's talk about your gowns. I should like to know, shall you
+never wear anything but gray or black?"
+
+"Never, not even to please you, Dickie."
+
+"Ah, that's so delicious with you!" he exclaimed. "Every now and then
+you bring one up short, one knocks one's head against a stone wall!
+There is an indomitable strain in you. I only hope you've transmitted
+it to me. I'm afraid I need stiffening.--I beg your pardon," he added
+quickly and courteously, "it strikes me I am becoming slightly
+impertinent. But that woman's voice has turned my brain and loosed the
+string of my tongue so that I speak words of unwisdom. You enjoyed her
+singing too, though, didn't you? I thought so, catching sight of you
+while it was going on, attended by the faithful Ludovic and little Lady
+Constance. It's quite touching to see how she worships you. And wasn't
+Miss St. Quentin with you too? Yes, I thought so. I can't quite make up
+my mind about Honoria St. Quentin. Sometimes she strikes me as one of
+the loveliest women here--and she can walk, if you like, it's a joy to
+see her. And then again, she seems to me altogether too long, and
+off-hand somehow, and boyish! And then, too,"--Richard moved his head
+against the white pillows, and stared up at the window, where the blind
+sucked, with small creaking noises, against the top edge of the open
+sash,--"she fights shy of me, and personal feeling militates against
+admiration, you know. I am sorry, for I rather want to talk to her
+about--oh, well, a whole lot of things. But she avoids me. I never get
+the opportunity."
+
+"My darling, don't you think that is partly imagination?"
+
+"Perhaps it is," he answered. "I dare say I do indulge in unnecessary
+fancies about people's manner and so on. I can't very well be off it,
+you know. And every one is really very kind to me. Morabita was
+perfectly charming when I thanked her in very floundering Italian. It's
+a pity she's so fat. But, never mind, the fat vanishes, to all intents
+and purposes, when she begins to sing. And old Barking is as kind as he
+can be. I feel awfully obliged to him, though his ministrations
+to-night amounted to being slightly embarrassing. He brought me cabinet
+ministers and under-secretaries, and gorgeous Germans and Turks, in
+batches--and even a real live Chinaman with a pig-tail. Mother, do you
+remember the cabinets at home in the Long Gallery? I used to dream
+about them. And that Chinaman gave me the queerest feeling to-night. It
+was idiotic, but--did I ever tell you--when I was a little chap, I was
+always dreaming about war or something, from which I couldn't get away.
+Others could, but for me--from circumstances, don't you know--there was
+no possibility of scuttling. And the little Chinese figures on the
+black, lacquer cabinets were mixed up with it. As I say, it gripped me
+to-night in the midst of all those people and---- Oh yes! old Barking
+is very kind," he went on, with a change of tone. "Only I wish Lady
+Louisa would warn him he need not trouble himself to be amusing. He
+came and sat by me, towards the end of the evening, and told me the
+most inane stories in that inflated manner of his. Verily, they were
+ancient as the hills, and a weariness to the spirit. But that
+good-looking, young fellow, Decies, swallowed them all down with the
+devoutest attention and laughed aloud in all that he conceived to be
+the right places."
+
+A pause came in Richard's flow of words. He moved again restlessly and
+clasped his hands under his head. Katherine had seldom seen him thus
+excited and feverish. A sense of alarm grew on her, lest her heroic
+remedy was, after all, not working a wholly satisfactory cure. For
+there was a violence in his utterance, and in his face, a certain
+recklessness of speech and of demeanour, very agitating to her.
+
+"Oh, every one's kind, awfully kind," he repeated, looking away at the
+sucking blind again, "and I'm awfully grateful to them, but---- Oh! I
+tell you, that woman's voice has got me and made me drunk, made me mad
+drunk. I almost wish I had never heard her. I think I won't go to the
+opera again. Emotion that finds no outlet in action only demoralises
+one and breaks up one's philosophy, and she makes me know all that
+might be, and is not, and never, never can be. Good God! what a
+glorious, what an amazing, business I could have made of life if----"
+He slipped a little on the pillows, had to unclasp his hands hastily
+and press them down on either side him, to keep his body fairly upright
+in the bed. His features contracted with a spasm of anger. "If I had
+only had the average chance," he added harshly. "If I had only started
+with the normal equipment."
+
+And, as she listened, the old anguish, lately lulled to rest in
+Katherine's heart, arose and cried aloud. But she sought resolutely to
+stifle its crying, strong in faith and hope.
+
+"I know, my dearest, I know," she said pleadingly. "And yet, since we
+have been here, I have thought perhaps we had a little underrated both
+your happy gift of pleasing and the readiness of others to be pleased.
+It seems to me, Dickie, all doors open if you stretch out your hand.
+Well, my dear, I would have you go forward fearlessly. I would have you
+more ambitious, more self-confident. I see and deplore my own cowardly
+mistake. Instead of hiding you away at home, and keeping you to myself,
+I ought to have encouraged you to mix in the world and fill the
+position to which both your powers and your birth entitle you. I was
+wrong--I lament my folly. But there is ample time in which to rectify
+my mistake."
+
+Richard's face relaxed.
+
+"I wonder--I wonder," he said.
+
+"I am sure," she replied.
+
+"You are too sanguine," he said. "Your love for me blinds you to fact."
+
+"No, no," she replied again. "Love is the only medium in which vision gains
+perfect clearness, becomes trustworthy and undistorted."--Instinctively
+Katherine folded her hands as in prayer, while the brightness of a pure
+enthusiasm shone in her sweet eyes. "That I have learned beyond all
+possibility of dispute. It has been given me, through much tribulation,
+to arrive at that."
+
+Richard smiled upon her tenderly, then, turning his head, remained
+silent for a while. The sullen roar of the great city invaded the quiet
+room through the open windows, the heavy regular tread of a policeman
+on his beat, a shrill whistle hailing a hansom from a house some few
+doors distant up the square, and then an answering rumble of wheels and
+clatter of hoofs. Richard's face had grown fierce again, and his breath
+came quick. He turned on his side, and once more the dwarfed
+proportions of his person became perceptible. Lady Calmady averted her
+eyes, fixing them upon his. But even there she found sad lack of
+comfort, for in them she read the inalienable distress and desolation
+of one unhandsomely treated by Nature, maimed and incomplete. Even the
+Divine Light, resident within her, failed to reconcile her to that
+reading. She shrank back in protest, once again, against the dealing of
+Almighty God with this only child of hers. And yet--such is the
+adorable paradox of a living faith--even while shrinking, while
+protesting, she flung herself for support, for help, upon the very
+Being who had permitted, in a sense caused, her misery.
+
+"Mother can I say something to you?" Richard asked, rather hoarsely, at
+last.
+
+"Anything--in heaven or earth."
+
+"But it is a thing not usually spoken of as I want to speak of it. It
+may seem indecent. You won't be disgusted, or think me wanting in
+respect or in modesty?"
+
+"Surely not," Lady Calmady answered quietly, yet a certain trembling
+took her, a nervousness as in face of the unknown. This strong, young
+creature developed forces, presented aspects, in his present feverish
+mood, with which she felt hardly equal to cope.
+
+"Mother, I--I want to marry."
+
+"I, too, have thought of that," she said.
+
+"You don't consider that I am debarred from marriage?"
+
+"Oh, no, no!" Katherine cried, a little sob in her voice.
+
+He looked at her steadily, with those profoundly desolate eyes.
+
+"It would not be wrong? It would not be otherwise than honourable?" he
+asked.
+
+If doubts arose within Katherine of the answer to that question, she
+crushed them down passionately.
+
+"No, my dearest, no," she declared. "It would not be wrong--it could
+not, could not be so--if she loved you, and you loved whomsoever you
+married."
+
+"But I'm not in love--at least not in love with any person who can
+become my wife. Yet that does not seem to me to matter very much. I
+should be faithful, no fear, to any one who was good enough to marry
+me. Enough of love would come, if only out of gratitude, towards the
+woman who would accept me as--as I am--and forgive that--that which
+cannot be helped."
+
+Again trembling shook Katherine. So terribly much seemed to her at
+stake just then! Silently she implored wisdom and clear-seeing might be
+accorded her. She leaned a little forward, and taking his left hand
+held it closely in both hers.
+
+"Dearest, that is not all. Tell me all," she said, "or I cannot quite
+follow your thought."
+
+Richard flung his body sideways across the bed, and kissed her hands as
+they held his. The hot colour rushed over his face and neck, up to the
+roots of his close-cropped, curly hair. He spoke, lying thus upon his
+chest, his face half buried in the sheet.
+
+"I want to marry because--because I want a child--I want a son," he
+said.
+
+No words came to Katherine just then. But she disengaged one hand and
+laid it upon the dear brown head, and waited in silence until the
+violence of the young man's emotion had spent itself, until the broad,
+muscular shoulders had ceased to heave and the strong, young hands to
+grasp her wrist. Suddenly Richard recovered himself, sat up, rubbing
+his hands across his eyes, laughing, but with a queer catch in his
+voice.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said. "I'm a fool, an awful fool. Hang Morabita
+and her voice and the golden houses of the gods, and beastly, showy
+omnipotence to which her voice carries one away! To talk
+sense--mother--just brutal common sense. My fate is fixed, you know.
+There's no earthly use in wriggling. I am condemned to live a cow's
+life and die a cow's death. The pride of life may call, but I can't
+answer. The great prizes are not for me. I'm too heavily handicapped. I
+was looking at that young fellow, Decies, to-night and considering his
+chances as against my own---- Oh! I know there's wealth in plenty. The
+pasture's green enough to make many a man covet it, and the stall's
+well bedded-down. I don't complain. Only mother, you know--I know.
+Where's the use of denying that which we neither of us ever really
+forget?--And then sometimes my blood takes fire. It did to-night. And
+the splendour of living being denied me, I--I--am tempted to say a
+Black Mass. One must take it out somehow. And I know I could go to the
+devil as few men have ever gone, magnificently, detestably, with
+subtleties and refinements of iniquity."
+
+He laughed again a little. And, hearing him, his mother's heart stood
+still.
+
+"Verily, I have advantages," he continued. "There should be a
+picturesqueness in my descent to hell which would go far to place my
+name at the head of the list of those sinners who have achieved
+immortality----"
+
+"Richard! Richard!" Lady Calmady cried, "do you want to break my heart
+quite?"
+
+"No," he answered, simply. "I'd infinitely rather not break your heart.
+I have no ambition to see my name in that devil's list except as an
+uncommonly ironical sort of second best. But then we must make some
+change, some radical change. At times, lately, I've felt as if I was a
+caged wild beast--blinded, its claws cut, the bars of its cage soldered
+and riveted, no hope of escape, and yet the vigour, the immense longing
+for freedom and activity, there all the while."
+
+Richard stretched himself.
+
+"Poor beast, poor beast, poor beast!" he said, shaking his head and
+smiling. "I tell you I get absurdly sentimental over it at times."
+
+And then, happily, there came a momentary lapse in the entirety of his
+egoism. He turned on his side and took Lady Calmady's hand again, and
+fell to playing absently with her bracelets.
+
+"You poor darling, how I torture you," he said. "And yet, now we've
+once broken the ice and begun talking of all this, we're bound to talk
+on to the finish--if finish there is. You see these few weeks in
+London--I've enjoyed them--but still they've made me understand, more
+than ever, all I've missed. Life calls, mother, do you see? And though
+the beast is blind, and his claws are cut, and his cage bolted, yet,
+when life calls, he must answer--must--or run mad--or die--do you see?"
+
+"And you shall answer, my beloved. Never fear, you will answer,"
+Katherine replied proudly.
+
+Richard's hand closed hard upon hers.
+
+"Thank you," he said. "You were made to be a mother of heroes, not of a
+useless log like me.--And that's just why I want to be good. And to be
+good I want a wife, that I may have that boy. I could keep straight for
+him, mother, though I'm afraid I can't keep straight for myself, and
+simply because it's right, much longer. I want him to have just all
+that I am denied. I want him to restore the balance, both for you and
+for me. I may have something of a career myself, perhaps, in politics
+or something. It's possible, but that will come later, if it comes at
+all. And then it would be for his sake. What I want first is the boy,
+to give me an object and keep up my pluck, and keep me steady. I,
+giving him life, shall find my life in him, be paid for my wretched
+circumscribed existence by his goodly and complete one. He may be
+clever or not--I'd rather, of course, he was not quite a dunce--but I
+really don't very much mind, so long as he isn't an outrageous fool, if
+he's only an entirely sound and healthy human animal."
+
+Richard stretched himself upon the bed, straightened the sheet across
+his chest, and clasped his hands under his head again. The desolation
+had gone out of his eyes. He seemed to look afar into the future, and
+therein see manly satisfaction and content. His voice was vibrant,
+rising to a kind of chant.
+
+"He shall run, and he shall swim, he shall fence, and he shall row," he
+said. "He shall learn all gallant sports, as becomes an English
+gentleman. And he shall ride,--not as I ride, God forbid! like a monkey
+strapped on a dog at a fair, but as a centaur, as a young demigod. We
+will set him, stark naked, on a bare-backed horse, and see that he's
+clean-limbed, perfect, without spot or blemish, from head to heel."
+
+And once more Katherine Calmady held her peace, somewhat amazed,
+somewhat tremulous, since it seemed to her the young man was drawing a
+cheque upon the future which might, only too probably, be dishonoured
+and returned marked no account. For who dare say that this child would
+ever come to the birth, or coming, what form it would bear? Yet, even
+so, she rejoiced in her son and the high spirit he displayed, while the
+instinct of romance which inspired his speech touched an answering
+chord in, and uplifted, her.
+
+By now the brief June night was nearly spent. The blind still creaked
+against the open window sash, but the thud of horse-hoofs and beat of
+passing footsteps had become infrequent, while the roar of the mighty
+city had dwindled to a murmur, as of an ebbing tide upon a shallow,
+sand-strewn beach. The after-light of the sunset, walking the horizon,
+beneath the Pole star from west to east, broadened upward now towards
+the zenith. Even here, in the heart of London, the day broke with a
+spacious solemnity. Richard raised himself, and, sitting up, blew out
+the candles placed on the table at the bedside.
+
+"Mother," he said, "will you let in the morning?"
+
+Lady Calmady was pale from her long vigil, and her unspoken, yet
+searching, emotion. She appeared very tall, ghostlike even, in her
+soft, white raiment, as she moved across and drew up the sucking blind.
+Above the gray parapets of the houses, and the ranks of contorted
+chimney-pots, the loveliness of the summer dawn grew wide. Warm amber
+shaded through gradations of exquisite and nameless colour into blue.
+While, across this last, lay horizontal lines of fringed,
+semi-transparent, opalescent cloud. To Katherine those heavenly blue
+interspaces spoke of peace, of the stilling of all strife, when the
+tragic, yet superb, human story should at last be fully told and God be
+all in all. She was very tired. The struggle was so prolonged. Her soul
+cried out for rest. And then she reminded herself, almost sternly, that
+the kingdom of God and the peace of it is no matter of time or of
+place, but is within the devout believer, ever present, immediate,
+possessing his or her soul, and by that soul in turn possessed. Just
+then the sparrows, roosting in the garden of the square, awoke with
+manifold and vociferous chirping and chattering. The voice from the bed
+called to her.
+
+"Mother," it said imperatively, "come to me. You are not angry at what
+I have told you? You understand? You will find her for me?"
+
+Lady Calmady turned away from the open window and the loveliness of the
+summer dawn. She was less tired somehow. God was with her, so she could
+not be otherwise than hopeful. Moreover, the world had proved itself
+very kind towards her son. It would not deny him this last request,
+surely?
+
+"My dearest, I think I have found her already," Lady Calmady answered.
+
+Yet, even as she spoke, she faltered a little, recognising the energy
+and strength manifest in the young man's countenance, remembering his
+late discourse, and the pent-up fires of his nature to which that
+discourse had borne only too eloquent testimony. For who was a young
+girl, but just out of the schoolroom, a girl in pretty, fresh
+frocks--the last word of contemporary fashion,--whose baby face and
+slow, wide-eyed gaze bore witness to her entire innocence of the great
+primitive necessities, the rather brutal joys, the intimate vices, the
+far-ranging intellectual questionings which rule and mould the action
+of mankind,--who was she, indeed, to cope with a nature such as
+Richard's?
+
+"Mother, tell me, who is it?"
+
+And instinctively Katherine fell to pleading. She sat down beside the
+bed again and smoothed the sheet.
+
+"You will be tender and loving to her, Dickie?" she said. "For she is
+young and very gentle, and might easily be made afraid. You will not
+forget what is due to your wife, to your bride, in your longing for a
+child?"
+
+"Who is it?" Richard demanded again.
+
+"Ludovic's sister--little Lady Constance Quayle."
+
+He drew in his breath sharply.
+
+"Would she--would her people consent?" he said.
+
+"I think so. Judging by appearances, I am almost sure they would
+consent."
+
+A long silence followed. Richard lay still, looking at the rosy flush
+that broadened in the morning sky and touched the bosoms of those
+delicate clouds with living, pulsating colour. And he flushed too, all
+his being softened into a great tenderness, a great shyness, a quick
+yet noble shame. For his whole attitude towards this question of
+marriage changed strangely as it passed from the abstract, from regions
+of vague purpose and desire, to the concrete, to the thought of a
+maiden with name and local habitation, a maiden actual and accessible,
+whose image he could recall, whose pretty looks and guileless speech he
+knew.
+
+"I almost wish she was not Ludovic's sister, though," he remarked
+presently. "It is a great deal to ask."
+
+"You have a great deal to offer," Katherine said, adding: "You can care
+for her, Dickie?"
+
+He turned his head, his lips working a little, his flushed face very
+young and bright.
+
+"Oh yes! I can care fast enough," he said. "And I think--I think I
+could make her happy. And you see, already she worships you. We would
+pet her, mother, and give her all manner of pretty things, and make a
+little queen of her--and she would be pleased--she's a child, such a
+child."
+
+Richard remained awake far into the morning, till the rose had died out
+of the sky, and the ascending smoke of many kitchen-chimneys began to
+stain the expanse of heavenly blue. The thought of his possible bride
+was very sweet to him. But when at last sleep came, dreams came
+likewise. Helen de Vallorbes' perfect face arose, in reproach, before
+him, and her azure and purple draperies swept over him, stifling and
+choking him as the salt waves of an angry sea. Then some one--it was
+the comely, long-limbed young soldier, Mr. Decies--whom he had seen
+last night at the Barkings' great party when Morabita sang--and the
+soprano's matchless voice was mixed up, in the strangest fashion, with
+all these transactions--lifted Helen and all her magic sea-waves from
+off him, setting him free. But even as he did so, Dickie perceived that
+it was not Helen, after all, whom the young soldier carried in his
+arms, but little Lady Constance Quayle. Whereupon Richard, waking with
+a start, conceived a wholly unreasoning detestation of Mr. Decies,
+while, along with that, his purpose of marrying Lady Constance
+increased notably, waxed strong and grew, putting forth all manner of
+fair flowers of promise and of hope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A LESSON UPON THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT--"PARENTS OBEY YOUR CHILDREN"
+
+
+A family council was in course of holding in the lofty, white-and-gold
+boudoir, overlooking the Park, in Albert Gate. Lady Louisa Barking had
+summoned it. She had also exercised a measure of selection among
+intending members. For instance Lady Margaret and Lady Emily,--the
+former having a disposition, in the opinion of her elder sister, to put
+herself forward and support the good cause with more zeal than
+discretion, the latter being but a weak-kneed supporter of the cause at
+best,--were summarily dismissed.
+
+"It was really perfectly unnecessary to discuss this sort of thing
+before the younger girls," she said. "It put them out of their place
+and rather rubbed the freshness off their minds. And then they would
+chatter among themselves. And it all became a little foolish and missy.
+They never knew when to stop."
+
+One member of the Quayle family, and that a leading one, had taken his
+dismissal before it was given and, with a nice mixture of defective
+moral-courage and good common-sense, had removed himself bodily from
+the neighbourhood of the scene of action. Lord Shotover was still in
+London. Along with the payment of his debts had come a remarkable
+increase of cheerfulness. He made no more allusions to the unpleasant
+subject of cutting his throat, while the proposed foreign tour had been
+relegated to a vague future. It seemed a pity not to see the season
+out. It would be little short of a crime to miss Goodwood. He might go
+out with Decies to India in the autumn, when that young soldier's leave
+had expired, and look Guy up a bit. He would rather like a turn at
+pig-sticking--and there were plenty of pig, he understood, in the
+neighbourhood of Agra, where his brother was now stationed. On the
+morning in question, Lord Shotover, in excellent spirits, had walked
+down Piccadilly with his father, from his rooms in Jermyn Street to
+Albert Gate. The elder gentleman, arriving from Westchurch by an early
+train, had solaced himself with a share of the by no means ascetic
+breakfast of which his eldest son was partaking at a little after
+half-past ten. It was very much too good a breakfast for a person in
+Lord Shotover's existing financial position--so indeed were the
+rooms--so, in respect of locality, was Jermyn Street itself. Lord
+Fallowfeild knew this, no man better. Yet he was genuinely pleased,
+impressed even, by the luxury with which his erring son was surrounded,
+and proceeded to praise his cook, praise his valet's waiting at table,
+praise some fine old sporting prints upon the wall. He went so far,
+indeed, as to chuckle discreetly--immaculately faithful husband though
+he was--over certain photographs of ladies, more fair and kind than
+wise, which were stuck in the frame of the looking-glass over the
+chimneypiece. In return for which acts of good-fellowship Lord Shotover
+accompanied him as far as the steps of the mansion in Albert Gate.
+There he paused, remarking with the most disarming frankness:--
+
+"I would come in. I want to awfully, I assure you. I quite agree with
+you about all this affair, you know, and I should uncommonly like to
+let the others know it. But, between ourselves, Louisa's been so short
+with me lately, so infernally short--if you'll pardon my saying
+so--that it's become downright disagreeable to me to run across her. So
+I'm afraid I might only make matters worse all round, don't you know,
+if I put in an appearance this morning."
+
+"Has she, though?" ejaculated Lord Fallowfeild, in reference presumably
+to his eldest daughter's reported shortness. "My dear boy, don't think
+of it. I wouldn't have you exposed to unnecessary unpleasantness on any
+account."
+
+Then, as he followed the groom-of-the-chambers up the bare, white,
+marble staircase--which struck almost vaultlike in its chill and
+silence, after the heat and glare and turmoil of the great thoroughfare
+without--he added to himself:--
+
+"Good fellow, Shotover. Has his faults, but upon my word, when you come
+to think of it, so have all of us. Very good-hearted, sensible fellow
+at bottom, Shotover. Always responds when you talk rationally to him.
+No nonsense about him."--His lordship sighed as he climbed the marble
+stair. "Great comfort to me at times Shotover. Shows very proper
+feeling on the present occasion, but naturally feels a diffidence about
+expressing it."
+
+Thus, in the end, it happened that the family council consisted only of
+the lady of the house, her sister Lady Alicia Winterbotham, Mr. Ludovic
+Quayle, and the parent whom all three of them were, each in their
+several ways, so perfectly willing to instruct in his duty towards his
+children.
+
+Ludovic, perhaps, displayed less alacrity than usual in offering good
+advice to his father. His policy was rather that of masterly
+inactivity. Indeed, as the discussion waxed hot--his sisters' voices
+rising slightly in tone, while Lord Fallowfeild's replies disclosed a
+vein of dogged obstinacy--he withdrew from the field of battle and
+moved slowly round the room staring abstractedly at the pictures. There
+was a seductive, female head by Greuze, a couple of reposeful
+landscapes by Morland, a little Constable--waterways, trees, and
+distant woodland, swept by wind and weather. But upon these the young
+man bestowed scant attention. That which fascinated his gaze was a
+series of half-length portraits in oval frames, representing his
+parents, himself, his sisters, and brothers. These portraits were the
+work of a lady whose artistic gifts, and whose prices, were alike
+modest. They were in coloured chalks, and had, after adorning her own
+sitting-room for a number of years, been given, as a wedding present,
+by Lady Fallowfeild to her eldest daughter. Mr. Quayle reviewed them
+leisurely now, looking over his shoulder now and again to note how the
+tide of battle rolled, and raising his eyebrows in mute protest when
+the voices of the two ladies became more than usually elevated.
+
+"You see, papa, you have not been here"--Lady Louisa was saying.
+
+"No, I haven't," interrupted Lord Fallowfeild. "And very much I regret
+that I haven't. Should have done my best to put a stop to this
+engagement at the outset--before there was any engagement at all, in
+fact."
+
+"And so you cannot possibly know how the whole thing--any breaking off
+I mean--would be regarded."
+
+"Can't I, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild. "I know perfectly well how I
+should regard it myself."
+
+"You do not take the advantages sufficiently into consideration, papa.
+Of course with their enormous wealth they can afford to do
+anything."--Mr. Winterbotham's income was far from princely at this
+period, and Lady Alicia was liable to be at once envious of, and
+injured by, the riches of others. Her wardrobe was limited. She was,
+this morning, vexatiously conscious of a warmer hue in the back pleats
+than in the front breadth of her mauve, cashmere dress, sparsely
+decorated with bows of but indifferently white ribbon. "It has enabled
+them to make an immense success. One really gets rather tired of
+hearing about them. But everybody goes to their house, you know, and
+says that he is perfectly charming."
+
+"Half the parents in London would jump at the chance of one of their
+girls making such a marriage,"--this from Lady Louisa.
+
+Mr. Quayle looked over his shoulder and registered a conviction that
+his father did not belong to that active, parental moiety. He sat
+stubbornly on a straight-backed, white-and-gold chair, his hands
+clasped on the top of his favourite, gold-headed walking-stick. He had
+refused to part with this weapon on entering the house. It gave him a
+sense of authority, of security. Meanwhile his habitually placid and
+infantile countenance wore an expression of the acutest worry.
+
+"Would they, though?" he said, in response to his daughter's
+information regarding the jumping moiety.--"Well, I shouldn't. In point
+of fact, I don't. All that you and Alicia tell me may be perfectly
+true, my dear Louisa. I would not, for a moment, attempt to discredit
+your statements. And I don't wish to be intemperate.--Stupid thing
+intemperance, sign of weakness, intemperance.--Still I must repeat, and
+I do repeat, I repeat clearly, that I do not approve of this
+engagement."
+
+"Did not I prophesy long, long ago what my father's attitude would be,
+Louisa?" Mr. Quayle murmured gently, over his shoulder.
+
+Then he fell to contemplating the portrait of his brother Guy, aged
+seven, who was represented arrayed in a brown-holland blouse of
+singular formlessness confined at the waist by a black leather belt,
+and carrying, cupid-like, in his hands a bow and arrows decorated with
+sky-blue ribbons.--"Were my brothers and I actually such appallingly
+insipid-looking little idiots?" he asked himself. "In that case the
+years do bring compensations. We really bear fewer outward traces of
+utter imbecility now."
+
+"I don't wish to be harsh with you, my dears--never have been harsh, to
+my knowledge, with any one of my children. Believe in kindness. Always
+have been lenient with my children----"
+
+"And as indirect consequence thereof note my eldest brother's frequent
+epistles to the Hebrews!" commented Mr. Quayle softly. "The sweet
+simplicity of this counterfeit presentment of him, armed with a
+pea-green bait-tin and jointless fishing-rod, hardly shadows forth the
+copious insolvencies of recent times!"
+
+"Never have approved of harshness," continued Lord Fallowfeild. "Still
+I do feel I should have been given an opportunity of speaking my mind
+sooner. I ought to have been referred to in the first place. It was my
+right. It was due to me. I don't wish to assert my authority in a
+tyrannical manner. Hate tyranny, always have hated parental tyranny.
+Still I feel that it was due to me. And Shotover quite agrees with me.
+Talked in a very nice, gentlemanly, high-minded way about it all this
+morning, did Shotover."
+
+The two ladies exchanged glances, drawing themselves up with an
+assumption of reticence and severity.
+
+"Really!" exclaimed Lady Alicia. "It seems a pity, papa, that
+Shotover's actions are not a little more in keeping with his
+conversation, then."
+
+But Lord Fallowfeild only grasped the head of his walking-stick the
+tighter, congratulating himself the while on the unshakable firmness
+both of his mental and physical attitude.
+
+"Oh! ah! yes," he said, rising to heights of quite reckless defiance.
+"I know there is a great deal of prejudice against Shotover, just now,
+among you. He alluded to it this morning with a great deal of feeling.
+He was not bitter, but he is very much hurt, is Shotover. You are hard
+on him, Alicia. It is a painful thing to observe upon, but you are
+hard, and so is Winterbotham. I regret to be obliged to put it so
+plainly, but I was displeased by Winterbotham's tone about your
+brother, last time you and he were down at Whitney from Saturday to
+Monday."
+
+"At all events, papa, George has never cost his parents a single penny
+since he left Balliol," Lady Alicia replied, with some spirit and a
+very high colour.
+
+But Lord Fallowfeild was not to be beguiled into discussion of side
+issues, though his amiable face was crumpled and puckered by the effort
+to present an uncompromising front to the enemy.
+
+"Some of you ought to have written and informed me as soon as you had
+any suspicion of what was likely to happen. Not to do so was underhand.
+I do not wish to employ strong language, but I do consider it
+underhand. Shotover tells me he would have written if he had only
+known. But, of course, in the present state of feeling, he was shut out
+from it all. Ludovic did know, I presume. And, I am sorry to say it,
+but I consider it very unhandsome of Ludovic not to have communicated
+with me."
+
+At this juncture Mr. Quayle desisted from contemplation of the family
+portraits and approached the belligerents, threading his way carefully
+between the many tables and chairs. There was much furniture, yet but
+few ornaments, in Lady Louisa's boudoir. The young man's long neck was
+directed slightly forward and his expression was one of polite inquiry.
+
+"It is very warm this morning," he remarked parenthetically, "and as a
+family we appear to feel it. You did me the honour to refer to me just
+now, I believe, my dear father? Since my two younger sisters have been
+banished it has happily become possible to hear both you, and myself,
+speak. You were saying?"
+
+"That you might very properly have written and told me about this
+business, and given me an opportunity of expressing my opinion before
+things reached a head."
+
+Mr. Quayle drew forward a chair and seated himself with mild
+deliberation. Lord Fallowfeild began to fidget. "Very clever fellow,
+Ludovic," he said to himself. "Wonderfully cool head"--and he became
+suspicious of his own wisdom in having made direct appeal to a person
+thus distinguished.
+
+"I might have written, my dear father. I admit that I might. But there
+were difficulties. To begin with, I--in this particular--shared
+Shotover's position. Louisa had not seen fit to honour me with her
+confidence.--I beg your pardon, Louisa, you were saying?--And so, you
+see, I really hadn't anything to write about."
+
+"But--but--this young man"--Lord Fallowfeild was sensible of a singular
+reluctance to mention the name of his proposed son-in-law--"this young
+Calmady, you know, he's an intimate friend of yours----"
+
+"Difficulty number two. For I doubted how you would take the
+matter----"
+
+"Did you, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild, with an appreciable smoothing
+of crumples and puckers.
+
+"I'm extremely attached to Dickie Calmady. And I did not want to put a
+spoke in his wheel."
+
+"Of course not, my dear boy, of course not. Nasty unpleasant business
+putting spokes in other men's wheels, specially when they're your
+friends. I acknowledge that."
+
+"I am sure you do," Mr. Quayle replied, indulgently. "You are always on
+the side of doing the generous thing, my dear father,--when you see
+it."
+
+Here his lordship's grasp upon the head of his walking-stick relaxed
+sensibly.
+
+"Thank you, Ludovic. Very pleasant thing to have one's son say to one,
+I must say, uncommonly pleasant."--Alas! he felt himself to be
+slipping, slipping. "Deuced shrewd, diplomatic fellow, Ludovic," he
+remarked to himself somewhat ruefully. All the same, the little
+compliment warmed him through. He knew it made for defeat, yet for the
+life of him he could not but relish it.--"Very pleasant," he repeated.
+"But that's not the point, my dear boy. Now, about this young fellow
+Calmady's proposal for your sister Constance?"
+
+Mr. Quayle looked full at the speaker, and for once his expression held
+no hint of impertinence or raillery.
+
+"Dickie Calmady is as fine a fellow as ever fought, or won, an almost
+hopeless battle," he said. "He is somewhat heroic, in my opinion. And
+he is very lovable."
+
+"Is he, though?" Lord Fallowfeild commented, quite gently.
+
+"A woman who understood him, and had some idea of all he must have gone
+through, could not well help being very proud of him."
+
+Yet, even while speaking, the young man knew his advocacy to be but
+half-hearted. He praised his friend rather than his friend's
+contemplated marriage.--"But his dear, old lordship's not very quick.
+He'll never spot that," he added mentally. And then he reflected that
+little Lady Constance was not very quick either. She might marry
+obediently, even gladly. But was it probable she would develop
+sufficient imagination ever to understand, and therefore be proud of,
+Richard Calmady?
+
+"He is brilliant too," Ludovic continued. "He is as well read as any
+man of his standing whom I know, and he can think for himself. And,
+when he is in the vein he is unusually good company."
+
+"Everybody says he is extraordinarily agreeable," broke in Lady Alicia.
+"Old Lady Combmartin was saying only yesterday--George and I met her at
+the Aldhams', Louisa, you know, at dinner--that she had not heard
+better conversation for years. And she was brought up among Macaulay
+and Rogers and all the Holland House set, so her opinion really is
+worth having."
+
+But Lord Fallowfeild's grasp had tightened again upon his
+walking-stick.
+
+"Was she, though?" he said rather incoherently.
+
+"Pray, from all this, don't run away with the notion Calmady is a
+prig," Ludovic interposed. "He is as keen a sportsman as you are--in as
+far, of course, as sport is possible for him."
+
+Here Lord Fallowfeild, finding himself somewhat hard pressed, sought
+relief in movement. He turned sideways, throwing one shapely leg across
+the other, grasping the supporting walking-stick in his right hand,
+while with the left he laid hold of the back of the white-and-gold
+chair.
+
+"Oh! ah! yes," he said valiantly, directing his gaze upon the tree-tops
+in the Park. "I quite accept all you tell me. I don't want to detract
+from your friend's merits--poor, mean sort of thing to detract from any
+man's friend's merits. Gentlemanlike young fellow, Calmady, the little
+I have seen of him--reminds me of my poor friend his father. I liked
+his father. But, you see, my dear boy, there is--well, there's no
+denying it, there is--and Shotover quite----"
+
+"Of course, papa, we all know what you mean," Lady Louisa interposed,
+with a certain loftiness and, it must be owned, asperity. "I have never
+pretended there was not something one had to get accustomed to. But
+really you forget all about it almost immediately--every one does--one
+can see that--don't they, Alicia? If you had met Sir Richard
+everywhere, as we have this season, you would realise how very very
+soon that is quite forgotten."
+
+"Is it, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild somewhat incredulously. His face
+had returned to a sadly puckered condition.
+
+"Yes, I assure you, nobody thinks of it, after just the first little
+shock, don't you know,"--this from Lady Louisa.
+
+"I think one feels it is not quite nice to dwell on a thing of that
+kind," her sister chimed in, reddening again. "It ought to be
+ignored."--From a girl, the speaker had enjoyed a reputation for great
+refinement of mind.
+
+"I think it amounts to being more than not nice," echoed Lady Louisa.
+"I think it is positively wrong, for nobody can tell what accident may
+not happen to any of us at any moment. And so I am not at all sure that
+it is not actually unchristian to make a thing like that into a serious
+objection."
+
+"You know, papa, there must be deformed people in some families, just
+as there is consumption or insanity."
+
+"Or under-breeding, or attenuated salaries," Mr. Quayle softly
+murmured. "It becomes evident, my dear father, you must not expect too
+much of sons, or I of brothers-in-law."
+
+"Think of old Lord Sokeington--I mean the great uncle of the present
+man, of course--of his temper," Lady Louisa proceeded, regardless of
+ironical comment. "It amounted almost to mania. And yet Lady Dorothy
+Hellard would certainly have married him. There never was any question
+about it."
+
+"Would she, though? Bad, old man, Sokeington. Never did approve of
+Sokeington."
+
+"Of course she would. Mrs. Crookenden, who always has been devoted to
+her, told me so."
+
+"Did she, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild. "But the marriage was broken
+off, my dear."
+
+He made this remark triumphantly, feeling it showed great acuteness.
+
+"Oh, dear no! indeed it wasn't," his daughter replied. "Lord Sokeington
+behaved in the most outrageous manner. At the last moment he never
+proposed to her at all. And then it came out that for years he had been
+living with one of the still-room maids."
+
+"Louisa!" cried Lady Alicia, turning scarlet.
+
+"Had he, though? The old scoundrel!"
+
+"Papa," cried Lady Alicia.
+
+"So he was, my dear. Very bad old man, Sokeington. Very amusing old man
+too, though."
+
+And, overcome by certain reminiscences, Lord Fallowfeild chuckled a
+little, shamefacedly. His second daughter thereupon arranged the folds
+of her mauve cashmere, with bent head.--"It is very clear papa and
+Shotover have been together to-day," she thought. "Shotover's influence
+over papa is always demoralising. It's too extraordinary the subjects
+men joke about and call amusing when they get together."
+
+A pause followed, a brief cessation of hostilities, during which Mr.
+Quayle looked inquiringly at his three companions.
+
+"Alicia fancies herself shocked," he said to himself, "and my father
+fancies himself wicked, and Louisa fancies herself a chosen vessel.
+Strong delusion is upon them all. The only question is whose delusion
+is the strongest, and who, consequently, will first renew the fray? Ah!
+the chosen vessel! I thought as much."
+
+"You see, papa, one really must be practical," Lady Louisa began in
+clear, emphatic tones. "We all know how you have spoiled Constance. She
+and Shotover have always been your favourites. But even you must admit
+that Shotover's wretched extravagance has impoverished you, and helped
+to impoverish all your other children. And you must also admit,
+notwithstanding your partiality for Constance, that----"
+
+"I want to see Connie. I want to hear from herself that she"--broke out
+Lord Fallowfeild. His kindly heart yearned over this ewe-lamb of his
+large flock. But the eldest of the said flock interposed sternly.
+
+"No, no," she cried, "pray, papa, not yet. Connie is quite contented
+and reasonable--I believe she is out shopping just now, too. And while
+you are in this state of indecision yourself, it would be the greatest
+mistake for you to see her. It would only disturb and upset
+her--wouldn't it, Alicia?"
+
+And the lady thus appealed to assented. It is true that when she
+arrived at the great house in Albert Gate that morning she had found
+little Lady Constance with her pretty, baby face sadly marred by tears.
+But she had put that down to the exigencies of the situation. All young
+ladies of refined mind cried under kindred circumstances. Had she not
+herself wept copiously, for the better part of a week, before finally
+deciding to accept George Winterbotham? Moreover, a point of jealousy
+undoubtedly pricked Lady Alicia in this connection. She was far from
+being a cruel woman, but, comparing her own modest material advantages
+in marriage with the surprisingly handsome ones offered to her little
+sister, she could not be wholly sorry that the latter's rose was not
+entirely without thorns. That the flower in question should have been
+thornless, as well as so very fine and large, would surely have
+trenched on injustice to herself. This thought had, perhaps
+unconsciously, influenced her when enlarging on the becomingness of a
+refined indifference to Sir Richard Calmady's deformity. In her heart
+of hearts she was disposed, perhaps unconsciously, to hail rather than
+deplore the fact of that same deformity. For did it not tend
+subjectively to equalise her lot and that of her little sister, and
+modify the otherwise humiliating disparity of their respective
+fortunes? Therefore she capped Lady Louisa's speech, by saying
+immediately:--
+
+"Yes, indeed, papa, it would only be an unkindness to run any risk of
+upsetting Connie. No really nice girl ever really quite likes the idea
+of marriage----"
+
+"Doesn't she, though?" commented Lord Fallowfeild, with an air of
+receiving curious, scientific information.
+
+"Oh, of course not! How could she? And then, papa, you know how you
+have always indulged Connie"--Lady Alicia's voice was slightly peevish
+in tone. She was not in very good health at the present time, with the
+consequence that her face showed thin and bird-like. While,
+notwithstanding the genial heat of the summer's day, she presented a
+starved and chilly appearance.--"Always indulged Connie," she repeated,
+"and that has inclined her to be rather selfish and fanciful."
+
+The above statements, both regarding his own conduct and the effect of
+that conduct upon his little ewe-lamb, nettled the amiable nobleman
+considerably. He faced round upon the speaker with an intention of
+reprimand, but in so doing his eyes were arrested by his daughter's
+faded dress and disorganised complexion. He relented.--"Poor thing,
+looks ill," he thought. "A man's an unworthy brute who ever says a
+sharp word to a woman in her condition."--And, before he had time to
+find a word other than sharp, Lady Louisa Barking returned to the
+charge.
+
+"Exactly," she asserted. "Alicia is perfectly right. At present Connie
+is quite reasonable. And all we entreat, papa, is that you will let her
+remain so, until you have made up your own mind. Do pray let us be
+dignified. One knows how the servants get hold of anything of this kind
+and discuss it, if there is any want of dignity or any indecision. That
+is too odious. And I must really think just a little of Mr. Barking and
+myself in the matter. It has all gone on in our house, you see. One
+must consider appearances, and with all the recent gossip about
+Shotover, we do not want another _esclandre_--the servants knowing all
+about it too. And then, with all your partiality for Constance, you
+cannot suppose she will have many opportunities of marrying men with
+forty or fifty thousand a year."
+
+"No, papa, as Louisa says, in your partiality for Connie you must not
+entirely forget the claims of your other children. She must not be
+encouraged to think exclusively of herself, and it is not fair that you
+should think exclusively of her. I know that George and I are poor, but
+it is through no fault of our own. He most honourably refuses to take
+anything from his mother, and you know how small my private income is.
+Yet no one can accuse George of lack of generosity. When any of my
+family want to come to us he always makes them welcome. Maggie only
+left us last Thursday, and Emily comes to-morrow. I know we can't do
+much. It is not possible with our small means and establishment. But
+what little we can do, George is most willing should be done."
+
+"Excellent fellow, Winterbotham," Lord Fallowfeild put in soothingly.
+"Very steady, painstaking man, Winterbotham."
+
+His second daughter looked at him reproachfully.
+
+"Thank you, papa," she said. "I own I was a little hurt just now by the
+tone in which you alluded to George."
+
+"Were you, though? I'm sure I'm very sorry, my dear Alicia. Hate to
+hurt anybody, especially one of my own children. Unnatural thing to
+hurt one of your own children. But you see this feeling of all of yours
+about Shotover has been very painful to me. I never have liked
+divisions in families. Never know where they may lead to. Nasty,
+uncomfortable things divisions in families."
+
+"Well, papa, I can only say that divisions are almost invariably caused
+by a want of the sense of duty." Lady Louisa's voice was stern. "And if
+people are over-indulged they become selfish, and then, of course, they
+lose their sense of duty."
+
+"My sister is a notable logician," Mr. Quayle murmured, under his
+breath. "If logic ruled life, how clear, how simple our course! But
+then, unfortunately, it doesn't."
+
+"Shotover has really no one but himself to thank for any bitterness
+that his brothers and sisters may feel towards him. He has thrown away
+his chances, has got the whole family talked about in a most
+objectionable manner, and has been a serious encumbrance to you, and
+indirectly to all of us. We have all suffered quite enough trouble and
+annoyance already. And so I must protest, papa, I must very strongly
+and definitely protest, against Connie being permitted, still more
+encouraged, to do exactly the same thing."
+
+Lord Fallowfeild, still grasping his walking-stick,--though he could
+not but fear that trusted weapon had proved faithless and sadly failed
+in its duty of support,--gazed distractedly at the speaker. Visions of
+Jewish money-lenders, of ladies more fair and kind than wise, of guinea
+points at whist, of the prize ring of Baden-Baden, of Newmarket and
+Doncaster, arose confusedly before him. What the deuce,--he did not
+like bad language, but really,--what the dickens, had all these to do
+with his ewe-lamb, innocent little Constance, her virgin-white body and
+soul, and her sweet, wide-eyed prettiness?
+
+"My dear Louisa, no doubt you know what you mean, but I give you my
+word I don't," he began.
+
+"Hear, hear, my dear father," put in Mr. Quayle. "There I am with you.
+Louisa's wing is strong, her range is great. I myself, on this
+occasion, find it not a little difficult to follow her."
+
+"Nonsense, Ludovic," almost snapped the lady. "You follow me perfectly,
+or can do so if you use your common sense. Papa must face the fact,
+that Constance cannot afford--that we cannot afford to have her--throw
+away her chances, as Shotover has thrown away his. We all have a duty,
+not only to ourselves, but to each other. Inclination must give way to
+duty--though I do not say Constance exhibits any real disinclination to
+this marriage. She is a little flurried. As Alicia said just now, every
+really nice-minded girl is flurried at the idea of marriage. She ought
+to be. I consider it only delicate that she should be. But she
+understands--I have pointed it out to her--that her money, her
+position, and those two big houses--Brockhurst and the one in Lowndes
+Square--will be of the greatest advantage to the girls and to her
+brothers. It is not as if she was nobody. The scullery-maid can marry
+whom she likes, of course. But in our rank of life it is different. A
+girl is bound to think of her family, as well as of herself. She is
+bound to consider----"
+
+The groom-of-the-chambers opened the door and advanced solemnly across
+the boudoir to Lord Fallowfeild.
+
+"Sir Richard Calmady is in the smoking-room, my lord," he said, "to see
+you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+IPHIGENIA
+
+
+Chastened in spirit, verbally acquiescent, yet unconvinced, a somewhat
+pitiable sense of inadequacy upon him, Lord Fallowfeild traveled back
+to Westchurch that night. Two days later the morning papers announced
+to all whom it might concern,--and that far larger all, whom it did not
+really concern in the least,--in the conventional phrases common to
+such announcements, that Sir Richard Calmady and Lady Constance Quayle
+had agreed shortly to become man and wife. Thus did Katherine Calmady,
+in all trustfulness, strive to give her son his desire, while the
+great, and little, world looked on and made comments, various as the
+natures and circumstances of the units composing them.
+
+Lady Louisa was filled with the pride of victory. Her venture had not
+miscarried. At church on Sunday--she was really too busy socially, just
+now, to attend what it was her habit to describe as "odds and ends of
+week-day services," and therefore worshipped on the Sabbath only, and
+then by no means in secret or with shut door--she repeated the General
+Thanksgiving with much unction and in an aggressively audible voice.
+And Lady Alicia Winterbotham expressed a peevish hope that,--"such
+great wealth might not turn Constance's head and make her just a little
+vulgar. It was all rather dangerous for a girl of her age, and
+she"--the speaker--"trusted _somebody_ would point out to Connie the
+heavy responsibilities towards others such a position brought with it."
+And Lord Shotover delivered it as his opinion that,--"It might be all
+right. He hoped to goodness it was, for he'd always been uncommonly
+fond of the young un. But it seemed to him rather a put-up job all
+round, and so he meant just to keep his eye on Con, he swore he did."
+In furtherance of which laudable determination he braved his eldest
+sister's frowns with heroic intrepidity, calling to see the young girl
+whenever all other sources of amusement failed him, and paying her the
+compliment--as is the habit of the natural man, when unselfishly
+desirous of giving pleasure to the women of his family--of talking
+continuously and exclusively about his own affairs, his gains at cards,
+his losses on horses, even recounting, in moments of more than
+ordinarily expansive affection, the less wholly disreputable episodes
+of his many adventures of the heart. And Honoria St. Quentin's
+sensitive face straightened and her lips closed rather tight whenever
+the marriage was mentioned before her. She refused to express any view
+on the subject, and to that end took rather elaborate pains to avoid
+the society of Mr. Quayle. And Lady Dorothy Hellard,--whose unhappy
+disappointment in respect of the late Lord Sokeington and other
+non-successful excursions in the direction of wedlock, had not cured
+her of sentimental leanings,--asserted that,--"It was quite the most
+romantic and touching engagement she had ever heard of." To which
+speech her mother, the Dowager Lady Combmartin, replied, with the
+directness of statement which made her acquaintance so cautious of
+differing from her:--"Touching? Romantic? Fiddle-de-dee! You ought to
+be ashamed of yourself for thinking so at your age, Dorothy. A
+bargain's a bargain, and in my opinion the bride has got much the best
+of it. For she's a mawkish, milk-and-water, little schoolgirl, while he
+is charming--all there is of him. If there'd been a little more I
+declared I'd have married him myself." And good-looking Mr. Decies, of
+the 101st Lancers, got into very hot water with the mounted constables,
+and with the livery-stable keeper from whom he hired his hacks, for
+"furious riding" in the Park. And Julius March walked the paved ways
+and fragrant alleys of the red-walled gardens at Brockhurst, somewhat
+sadly, in the glowing June twilights, meditating upon the pitiless
+power of change which infects all things human, and of his own lifelong
+love doomed to "find no earthly close." And Mrs. Chifney, down at the
+racing stables, rejoiced to the point of tears, being possessed by the
+persistent instinct of matrimony common to the British, lower
+middle-class. And Sandyfield parish rejoiced likewise, and pealed its
+church-bells in token thereof, foreseeing much carnal gratification in
+the matter of cakes and ale. And Madame de Vallorbes, whose letters to
+Richard had come to be pretty frequent during the last eight months,
+was overtaken by silence and did not write at all.
+
+But this omission on the part of his cousin was grateful, rather than
+distressing, to the young man. It appeared to him very sympathetic of
+Helen not to write. It showed a finely, imaginative sensibility and
+considerateness on her part, which made Dickie sigh, thinking of it,
+and then, so to speak, turn away his head. And to do this last was the
+less difficult that his days were very full just now. And his mind was
+very full, likewise, of gentle thoughts of, and many provisions for,
+the happiness of his promised bride.
+
+The young girl was timid in his presence, it is true. Yet she was
+transparently, appealing, anxious to please. Her conversation was
+neither ready nor brilliant, but she was very fair to look upon in her
+childlike freshness and innocence. A protective element, a tender and
+chivalrous loyalty, entered into Richard's every thought of her. A
+great passion and a happy marriage were two quite separate matters--so
+he argued in his inexperience. And this was surely the wife a man
+should desire, modest, guileless, dutiful, pure in heart as in person?
+The gentle dumbness which often held her did not trouble him. It was a
+pretty pastime to try to win her confidence and open the doors of her
+artless speech.
+
+And then, to Richard, tempted it is true, but as yet himself unsullied,
+it was so sacred and wonderful a thing that this spotless
+woman-creature in all the fragrance of her youth belonged to him in a
+measure already, and would belong to him, before many weeks were out,
+wholly and of inalienable right. And so it happened that the very
+limitations of the young girl's nature came to enhance her attractions.
+Dickie could not get very near to her mind, but that merely piqued his
+curiosity and provoked his desire of discovery. She was to him as a
+book written in strange character, difficult to decipher. With the
+result that he accredited her with subtleties and many fine feelings
+she did not really possess, while he failed to divine--not from
+defective sympathy so much as from absorption in his self-created idea
+of her--the very simple feelings which actually animated her. His
+masculine pride was satisfied in that so eligible a maiden consented to
+become his wife. His moral sense was satisfied also, since he had--as
+he supposed--put temptation from him and chosen the better part. Very
+certainly he was not violently in love. That he supposed to be a thing
+of the past. But he was quietly happy. While ahead lay the mysterious
+enchantments of marriage. Dickie's heart was very tender, just then.
+Life had never turned on him a more gracious face.
+
+Nevertheless, once or twice, a breath of distrust dimmed the bright
+surface of his existing complacency. One day, for instance, he had
+taken his _fiancee_ for a morning drive and brought her home to
+luncheon. After that meal she should sit for a while with Lady Calmady
+and then join him in the library down-stairs, for he had that which he
+coveted to show her. But it appeared to him that she tarried unduly
+with his mother, and he grew impatient waiting through the long minutes
+of the summer afternoon. A barrel-organ droned slumberously from the
+other side of the square, while to his ears, so long attuned to country
+silences or the quick, intermittent music of nature, the ceaseless roar
+of London became burdensome. Ever after, thinking of this first wooing
+of his, he recalled--as slightly sinister--that ever-present murmur of
+traffic,--bearing testimony, at it seemed later, to the many activities
+in which he could play, after all, but so paltry and circumscribed a
+part.
+
+And, listening to that same murmur now, something of rebellion against
+circumstance arose in Dickie for all that the present was very good.
+For, as he considered, any lover other than himself would not sit
+pinned to an armchair awaiting his mistress' coming, but, did she
+delay, would go to seek her, claim her, and bear her merrily away. The
+organ-grinder, meanwhile, cheered by a copper shower from some adjacent
+balcony, turned the handle of his instrument more vigorously, letting
+loose stirring valse-tune and march upon the sultry air. Such music
+was, of necessity, somewhat comfortless hearing to Richard, debarred
+alike from deeds of arms or joy of dancing. His impatience increased.
+It was a little inconsiderate of his mother surely to detain Constance
+for so long! But just then the sound of women's voices reached him
+through the half-open door. The two ladies were leisurely descending
+the stairs. There was a little pause, then he heard Lady Calmady say,
+as though in gentle rebuke:--
+
+"No, no, dear child, I will not come with you. Richard would like
+better to see you alone. Too, I have a number of letters to write. I am
+at home to no one this afternoon. You will find me in the sitting-room
+here. You can come and bid me good-bye--now, dear child, go."
+
+Thus admonished, Lady Constance moved forward. Yet, to Dickie's
+listening ears, it appeared that it took her an inordinate length of
+time to traverse the length of the hall from the foot of the stairs to
+the library door. And there again she paused, the organ, now nearer,
+rattling out the tramp of a popular military march. But the throb and
+beat of the quickstep failed to hasten little Lady Constance's lagging
+feet, so that further rebellion against his own infirmity assaulted
+poor Dick.
+
+At length the girl entered with a little rush, her soft cheeks flushed,
+her rounded bosom heaving, as though she arrived from a long and
+arduous walk, rather than from that particularly deliberate traversing
+of the cool hall and descent of the airy stairway.
+
+"Ah! here you are at last, then!" Richard exclaimed. "I began to wonder
+if you had forgotten all about me."
+
+The young girl did not attempt to sit down, but stood directly in front
+of him, her hands clasped loosely, yet somewhat nervously, almost in
+the attitude of a child about to recite a lesson. Her still, heifer's
+eyes were situate so far apart that Dickie, looking up at her, found it
+difficult to focus them both at the same glance. And this produced an
+effect of slight uncertainty, even defect of vision, at once pathetic
+and quaintly attractive. Her face was heart-shaped, narrowing from the
+wide, low brow to the small, rounded chin set below a round, babyish
+mouth of slight mobility but much innocent sweetness. Her light, brown
+hair, rising in an upward curve on either side the straight parting,
+was swept back softly, yet smoothly, behind her small ears. The neck of
+her white, alpaca dress, cut square according to the then prevailing
+fashion, was outlined with flat bands of pale, blue ribbon, and filled
+up with lace to the base of the round column of her throat. Blue
+ribbons adorned the hem of her simple skirt, and a band of the same
+colour encircled her shapely, though not noticeably slender, waist. Her
+bosom was rather full for so young a woman, so that, notwithstanding
+her perfect freshness and air of almost childlike simplicity, there was
+a certain statuesque quality in the effect of her white-clad figure
+seen thus in the shaded library, with its russet-red walls and
+furnishings and ranges of dark bookshelves.
+
+"I am so sorry," she said breathlessly. "I should have come sooner, but
+I was talking to Lady Calmady, and I did not know it was so late. I am
+not afraid of talking to Lady Calmady, she is so very kind to me, and
+there are many questions I wanted to ask her. She promises to help and
+tell me what I ought to do. And I am very glad of that. It will prevent
+my making mistakes."
+
+Her attitude and the earnestness of her artless speech were to Richard
+almost pathetically engaging. His irritation vanished. He smiled,
+looked up at her, his own face flushing a little.
+
+"I don't fancy you will ever make any very dangerous mistakes!" he
+said.
+
+"Ah! but I might," the girl insisted. "You see I have always been told
+what to do."
+
+"Always?" Dickie asked, more for the pleasure of watching her stand
+thus than for any great importance he attached to her answer.
+
+"Oh yes!" she said. "First by our nurses, and then by our governesses.
+They were not always very kind. They called me obstinate. But I did not
+mean to be obstinate. Only they spoke in French or German, and I could
+not always understand. And since I have grown up my elder sisters have
+told me what I ought to do."
+
+It seemed to Richard that the girl's small, round chin quivered a
+little, and that a look of vague distress invaded her soft, ruminant,
+wide-set eyes.
+
+"And so I should have been very frightened, now, unless I had had Lady
+Calmady to tell me."
+
+"Well, I think there's only one thing my mother will need to tell you,
+and it won't run into either French or German. It can be stated in very
+plain English. Just to do whatever you like, and--and be happy."
+
+Lady Constance stared at the speaker with her air of gentle perplexity.
+As she did so undoubtedly her pretty chin did quiver a little.
+
+"Ah! but to do what you like can never really make you happy," she
+said.
+
+"Can't it? I'm not altogether so sure of that. I had ventured to
+suppose there were a number of things you and I would do in the future
+which will be most uncommonly pleasant without being conspicuously
+harmful."
+
+He leaned sideways, stretching out to a neighbouring chair with his
+right hand, keeping the light, silk-woven, red blanket up across his
+thighs with his left.
+
+"Do sit down, Constance, and we will talk of things we both like to do,
+at greater length---- Ah! bother--forgive me--I can't reach it."
+
+"Oh! please don't trouble. It doesn't matter. I can get it quite well
+myself," Lady Constance said, quite quickly for once. She drew up the
+chair and sat down near him, folding her hands again nervously in her
+lap. All the colour had died out of her cheeks. They were as white as
+her rounded throat. She kept her eyes fixed on Richard's face, and her
+bosom rose and fell, while her words came somewhat gaspingly. Still she
+talked on with a touching little effect of determined civility.
+
+"Lady Calmady was very kind in telling me I might sometimes go over to
+Whitney," she said. "I should like that. I am afraid papa will miss me.
+Of course there will be all the others just the same. But I go out so
+much with him. Of course I would not ask to go over very often, because
+I know it might be inconvenient for me to have the horses."
+
+"But you will have your own horses," Richard answered. "I wrote to
+Chifney to look out for a pair of cobs for you last week--browns--you
+said you liked that colour I remember. And I told him they were to be
+broken until big guns, going off under their very noses, wouldn't make
+them so much as wince."
+
+"Are you buying them just for me?" the girl said.
+
+"Just for you?" Dickie laughed. "Why, who on earth should I buy
+anything for but just you, I should like to know?"
+
+"But"--she began.
+
+"But--but"--he echoed, resting his hands on the two arms of his chair,
+leaning forward and still laughing, though somewhat shyly. "Don't you
+see the whole and sole programme is that you should do all you like,
+and have all you like, and--and be happy."--Richard straightened
+himself up, still looking full at her, trying to focus both these
+quaintly--engaging, far-apart eyes. "Constance, do you never play?" he
+asked her suddenly.
+
+"I did practice every morning at home, but lately----"
+
+"Oh! I don't mean that," the young man said. "I mean quite another sort
+of playing."
+
+"Games?" Lady Constance inquired. "I am afraid I am rather stupid about
+games. I find it so difficult to remember numbers and words, and I
+never can make a ball go where I want it to, somehow."
+
+"I was not thinking of games either, exactly," Richard said, smiling.
+
+The girl stared at him in some perplexity. Then spoke again, with the
+same little effect of determined civility.
+
+"I am very fond of dancing and of skating. The ice was very good on the
+lake at Whitney this winter. Rupert and Gerry were home from Eton, and
+Eddy had brought a young man down with him--Mr. Hubbard---who is in his
+business in Liverpool, and a friend of my brother Guy's was staying in
+the house too, from India. I think you have met him--Mr. Decies. We
+skated till past twelve one night--a Wednesday, I think. There was a
+moon, and a great many stars. The thermometer registered fifteen
+degrees of frost Mr. Decies told me. But I was not cold. It was very
+beautiful."
+
+Richard shifted his position. The organ had moved farther away.
+Uncheered by further copper showers, it droned again slumberously,
+while the murmur sent forth by the thousand activities of the great
+city waxed loud, for the moment, and hoarsely insistent.
+
+"I do not bore you?" Lady Constance asked, in sudden anxiety.
+
+"Oh no, no!" Richard answered. "I am glad to have you tell me about
+yourself, if you will; and all that you care for."
+
+Thus encouraged, the girl took up her little parable again, her sweet,
+rather vacant, face growing almost animated as she spoke.
+
+"We did something else I liked very much, but from what Alicia said
+afterwards I am afraid I ought not to have liked it. One day it snowed,
+and we all played hide-and-seek. There are a number of attics in the
+roof of the bachelor's wing at Whitney, and there are long up-and-down
+passages leading round to the old nurseries. Mama did not mind, but
+Alicia was very displeased. She said it was a mere excuse for romping.
+But that was not true. Of course we never thought of romping. We did
+make a great noise," she added conscientiously, "but that was Rupert
+and Gerry's fault. They would jump out after promising not to, and of
+course it was impossible to help screaming. Eddy's Liverpool friend
+tried to jump out too, but Maggie snubbed him. I think he deserved it.
+You ought to play fair; don't you think so? After promising, you would
+never jump out, would you?"
+
+And there Lady Constance stopped, with a little gasp.
+
+"Oh! I beg your pardon. I am so sorry. I forgot," she added
+breathlessly.
+
+Richard's face had become thin and keen.
+
+"Forget just as often as you can, please," he answered huskily. "I
+would infinitely rather have you--have everybody--forget altogether--if
+possible."
+
+"Oh! but I think that would be wrong of me," she rejoined, with gentle
+dogmatism. "It is selfish to forget anything that is very sad."
+
+"And is this so very sad?" Richard asked, almost harshly.
+
+The girl stared at him with parted lips.
+
+"Oh yes!" she said slowly. "Of course,--don't you think so? It is
+dreadfully sad."--And then, her attitude still unchanged and her pretty
+plump hands still folded on her lap, she went on, in her touching
+determination to sustain the conversation with due readiness and
+civility. "Brockhurst is a much larger house than Whitney, isn't it? I
+thought so the day we drove over to luncheon--when that beautiful,
+French cousin of yours was staying with you, you remember?"
+
+"Yes, I remember," Richard said.
+
+And as he spoke Madame de Vallorbes, clothed in the seawaves, crowned
+and shod with gold, seemed to stand for a moment beside his innocent,
+little _fiancee_. How long it was since he had heard from her! Did she
+want money, he wondered? It would be intolerable if, because of his
+marriage, she never let him help her again. And all the while Lady
+Constance's unemotional, careful, little voice continued, as did the
+ceaseless murmur of London.
+
+"I remember," she was saying, "because your cousin is quite the most
+beautiful person I have ever seen. Papa admired her very much too. We
+spoke of that as soon as Louisa had left us, when we were alone. But
+there seemed to me so many staircases at Brockhurst, and rooms opening
+one out of the other. I have been wondering--since--lately--whether I
+shall ever be able to find my way about the house."
+
+"I will show you your way," Dickie said gently, banishing the vision of
+Helen de Vallorbes.
+
+"You will show it me?" the girl asked, in evident surprise.
+
+Then a companion picture to that of Madame de Vallorbes arose before
+Dickie's mental vision--namely, the good-looking, long-legged, young,
+Irish soldier, Mr. Decies, of the 101st Lancers, flying along the attic
+passages of the Whitney bachelor's wing, in company with this
+immediately--so--demure and dutiful maiden and all the rest of that
+admittedly rather uproarious, holiday throng. Thereat a foolish lump
+rose in poor Richard's throat, for he too was, after all, but young. He
+choked the foolish lump down again. Yet it left his voice a trifle
+husky.
+
+"Yes, I will show you your way," he said. "I can manage that much, you
+know, at home, in private, among my own people. Only you mustn't be in
+a hurry. I have to take my time. You must not mind that. I--I go
+slowly."
+
+"But that will be much better for me," she answered, with rather humble
+courtesy, "because then I am more likely to remember my way. I have so
+much difficulty in knowing my way. I still lose myself sometimes in the
+park at Whitney. I did once this winter with--my brother Guy's friend,
+Mr. Decies. The boys always tease me about losing my way. Even papa
+says I have no bump of locality. I am afraid I am stupid about that. My
+governesses always complained that I was a very thoughtless child."
+
+Lady Constance unfolded her hands. Her timid, engagingly vague gaze
+dwelt appealingly upon Richard's handsome face.
+
+"I think, perhaps, if you do not mind, I will go now," she said. "I
+must bid Lady Calmady good-bye. We dine at Lady Combmartin's to-night.
+You dine there too, don't you? And my sister Louisa may want me to
+drive with her, or write some notes, before I dress."
+
+"Wait half a minute," Dickie said. "I've got something for you. Let's
+see---- Oh! there it is!"
+
+Raising himself he stood, for a moment, on the seat of the chair,
+steadying himself with one hand on the back of it, and reached a
+little, silver-paper covered parcel from the neighbouring table. Then
+he slipped back into a sitting position, drew the silken blanket up
+across his thighs, and tossed the little parcel gently into Lady
+Constance Quayle's lap.
+
+"I as near as possible let you go without it," he said. "Not that it's
+anything very wonderful. It's nothing--only I saw it in a shop in Bond
+Street yesterday, and it struck me as rather quaint. I thought you
+might like it. Why--but--Constance, what's the matter?"
+
+For the girl's pretty, heart-shaped face had blanched to the whiteness
+of her white dress. Her eyes were strained, as those of one who beholds
+an object of terror. Not only her chin but her round, baby mouth
+quivered. Richard looked at her, amazed at these evidences of
+distressing emotion. Then suddenly he understood.
+
+"I frighten you. How horrible!" he said.
+
+But little Lady Constance had not suffered persistent training at the
+hands of nurses, and governesses, and elder sisters, during all her
+eighteen years of innocent living for nothing. She had her own small
+code of manners and morals, of honour and duty, and to the requirements
+of that code, as she apprehended them, she yielded unqualified
+obedience, not unheroic in its own meagre and rather puzzle-headed
+fashion. So that now, notwithstanding quivering lips, she retained her
+intention of civility and entered immediate apology for her own
+weakness.
+
+"No, no, indeed you do not," she replied. "Please forgive me. I know I
+was very foolish. I am so sorry. You are so kind to me, you are always
+giving me beautiful presents, and indeed I am not ungrateful. Only I
+had never seen--seen--you like that before. And, please forgive me--I
+will never be foolish again--indeed, I will not. But I was taken by
+surprise. I beg your pardon. I shall be so dreadfully unhappy if you do
+not forgive me."
+
+And all the while her trembling hands fumbled helplessly with the
+narrow ribbon tying the dainty parcel, and big tears rolled down slowly
+out of her great, soft, wide-set, heifer's eyes. Never was there more
+moving or guileless a spectacle! Witnessing which, Richard Calmady was
+taken somewhat out of himself, his personal misfortune seeming matter
+inconsiderable, while his childlike _fiancee_ had never appeared more
+engaging. All the sweetest of his nature responded to her artless
+appeal in very tender pity.
+
+"Why, my dear Constance," he said, "there's nothing to forgive. I was
+foolish, not you. I ought to have known better. Never mind. I don't.
+Only wipe your pretty eyes, please. Yes--that's better. Now let me
+break that tiresome ribbon for you."
+
+"You are very kind to me," the girl murmured. Then, as the ribbon broke
+under Richard's strong fingers, and the delicate necklace of many,
+roughly-cut, precious stones--topaz, amethyst, sapphire, ruby,
+chrysolite, and beryl joined together, three rows deep, by slender,
+golden chains--slipped from the enclosing paper wrapping into her open
+hands, Constance Quayle added, rather tearfully:--"Oh! you are much too
+kind! You give me too many things. No one I know ever had such
+beautiful presents. The cobs you told me of, and now this, and the
+pearls, and the tiara you gave me last week. I--I don't deserve it. You
+give me too much, and I give nothing in return."
+
+"Oh yes, you do!" Richard said, flushing. "You--you give me yourself."
+
+Lady Constance's tears ceased. Again she stared at him in gentle
+perplexity.
+
+"You promise to marry me----"
+
+"Yes, of course, I have promised that," she said slowly.
+
+"And isn't that about the greatest giving there can be? A few horses,
+and jewels, and such rubbish of sorts, weigh pretty light in the
+balance against that--I being I"--Richard paused a moment--"and
+you--you."
+
+But a certain ardour which had come into his speech, for all that he
+sat very still, and that his expression was wholly gentle and
+indulgent, and that she felt a comfortable assurance that he was not
+angry with her, rather troubled little Lady Constance Quayle. She rose
+to her feet, and stood before him again, as a child about to recite a
+lesson.
+
+"I think," she said, "I must go. Louisa may want me. Thank you so much.
+The necklace is quite lovely. I never saw one like it. I like so many
+colours. They remind me of flowers, or of the colours at sunset in the
+sky. I shall like to wear this very much. You--you will forgive me for
+having been foolish--or if I have bored you?"
+
+Her bosom rose and fell, and the words came breathlessly.
+
+"I shall see you at Lady Combmartin's? So--so now I will go."
+
+And with that she departed, leaving Richard more in love with her,
+somehow, than he had ever been before or had ever thought to be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IN WHICH HONORIA ST. QUENTIN TAKES THE FIELD
+
+
+It had been agreed that the marriage should take place, in the country,
+one day in the first week of August. This at Richard's request. Then
+the young man asked a further favour, namely, that the ceremony might
+be performed in the private chapel at Brockhurst, rather than in the
+Whitney parish church. This last proposal, it must be owned, when made
+to him by Lady Calmady, caused Lord Fallowfeild great searchings of
+heart.
+
+"I give you my word, my dear boy, I never felt more awkward in my
+life," he said, subsequently, to his chosen confidant, Shotover. "Can
+quite understand Calmady doesn't care to court publicity. Told his
+mother I quite understood. Shouldn't care to court it myself if I had
+the misfortune to share his--well, personal peculiarities, don't you
+know, poor young fellow. Still this seems to me an uncomfortable, hole
+and corner sort of way of behaving to one's daughter--marrying her at
+his house instead of from my own. I don't half approve of it. Looks a
+little as if we were rather ashamed of the whole business."
+
+"Well, perhaps we are," Lord Shotover remarked.
+
+"For God's sake, then, don't mention it!" the elder man broke out, with
+unprecedented asperity. "Don't approve of strong language," he added
+hastily. "Never did approve of it, and very rarely employ it myself. An
+educated man ought to be able to express himself quite sufficiently
+clearly without having recourse to it. Still, I must own this
+engagement of Constance's has upset me more than almost any event of my
+life. Nasty, anxious work marrying your daughters. Heavy responsibility
+marrying your daughters. And, as to this particular marriage, there's
+so very much to be said on both sides. And I admit to you, Shotover, if
+there's anything I hate it's a case where there's very much to be said
+on both sides. It trips you up, you see, at every turn. Then I feel I
+was not fairly treated. I don't wish to be hard on your brother Ludovic
+and your sisters, but they sprung it upon me, and I am not quick in
+argument, never was quick, if I am hurried. Never can be certain of my
+own mind when I am hurried--was not certain of it when Lady Calmady
+proposed that the marriage should be at Brockhurst. And so I gave way.
+Must be accommodating to a woman, you know. Always have been
+accommodating to women--got myself into uncommonly tight places by
+being so more than once when I was younger----"
+
+Here the speaker cheered up visibly, contemplating his favourite son
+with an air at once humorous and contrite.
+
+"You're well out of it, you know, Shotover, with no ties," he
+continued, "at least, I mean, with no wife and family. Not that I don't
+consider every man owning property should marry sooner or later. More
+respectable if you've got property to marry, roots you in the soil,
+gives you a stake, you know, in the future of the country. But I'd let
+it be later--yes, thinking of marriageable daughters, certainly I'd let
+it be later."
+
+From which it may be gathered that Richard's demands were conceded at
+all points. And this last concession involved many preparations at
+Brockhurst, to effect which Lady Calmady left London with the bulk of
+the household about the middle of July, while Richard remained in
+Lowndes Square and the neighbourhood of his little _fiancee_--in
+company with a few servants and many brown holland covers--till such
+time as that young lady should also depart to the country. It was just
+now that Lady Louisa Barking gave her annual ball, always one of the
+latest, and this year one of the smartest, festivities of the season.
+
+"I mean it to be exceedingly well done," she said to her sister Alicia.
+"And Mr. Barking entirely agrees with me. I feel I owe it not only to
+myself, but to the rest of the family to show that none of us see
+anything extraordinary in Connie's marriage, and that whatever
+Shotover's debts may have been, or may be, they are really no concern
+at all of ours."
+
+In obedience to which laudable determination the handsome mansion in
+Albert Gate opened wide its portals, and all London--a far from
+despicable company in numbers, since Parliament was still sitting and
+the session promised to be rather indefinitely prolonged--crowded its
+fine stairways and suites of lofty rooms, resplendent in silks and
+satins, jewels and laces, in orders and titles, and manifold personal
+distinctions of wealth, or office, or beauty, while strains of music
+and scent of flowers pervaded the length and breadth of it, and the
+feet of the dancers sped over its shining floors.
+
+It chanced that Honoria St. Quentin found herself, on this occasion, in
+a meditative, rather than an active, mood. True, the scene was
+remarkably brilliant. But she had witnessed too many parallel scenes to
+be very much affected by that. So it pleased her fancy to moralise, to
+discriminate--not without a delicate sarcasm--between actualities and
+appearances, between the sentiments which might be divined really to
+animate many of the guests, and those conventional presentments of
+sentiment which the manner and bearing of the said guests indicated.
+She assured Lord Shotover she would rather not dance, that she
+preferred the attitude of spectator, whereupon that gentleman proposed
+to her to take sanctuary in a certain ante-chamber, opening off Lady
+Louisa Barking's boudoir, which was cool, dimly lighted, and agreeably
+remote from the turmoil of the entertainment now at its height.
+
+The acquaintance of these two persons was, in as far as time and the
+number of their meetings went, but slight, and, at first sight, their
+tastes and temperaments would seem wide asunder as the poles. But
+contrast can form a strong bond of union. And the young man, when his
+fancy was engaged, was among those who do not waste time over
+preliminaries. If pleased, he bundled, neck and crop, into intimacy.
+And Miss St. Quentin, her fearless speech, her amusingly detached
+attitude of mind, and her gallant bearing, pleased him mightily from a
+certain point of view. He pronounced her to be a "first-rate sort," and
+entertained a shrewd suspicion that, as he put it, Ludovic "was after
+her." He commended his brother's good taste. He considered she would
+make a tip-top sister-in-law. While the young lady, on her part,
+accepted his advances in a friendly spirit. His fraternal attitude and
+unfailing good-temper diverted her. His rather doubtful reputation
+piqued her curiosity. She accepted the general verdict, declaring him
+to be good-for-nothing, while she enjoyed the conviction that, rake or
+no rake, he was incapable of causing her the smallest annoyance, or
+being guilty,--as far as she herself was concerned,--of the smallest
+indiscretion.
+
+"You know, Miss St. Quentin," he remarked, as he established himself
+comfortably, not to say cosily, on a sofa beside her,--"over and above
+the pleasure of a peaceful little talk with you, I am not altogether
+sorry to seek retirement. You see, between ourselves, I'm not,
+unfortunately, in exactly good odour with some members of the family
+just now. I don't think I'm shy----"
+
+Honoria smiled at him through the dimness.
+
+"I don't think you're shy," she said.
+
+"Well, you know, when you come to consider it from an unprejudiced
+standpoint, what the dickens is the use of being shy? It's only an
+inverted kind of conceit at best, and half the time it makes you stand
+in your own light."
+
+"Clearly it's a mistake every way," the young lady asserted. "And,
+happily, it's one of which I can entirely acquit you of being guilty."
+
+Lord Shotover threw back his head and looked sideways at his
+companion.--Wonderfully, graceful woman she was certainly! Gave you the
+feeling she'd all the time there was or ever would be. Delightful thing
+to see a woman who was never in a hurry.
+
+"No, honestly I don't believe I'm weak in the way of shyness," he
+continued. "If I had been, I shouldn't be here to-night. My sister
+Louisa didn't press me to come. Strange as it may appear to you, Miss
+St. Quentin, I give you my word she didn't. Nor has she regarded me
+with an exactly favourable eye since my arrival. I am not abashed, not
+a bit. But I can't disguise from myself that again I have gone, and
+been, and jolly well put my foot in it."
+
+He whistled very softly under his breath.--"Oh! I have, I promise you,
+even on the most modest computation, very extensively and
+comprehensively put my foot in it!"
+
+"How?" inquired Honoria.
+
+Lord Shotover's confidences invariably amused her, and just now she
+welcomed amusement. For crossing her hostess' boudoir she had
+momentarily caught sight of that which changed the speculative sarcasm
+of her meditations to something approaching pain--namely, a pretty,
+wide-eyed, childish face rising from out a cloud of white tulle, white
+roses, and diamonds, the expression of which had seemed to her
+distressingly remote from all the surrounding gaiety and splendour.
+Actualities and appearances here were surely radically at variance?
+And, now, she smilingly turned on her elbow and made brief inquiry of
+her companion, promising herself good measure of superficial
+entertainment which should serve to banish that pathetic countenance,
+and allay her suspicion of a sorrowful happening which she was
+powerless alike to hinder or to help.
+
+Lord Shotover pushed his hands into his trousers pockets, leaned far
+back on the sofa, turning his head so that he could look at her
+comfortably without exertion and chuckling, a little, as he spoke.
+
+"Well, you see," he said, "I brought Decies. No, you're right, I'm not
+shy, for to do that was a bit of the most barefaced cheek. My sister
+Louisa hadn't asked him. Of course she hadn't. At bottom she's awfully
+afraid he may still upset the apple-cart. But I told her I knew, of
+course, she had intended to ask him, and that the letter must have got
+lost somehow in the post, and that I knew how glad she'd be to have me
+rectify the little mistake. My manner was not jaunty, Miss St. Quentin,
+or defiant--not a bit of it. It was frank, manly, I should call it
+manly and pleasing. But Louisa didn't seem to see it that way somehow.
+She withered me, she scorched me, reduced me to a cinder, though she
+never uttered one blessed syllable. The hottest corner of the infernal
+regions resided in my sister's eye at that moment, and I resided in
+that hottest corner, I tell you. Of course I knew I risked losing the
+last rag of her regard when I brought Decies. But you see, poor chap,
+it is awfully rough on him. He was making the running all through the
+winter. I could not help, feeling for him, so I chucked discretion----"
+
+"For the first and only time in your life," put in Honoria gently. "And
+pray who and what is this disturber of domestic peace, Decies?"
+
+"Oh! you know the whole affair grows out of this engagement of my
+little sister Connie's. By the way, though, the Calmadys are great
+friends of yours, aren't they, Miss St. Quentin?"
+
+The young man regarded her anxiously, fearful least he should have
+endangered the agreeable intimacy of their present relation by the
+introduction of an unpalatable subject of conversation. Even in this
+semi-obscurity he perceived that her fine smile had vanished, while the
+lines of her sensitive face took on a certain rigidity and effect of
+sternness. Lord Shotover regretted that. For some reason, he knew not
+what, she was displeased. He, like an ass, evidently had blundered.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry," he began, "perhaps--perhaps----"
+
+"Perhaps it is very impertinent for a mere looker-on like myself to
+have any views at all about this marriage," Honoria put in quickly.
+
+"Bless you, no, it's not," he answered. "I don't see how anybody can
+very well be off having views about it--that's just the nuisance. The
+whole thing shouts, confound it. So you might just as well let me hear
+your views, Miss St. Quentin. I should be awfully interested. They
+might help to straighten my own out a bit."
+
+Honoria paused a moment, doubting how much of her thought it would be
+justifiable to confide to her companion. A certain vein of
+knight-errantry in her character inclined her to set lance in rest and
+ride forth, rather recklessly, to redress human wrongs. But in
+redressing one wrong it too often happens that another wrong--or
+something perilously approaching one--must be inflicted. To save pain
+in one direction is, unhappily, to inflict pain in the opposite one.
+Honoria was aware how warmly Lady Calmady desired this marriage. She
+loved Lady Calmady. Therefore her loyalty was engaged, and yet----
+
+"I am no match-maker," she said at last, "and so probably my view is
+unnecessarily pessimistic. But I happened to see Lady Constance just
+now, and I cannot pretend that she struck me as looking conspicuously
+happy."
+
+Lord Shotover flattened his shoulders against the back of the sofa,
+expanding his chest and thrusting his hands still farther into his
+pockets with a movement at once of anxiety and satisfaction.
+
+"I don't believe she is," he asserted. "Upon my word you're right. I
+don't believe she is. I doubted it from the first, and now I'm pretty
+certain. Of course I know I'm a bad lot, Miss St. Quentin. I've been
+very little but a confounded nuisance to my people ever since I was
+born. They're all ten thousand times better than I am, and they're
+doing what they honestly think right. All the same I believe they're
+making a ghastly mistake. They're selling the poor, little girl against
+her will, that's about the long and short of it."
+
+He bowed himself together, looking at his companion from under his
+eyebrows, and speaking with more seriousness than she had ever heard
+him yet speak.
+
+"I tell you it makes me a little sick sometimes to see what excellent,
+well-meaning people will do with girls in respect of marriage. Oh, good
+Lord! it just does! But then a high moral tone doesn't come quite
+gracefully from me. I know that. I'm jolly well out of it. It's not for
+me to preach. And so I thought for once I'd act--defy authority, risk
+landing myself in a worse mess than ever, and give Decies his chance.
+And I tell you he really is a charming chap, a gentleman, you know, and
+a nice, clean-minded, decent fellow--not like me, not a bit. He's
+awfully hard hit too, and would be as steady as old time for poor
+little Con's sake if----"
+
+"Ah! now I begin to comprehend," Honoria said.
+
+"Yes, don't you see, it's a perfectly genuine, for-ever-and-ever-amen
+sort of business."
+
+Lord Shotover leaned back once more, and turned a wonderfully pleasant,
+if not preeminently responsible, countenance upon his companion.
+
+"I never went in for that kind of racket myself, Miss St. Quentin," he
+continued. "Not being conspicuously faithful, I should only have made a
+_fiasco_ of it. But I give you my word it touches me all the same when
+I do run across it. I think it's awfully lucky for a man to be made
+that way. And Decies is. So there seemed no help for it. I had to chuck
+discretion, as I told you, and give him his chance."
+
+He paused, and then asked with a somewhat humorous air of
+self-depreciation:--"What do you think now, have I done more harm than
+good, made confusion worse confounded, and played the fool generally?"
+
+But again Honoria vouchsafed him no immediate reply. The meditative
+mood still held her, and the present conversation offered much food for
+meditation. Her companion's confession of faith in true love, if you
+had the good fortune to be born that way, had startled her. That the
+speaker enjoyed the reputation of being something of a profligate lent
+singular point to that confession. She had not expected it from Lord
+Shotover, of all men. And, as coming from him, the sentiment was in a
+high degree arresting and interesting. Her own ideals, so far, had a
+decidedly anti-matrimonial tendency, while being in love appeared to
+her a much overrated, if not actively objectionable, condition.
+Personally she hoped to escape all experience of it. Then her thought
+traveled back to Lady Calmady,--the charm of her personality, her
+sorrows, her splendid self-devotion, and to the object of that
+devotion--namely, Richard Calmady, a being of strange contrasts, at
+once maimed and beautiful, a being from whom she--Honoria--shrank in
+instinctive repulsion, while unwillingly acknowledging that he
+exercised a permanent and intimate fascination over her imagination.
+She dwelt, in quick pity, too, upon the frightened, wide-eyed, childish
+face recently seen rising from out its diaphanous cloud of tulle, the
+prettiness of it heightened by fair wealth of summer roses and flash of
+costly diamonds, and upon Mr. Decies, the whole-hearted, young soldier
+lover, whose existence threatened such dangerous complications in
+respect of the rest of this strangely assorted company. Finally her
+meditative survey returned to its point of departure. In thought she
+surveyed her present companion,--his undeniable excellence of sentiment
+and clear-seeing, his admittedly defective conduct in matters ethical
+and financial. Never before had she been at such close quarters with
+living and immediate human drama, and, notwithstanding her detachment,
+her lofty indifference and high-spirited theories, she found it
+profoundly agitating. She was sensible of being in collision with
+unknown and incalculable forces. Instinctively she rose from her place
+on the sofa, and, moving to the open window, looked out into the night.
+
+Below, the Park, now silent and deserted, slept peacefully, as any
+expanse of remote country pasture and woodland, in the mildly radiant
+moonlight. Here and there were blottings of dark shadow cast by the
+clumps or avenues of trees. Here and there the timid, yellow flame of
+gas lamps struggled to assert itself against the all-embracing silver
+brightness. Here and there windows glowed warm, set in the pale,
+glistering facades of the adjacent houses. A cool, light wind, hailing
+from the direction of the unseen Serpentine, stirred the hanging
+clusters of the pink geraniums that fell over the curved lip of the
+stone vases, standing along the broad coping of the balcony, and gently
+caressed the girl's bare arms and shoulders.
+
+Seen under these unaccustomed conditions familiar objects assumed a
+fantastic aspect. For the night is a mighty magician, with power to
+render even the weighty brick and stone, even the hard, uncomprising
+outlines of a monster, modern city, delicately elusive, mockingly
+tentative and unsubstantial. Meanwhile, within, from all along the
+vista of crowded and brilliantly illuminated rooms, came the subdued,
+yet confused and insistent, sound of musical instruments, of many
+voices, many footsteps, the hush of women's trailing garments, the rise
+and fall of unceasing conversation. And to Honoria standing in this
+quiet, dimly-seen place, the sense of that moonlit world without, and
+this gas and candle-lit world within, increased the nameless agitation
+which infected her. A haunting persuasion of the phantasmagoric
+character of all sounds that saluted her ears, all sights that met her
+eyes, possessed her. A vast uncertainty surrounded and pressed in on
+her, while those questionings of appearances and actualities, of truth
+and falsehood, right and wrong, justice and injustice, with which she
+had played idly earlier in the evening, took on new and almost terrible
+proportions, causing her intelligence, nay, her heart itself, to reach
+out, as never before, in search of some sure rock and house of defense
+against the disintegrating apprehension of universal instability and
+illusion.
+
+"Ah! it is all very difficult, difficult to the point of alarm!" she
+exclaimed suddenly, turning to Lord Shotover and looking him straight
+in the face, with an unself-consciousness and desire of support so
+transparent, that that gentleman found himself at once delighted and
+slightly abashed.
+
+"Bless my soul, but Ludovic is a lucky devil!" he said to
+himself.--"What's--what's so beastly difficult, Miss St. Quentin?" he
+asked aloud. And the sound of his cheery voice recalled Honoria to the
+normal aspects of existence with almost humorous velocity. She smiled
+upon him.
+
+"I really believe I don't quite know," she said. "Perhaps that the two
+people, of whom we were speaking, really care for each other, and that
+this engagement has come between them, and that you have chucked
+discretion and given him his chance. Tell me, what sort of man is
+he--strong enough to make the most of his chance when he's got it?"
+
+But at that moment Lord Shotover stepped forward, adroitly planting
+himself right in front of her and thus screening her from observation.
+
+"By George!" he said under his breath, in tones of mingled amusement
+and consternation, "he's making the most of his chance now Miss St.
+Quentin, and that most uncommonly comprehensively, unless I'm very much
+mistaken."
+
+Her companion's tall person and the folds of a heavy curtain, while
+screening Honoria from observation, also, in great measure, obscured
+her view of the room. Yet not so completely but that she saw two
+figures cross it, one black, one white, those of a man and a girl. They
+were both speaking, the man apparently pleading, the girl protesting
+and moving hurriedly, the while, as though in actual flight. She must
+have been moving blindly, at random, for she stumbled against the
+outstanding, gilded leg of a consol table, set against the further
+wall, causing the ornaments on it to rattle. And so doing, she gave a
+plaintive exclamation of alarm, perhaps even of physical pain. Hearing
+which, that nameless agitation, that sense of collision with unknown
+and incalculable forces, seized hold on Honoria again, while Lord
+Shotover's features contracted and he turned his head sharply.
+
+"By George!" he repeated under his breath.
+
+But the girl recovered herself, and, followed by her companion,--he
+still pleading, she still protesting,--passed by the further window on
+to the balcony and out of sight. There followed a period of embarrassed
+silence on the part of the usually voluble Shotover, while his pleasant
+countenance expressed a certain half-humorous concern.
+
+"Really, I'm awfully sorry," he said. "I'd not the slightest intention
+of landing you in for the thick of the brown like this.".
+
+"Or yourself either," she replied, smiling, though, with that sense of
+nameless agitation still upon her, her heart beat rather quick.
+
+"Well, perhaps not. Between ourselves, moral courage isn't my strong
+point. There's nothing I funk like a row. I say, what shall we do?
+Don't you think we'd better quietly clear out?"
+
+But just then a sound caught Honoria's ear before which all vague
+questions of ultimate truth and falsehood, right and wrong fled away.
+Whatever might savour of illusion, here was something real and actual,
+something pitiful, moreover, arousing the spirit of knight-errantry in
+her, pushing her to lay lance in rest and go forth, reckless of
+conventionalities, reckless even of considerations of justice, to the
+succour of oppressed womanhood. What words the man, on the balcony
+without, was saying she could not distinguish--whether cruel or kind,
+but that the young girl was weeping, with the abandonment of
+long-resisted tears, she could not doubt.
+
+"No, no, listen Lord Shotover," she exclaimed authoritatively. "Don't
+you hear? She is crying as if her poor heart would break. You must
+stay. If I understand you rightly your sister has only got you to
+depend on. Whatever happens you must stand by her and see her through."
+
+"Oh! but, my dear Miss St. Quentin----" The young man's aspect was
+entertaining. He looked at the floor, he looked at Honoria, he rubbed
+the back of his neck with one hand as though there might be placed the
+seat of fortitude. "You're inviting me to put my head into the
+liveliest hornet's nest. What the deuce--excuse me--am I to say to her
+and all the rest of them? Decies, even, mayn't quite understand my
+interference and may resent it. I think it is very much safer, all
+round, to let them--him and her--thrash it out between them, don't you
+know. I say though, what a beastly thing it is to hear a woman cry! I
+wish to goodness we'd never come into this confounded place and let
+ourselves in for it."
+
+As he spoke, Lord Shotover turned towards the door, meditating escape
+in the direction of that brilliant vista of crowded rooms. But Honoria
+St. Quentin, her enthusiasm once aroused, became inexorable. With her
+long swinging stride she outdistanced his hesitating steps, and stood,
+in the doorway, her arms extended--as to stop a runaway horse--her
+clear eyes aglow as though a lamp burned behind them, her pale,
+delicately cut face eloquent of very militant charity. A spice of
+contempt, moreover, for his display of pusillanimity was quite
+perceptible to Shotover in the expression of this charming, modern
+angel, clad in a ball-dress, bearing a fan instead of the traditional
+fiery-sword, who, so determinedly, barred the entrance of that
+comfortably conventional, worldly paradise to which he, just now, so
+warmly desired to regain admittance.
+
+"No, no," she said, with a certain vibration in her quiet voice, "you
+are not to go! You are not to desert her. It would be unworthy, Lord
+Shotover. You brought Mr. Decies here and so you are mainly responsible
+for the present situation. And think, just think what it means. All the
+course of her life will be affected by that which takes place in the
+next half-hour. You would never cease to reproach yourself if things
+went wrong."
+
+"Shouldn't I?" the young man said dubiously.
+
+"Of course you wouldn't," Honoria asserted. "Having it in your power to
+help, and then shirking the responsibility! I won't believe that of
+you. You are better than that. For think how young she is, and pretty
+and dependent. She may be driven to do some fatally, foolish thing if
+she's left unsupported. You must at least know what is going on. You
+are bound to do so. Moreover, as a mere matter of courtesy, you can't
+desert me and I intend to stay."
+
+"Do you, though?" faltered Lord Shotover, in tones curiously resembling
+his father's.
+
+Honoria drew herself up proudly, almost scornfully.
+
+"Yes, I shall stay," she continued. "I am no matchmaker. I have no
+particular faith in or admiration for marriage----"
+
+"Haven't you, though?" said Lord Shotover. He was slightly surprised,
+slightly amused, but to his credit be it stated that he put no
+equivocal construction upon the young lady's frank avowal. He felt a
+little sorry for Ludovic, that was all, fearing the latter's good
+fortune was less fully established than he had supposed.
+
+"No, I don't believe very much in marriage--modern, upper-class
+marriage," she repeated. "And, just precisely on that account, it seems
+to me all the more degrading and shameful that a girl should risk
+marrying the wrong man. People talk about a broken engagement as though
+it was a disgrace. I can't see that. An unwilling, a--a--loveless
+marriage is the disgrace. And so at the very church door I would urge
+and encourage a woman to turn back, if she doubted, and have done with
+the whole thing."
+
+"Upon my word!" murmured Lord Shotover.--The infinite variety of the
+feminine outlook, the unqualified audacity of feminine action, struck
+him as bewildering. Talk of women's want of logic! It was their
+relentless application of logic--as they apprehended it--which
+staggered him.
+
+Honoria had come close to him. In her excitement she laid her fan on
+his arm.
+
+"Listen," she said, "listen how Lady Constance is crying. Come--you
+must know what is happening. You must comfort her."
+
+The young man thrust his hands into his pockets with an air of
+good-humoured and despairing resignation.
+
+"All right," he replied, "only I tell you what it is, Miss St. Quentin,
+you've got to come too. I refuse to be deserted."
+
+"I have not the smallest intention of deserting you," Honoria said.
+"Even yet discretion, though so lately chucked, might return to you.
+And then you might cut and run, don't you know."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+RECORDING THE ASTONISHING VALOUR DISPLAYED BY A CERTAIN SMALL MOUSE IN
+A CORNER
+
+
+As Honoria St. Quentin and the reluctant Shotover stepped, side by
+side, from the warmth and dimness obtaining in the anteroom, into the
+pleasant coolness of the moonlit balcony, Lady Constance Quayle,
+altogether forgetful of her usual careful civility and pretty
+correctness of demeanour, uttered an inarticulate cry--a cry, indeed,
+hardly human in its abandon and unreasoning anguish, resembling rather
+the shriek of the doubling hare as the pursuing greyhound nips it
+across the loins. Regardless of all her dainty finery of tulle, and
+roses, and flashing diamonds, she flung herself forward, face
+downwards, across the coping of the balustrade, her bare arms
+outstretched, her hands clasped above her head. Mr. Decies, blue-eyed,
+black-haired, smooth of skin, looking noticeably long and lithe in his
+close-fitting, dress clothes, made a rapid movement as though to lay
+hold on her and bear her bodily away. Then, recognising the futility of
+any such attempt, he turned upon the intruders, his high-spirited
+Celtic face drawn with emotion, his attitude rather dangerously
+warlike.
+
+"What do you want?" he demanded hotly.
+
+"My dear good fellow," Lord Shotover began, with the most assuaging air
+of apology. "I assure you the very last thing I--we--I mean I--want is
+to be a nuisance. Only Miss St. Quentin thought--in fact, Decies, don't
+you see--dash it all, you know, there seemed to be some sort of worry
+going on out here and so----"
+
+But Honoria did not wait for the conclusion of elaborate explanations,
+for that cry and the unrestraint of the girl's attitude not only
+roused, but shocked her. It was not fitting that any man, however
+kindly or even devoted, should behold this well-bred, modest and
+gentle, young maiden in her present extremity. So she swept past Mr.
+Decies and bent over Lady Constance Quayle, raised her, strove to
+soothe her agitation, speaking in tones of somewhat indignant
+tenderness.
+
+But, though deriving a measure of comfort from the steady arm about her
+waist, from the strong, protective presence, from the rather stern
+beauty of the face looking down into hers, Lady Constance could not
+master her agitation. The train had left the metals, so to speak, and
+the result was confusion dire. A great shame held her, a dislocation of
+mind. She suffered that loneliness of soul which forms so integral a
+part of the misery of all apparently irretrievable disaster, whether
+moral or physical, and places the victim of it, in imagination at all
+events, rather terribly beyond the pale.
+
+"Oh!" she sobbed, "you ought not to be so kind to me. I am very wicked.
+I never supposed I could be so wicked. What shall I do? I am so
+frightened at myself and at everything. I did not recognise you. I
+didn't see it was only Shotover."
+
+"Well, but now you do see, my dear Con, it's only me," that gentleman
+remarked, with a cheerful disregard of grammar. "And so you mustn't
+upset yourself any more. It's awfully bad for you, and uncomfortable
+for everybody else, don't you know. You must try to pull yourself
+together a bit and we'll help you--of course, I'll help you. We'll all
+help you, of course we will, and pull you through somehow."
+
+But the girl only lamented herself the more piteously.
+
+"Oh no, Shotover, you must not be so kind to me! You couldn't if you
+knew how wicked I have been."
+
+"Couldn't I?" Lord Shotover remarked, not without a touch of humorous
+pathos. "Poor little Con!"
+
+"Only, only please do not tell Louisa. It would be too dreadful if she
+knew--she, and Alicia, and the others. Don't tell her, and I will be
+good. I will be quite good, indeed I will."
+
+"Bless me, my dear child, I won't tell anybody anything. To begin with
+I don't know anything to tell."
+
+The girl's voice had sunk away into a sob. She shuddered, letting her
+pretty, brown head fall back against Honoria St. Quentin's bare
+shoulder,--while the moonlight glinted on her jewels and the night wind
+swayed the hanging clusters of the pink geraniums. Along with the
+warmth and scent of flowers, streaming outward through the open
+windows, came a confused sound of many voices, of discreet laughter,
+mingled with the wailing sweetness of violins. Then the pleading,
+broken, childish voice took up its tale again:--
+
+"I will be good. I know I have promised, and I have let him give me a
+number of beautiful things. He has been very kind to me, because he is
+clever, and of course I am stupid. But he has never been impatient with
+me. And I am not ungrateful, indeed, Shotover, I am not. It was only
+for a minute I was wicked enough to think of doing it. But Mr. Decies
+told me he--asked me--and--and we were so happy at Whitney in the
+winter. And it seemed too hard to give it all up, as he said it was
+true. But I will be good, indeed I will. Really it was only for a
+minute I thought of it. I know I have promised. Indeed, I will make no
+fuss. I will be good. I will marry Richard Calmady."
+
+"But this is simply intolerable!" Honoria said in a low voice.
+
+She held herself tall and straight, looking gallant yet pure, austere
+even, as some pictured Jeanne d'Arc, a great singleness of purpose, a
+high courage of protest, an effect at once of fearless challenge and of
+command in her bearing.--"Is it not a scandal," she went on, "that in a
+civilised country, at this time of day, woman should be allowed,
+actually forced, to suffer so much? You must not permit this martyrdom
+to be completed--you can't!"
+
+As she spoke Decies watched her keenly. Who this stately, young
+lady--so remarkably unlike the majority of Lord Shotover's intimate,
+feminine acquaintance--might be, he did not know. But he discerned in
+her an ally and a powerful one.
+
+"Yes," he said impulsively, "you are right. It is a martyrdom and a
+scandalous one. It's worse than murder, it's sacrilege. It's not like
+any ordinary marriage. I don't want to be brutal, but it isn't. There's
+something repulsive in it, something unnatural."
+
+The young man looked at Honoria, and read in her expression a certain
+agreement and encouragement.
+
+"You know it, Shotover--you know it just as well as I do. And that
+justified me in attempting what I suppose I would not otherwise have
+felt it honourable to attempt.--Look here, Shotover, I will tell you
+what has just happened. I would have had to tell you to-morrow, in any
+case, if we had carried the plan out. But I suppose I have no
+alternative but to tell you now, since you've come."
+
+He ranged himself in line with Miss St. Quentin, his back against one
+of the big stone vases. He struggled honestly to keep both temper and
+emotion under control, but a rather volcanic energy was perceptible in
+him.
+
+"I love Lady Constance," he said. "I have told her so, and--and she
+cares for me. I am not a Croesus like Calmady. But I am not a pauper.
+I have enough to keep a wife in a manner suitable to her position, and
+my own. When my Uncle Ulick Decies dies--which I hope he'll not hurry
+to do, since I am very fond of him--there'll be the Somersetshire
+property in addition to my own dear, old place in County Cork. And your
+sister simply hates this marriage----"
+
+"Lord bless me, my dear fellow, so do I!" Lord Shotover put in with
+evident sincerity.
+
+"And so, when at last I had spoken freely, I asked her to----"
+
+But the young girl cowered down, hiding her face in Honoria St.
+Quentin's bosom.
+
+"Oh! don't say it again--don't say it," she implored. "It was wicked of
+me to listen to you even for a minute. I ought to have stopped you at
+once and sent you away. It was very wrong of me to listen, and talk to
+you, and tell you all that I did. But everything is so strange, and I
+have been so miserable. I never supposed anybody could ever be so
+miserable. And I knew it was ungrateful of me, and so I dared not tell
+anybody. I would have told papa, but Louisa never let me be alone with
+him. She said papa indulged me, and made me selfish and fanciful, and
+so I have never seen him for more than a little while. And I have been
+so frightened."--She raised her head, gazing wide-eyed first at Miss
+St. Quentin and then at her brother. "I have thought such dreadful
+things. I must be very bad. I wanted to run away. I wanted to die----"
+
+"There, you hear, you hear," Decies cried hoarsely, spreading abroad
+his hands, in sudden violence of appeal to Honoria. "For God's sake
+help us! I am not aware whether you are a relation, or a friend, or
+what. But I am convinced you can help, if only you choose to do so. And
+I tell you she is just killing herself over this accursed marriage.
+Some one's got at her and talked her into some wild notion of doing her
+duty, and marrying money for the sake of her family."
+
+"Oh! I say, damn it all," Lord Shotover exclaimed, smitten with genuine
+remorse.
+
+"And so she believes she's committing the seven deadly sins, and I
+don't know what besides, because she rebels against this marriage and
+is unhappy. Tell her it's absurd, it's horrible, that she should do
+what she loathes and detests. Tell her this talk about duty is a blind,
+and a fiction. Tell her she isn't wicked. Why, God in heaven, if we
+were none of us more wicked than she is, this poor old world would be
+so clean a place that the holy angels might walk barefoot along the
+Piccadilly pavement there, outside, without risking to soil so much as
+the hem of their garments! Make her understand that the only sin for
+her is to do violence to her nature by marrying a man she's afraid of,
+and for whom she does not care. I don't want to play a low game on Sir
+Richard Calmady and steal that which belongs to him. But she doesn't
+belong to him--she is mine, just my own. I knew that from the first day
+I came to Whitney, and looked her in the face, Shotover. And she knows
+it too, only she's been terrorised with all this devil's talk of duty."
+
+So far the words had poured forth volubly, as in a torrent. Now the
+speaker's voice dropped, and they came slowly, defiantly, yet without
+hesitation.
+
+"And so I asked her to go away with me, now, to-night, and marry me
+to-morrow. I can make her happy--oh, no fear about that! And she would
+have consented and gone. We'd have been away by now--if you and this
+lady had not come just when you did, Shotover."
+
+The gentleman addressed whistled very softly.
+
+"Would you, though?" he said, adding meditatively:--"By George now,
+who'd have thought of Connie going the pace like that!"
+
+"Oh, Shotover, never tell, promise me you will never tell them!" the
+poor child cried again. "I know it was wicked, but----"
+
+"No, no, you are mistaken there," Honoria put in, holding her still
+closer. "You were tempted to take a rather desperate way out of your
+difficulties. It would have been unwise, but there was nothing wicked
+in it. The wrong thing is--as Mr. Decies tells you--to marry without
+love, and so make all your life a lie, by pretending to give Richard
+Calmady that which you do not, and cannot, give him."
+
+Then the young soldier broke in resolutely again.
+
+"I tell you I asked her to go away, and I ask her again now----"
+
+"The deuce you do!" Lord Shotover exclaimed, his sense of amusement
+getting the better alike of astonishment and of personal regrets.
+
+"Only now I ask you to sanction her going, Shotover. And I ask you"--he
+turned to Miss St. Quentin--"to come with her. I am not even sure of
+your name, but I know by all that you've said and done in the last
+half-hour, I can be very sure of you. And, I perceive, that if you come
+nobody will dare to say anything unpleasant--there'll be nothing,
+indeed, to be said."
+
+Honoria smiled. The magnificent egoism of mankind in love struck her as
+distinctly diverting. Yet she had a very kindly feeling towards this
+black-haired, bright-eyed, energetic, young lover. He was in deadly
+earnest--to the removing even of mountains. And he had need to be so,
+for that mountains immediately blocked the road to his desires was
+evident even to her enthusiastic mind. She looked across compellingly
+at Lord Shotover. Let him speak first. She needed time, at this
+juncture, in which to arrange her ideas and to think.
+
+"My dear good fellow," that gentleman began obediently, patting Decies
+on the shoulder, "I'm all on your side. I give you my word I am, and
+I've reason to believe my father will be so too. But you see, an
+elopement--specially in our sort of highly respectable, humdrum
+family--is rather a strong order. Upon my honour, it is, you know,
+Decies. And, even though kindly countenanced by Miss St. Quentin, and
+sanctioned by me, it would make a precious undesirable lot of talk. It
+really is a rather irregular fashion of conducting the business you
+see. And then--advice I always give others and only wish I could always
+remember to take myself--it's very much best to be off with the old
+love before you're on with the new."
+
+"Yes, yes," Miss St. Quentin put in with quick decision. "Lord Shotover
+has laid his finger on the heart of the matter. It is just that.--Lady
+Constance's engagement to Richard Calmady must be cancelled before her
+engagement to you, Captain Decies, is announced. For her to go away
+with you would be to invite criticism, and put herself hopelessly in
+the wrong. She must not put herself in the wrong. Let me think! There
+must be some way by which we can avoid that."
+
+An exultation, hitherto unexperienced by her, inspired Honoria St.
+Quentin. Her attitude was slightly unconventional. She sat on the stone
+balustrade, with long-limbed, lazy grace, holding the girl's hand,
+forgetful of herself, forgetful, in a degree, of appearances, concerned
+only with the problem of rescue presented to her. The young man's
+honest, wholehearted devotion, the young girl's struggle after duty and
+her piteous desolation, nay, the close contact of that soft, maidenly
+body that she had so lately held against her in closer, more intimate,
+contact than she had ever held anything human before, aroused a new
+class of sentiment, a new order of emotion, within her. She realised,
+for the first time, the magnetism, the penetrating and poetic splendour
+of human love. To witness the spectacle of it, to be thus in touch with
+it, excited her almost as sailing a boat in a heavy sea, or riding to
+hounds in a stiff country, excited her. And it followed that now, while
+she perched aloft boy-like on the balustrade, her delicate beauty took
+on a strange effulgence, a something spiritual, mysterious, elusive,
+and yet dazzling as the moonlight which bathed her charming figure.
+Seeing which, it must be owned that Lord Shotover's attitude towards
+her ceased to be strictly fraternal, while the attractions of ladies
+more fair and kind than wise paled very sensibly.
+
+"I wish I hadn't been such a fool in my day, and run amuck with my
+chances," he thought.
+
+But Miss St. Quentin was altogether innocent of his observation or any
+such thinkings. She looked up suddenly, her face irradiated by an
+exquisite smile.
+
+"Yes, I have it," she cried. "I see the way clear."
+
+"But I can't tell them," broke in Lady Constance.
+
+Honoria's hand closed down on hers reassuringly.
+
+"No," she said, "you shall not tell them. And Lord Shotover shall not
+tell them. Sir Richard Calmady shall tell Lord Fallowfeild that he
+wishes to be released from his engagement, as he believes both you and
+he will be happier apart. Only you must be brave, both for your own
+sake, and for Mr. Decies', and for Richard Calmady's sake, also.--Lady
+Constance," she went on, with a certain gentle authority, "do you want
+to go back to Whitney to-morrow, or next day, all this nightmare of an
+unhappy marriage done away with and gone? Well, then, you must come and
+see Sir Richard Calmady to-night, and, like an honourable woman, tell
+him the whole truth. It must be done at once, or your courage may fail.
+We will come with you--Lord Shotover and I----"
+
+"Good Lord, will we though!" the young man ejaculated, while the girl's
+great, heifer's eyes grew strained with wonder at this astounding
+announcement.
+
+"I know it will be rather terrible," Honoria continued calmly. "But it
+is a matter of a quarter of an hour, as against a lifetime, and of
+honour as against a lie. So it's worth while, don't you think so, when
+your whole future, and Mr. Decies'"--she pressed the soft hand again
+steadily--"is at stake? You must be brave now, and tell him the
+truth--just simply that you do not love him enough--that you have
+tried,--you have, I know you have done that,--but you have failed, that
+you love some one else, and that therefore you beg him, in mercy,
+before it is too late, to set you free."
+
+Fascinated both by her appearance and by the simplicity of her
+trenchant solution of the difficulty, Lord Shotover stared at the
+speaker. Her faith was infectious. Yet it occurred to him that all
+women, good and bad, are at least alike in this--that their methods
+become radically unscrupulous when they find themselves in a tight
+place.
+
+"It is a fine plan. It ought to work, for--cripple or not--poor
+Calmady's a gentleman," he said, slowly. "But doesn't it seem just a
+trifle rough, Miss St. Quentin, to ask him to be his own executioner?"
+
+Honoria had slipped down from the balustrade, and stood erect in the
+moonlight.
+
+"I think not," she replied. "The woman pays, as a rule. Lady Constance
+has paid already quite heavily enough, don't you think so? Now we will
+have the exception that proves the rule. The man shall pay whatever
+remains of the debt. But we must not waste time. It is not late yet, we
+shall still find him up, and my brougham is here. I told Lady Aldham I
+should be home fairly early. Get a cloak Lady Constance and meet us in
+the hall. I suppose you can go down by some back way so as to avoid
+meeting people. Lord Shotover, will you take me to say good-night to
+your sister, Lady Louisa?"
+
+The young man fairly chuckled.
+
+"And you, Mr. Decies, must stay and dance."--She smiled upon him very
+sweetly. "I promise you it will come through all right, for, as Lord
+Shotover says, whatever his misfortunes may be, Richard Calmady is a
+gentleman.--Ah! I hope you are going to be very happy. Good-bye."
+
+Decies' black head went down over her hand, and he kissed it
+impulsively.
+
+"Good-bye," he said, the words catching a little in his throat. "When
+the time comes, may you find the man to love you as you deserve--though
+I doubt if there's such a man living, or dead either, for that matter!
+God bless you."
+
+Some half-hour later Honoria stood among the holland-shrouded furniture
+in Lady Calmady's sitting-room in Lowndes Square. The period of exalted
+feeling, of the conviction of successful attainment, was over, and her
+heart beat somewhat painfully. For she had had time, by now, to realise
+the surprising audacity of her own proceedings. Lord Shotover's parley
+with Richard Calmady's man-servant, on the door-step, had brought that
+home to her, placing what had seemed obvious, as a course of action to
+her fervid imagination, in quite a new light.--Sir Richard Calmady was
+at home? He was still up?--To that, yes. Would he see Lady Constance
+Quayle upon urgent business?--To that again, yes--after a rather
+lengthy delay, while the valet, inscrutable, yet evidently highly
+critical, made inquiries.--The trees in the square had whispered
+together uncomfortably, while the two young ladies waited in the
+carriage. And Lord Shotover's shadow, which had usually, very surely,
+nothing in the least portentous about it, lay queerly, three ways at
+once, in varying degrees of density, across the gray pavement in the
+conflicting gas and moonlight.
+
+And now, as she stood among the shrouded furniture, which appeared
+oddly improbable in shape seen in the flickering of two hastily lighted
+candles, Honoria could hear Shotover walking back and forth, patiently,
+on that same gray pavement outside. She was overstrained by the
+emotions and events of the past hours. Small matters compelled her
+attention. The creaking of a board, the rustle of a curtain, the
+silence even of this large, but half-inhabited, house, were to her big
+with suggestion, disquietingly replete with possible meaning, of
+exaggerated importance to her anxiously listening ears.
+
+Lord Shotover had stopped walking. He was talking to the coachman.
+Honoria entertained a conviction that, in the overflowing of his good
+nature, he talked--sooner or later--to every soul whom he met. And she
+derived almost childish comfort from the knowledge of the near
+neighbourhood of that eminently good-natured presence. Lord Shotover's
+very obvious faults faded from her remembrance. She estimated him only
+by his size, his physical strength, his large indulgence of all
+weaknesses--including his own. He constituted a link between her and
+things ordinary and average, for which she was rather absurdly thankful
+at this juncture. For the minutes passed slowly, very slowly. It must
+be getting on for half an hour since little Lady Constance, trembling
+and visibly affrighted, had passed out of sight, and the door of the
+smoking-room had closed behind her. The nameless agitation which
+possessed her earlier that same evening returned upon Honoria St.
+Quentin. But its character had suffered change. The questioning of the
+actual, the suspicion of universal illusion, had departed, and in its
+place she suffered alarm of the concrete, of the incalculable force of
+human passion, and of a manifestation of tragedy in some active and
+violent form. She did not define her own fears, but they surrounded her
+nevertheless, so that the slightest sound made her start.
+
+For, indeed, how slowly the minutes did pass! Lord Shotover was walking
+again. The horse rattled its bit, and pawed the ground impatient of
+delay. Though lofty, the room appeared close and hot, with drawn blinds
+and shut windows. Honoria began to move about restlessly, threading her
+way between the pieces of shrouded furniture. A chalk drawing of Lady
+Calmady stood on an easel in the far corner. The portrait emphasised
+the sweetness and abiding pathos, rather than the strength, of the
+original, and Honoria, standing before it, put her hands over her eyes.
+For the pictured face seemed to plead with and reproach her. Then a
+swift fear took her of disloyalty, of hastiness, of self-confidence
+trenching on cruelty. She had announced, rather arrogantly, that
+whatever balance debt remained to be paid, in respect of Sir Richard
+and Lady Constance Quayle's proposed marriage, should be paid by the
+man. But would the man, in point of fact, pay it? Would it not, must it
+not, be paid, eventually, by this other noble and much enduring
+woman--whom she had called her friend, and towards whom she played the
+part, as she feared, of betrayer? In her hot espousal of Lady
+Constance's cause she had only saved one woman at the expense of
+another--Oh! how hot the room grew! Suffocating--Lord Shotover's steps
+died away in the distance. She could look Lady Calmady in the face no
+more. Secure in her own self-conceit and vanity, she had betrayed her
+friend.
+
+Suddenly the sharp peal of a bell, the opening of a door, the dragging
+of silken skirts, and the hurrying of footsteps.--Honoria gathered up
+her somewhat scattered courage, and swung out into the hall. Lady
+Constance Quayle came towards her, groping, staggering, breathless, her
+head carried low, her face convulsed with weeping. But to this, for the
+moment, Miss St. Quentin paid small heed. For, at the far end of the
+hall, a bright light streamed out from the open doorway. And in the
+full glare of it stood a young man--his head, with its cap of
+close-cropped curls proudly distinguished as that of some classic hero,
+his features the beautiful features of Katherine Calmady, his height
+but two-thirds the height a man of his make should be, his face drawn
+and livid as that of a corpse, his arms hanging down straight at his
+sides, his hands only just not touching the marble quarries of the
+floor on either side of him.
+
+Honoria uttered an exclamation of uncontrollable pity and horror,
+caught Constance Quayle by the arm, and hurried out into the moonlit
+square to the waiting carriage. Lord Shotover flung away the end of his
+cigar and strolled towards them.
+
+"Got through, fixed it all right--eh, Connie? Bravo--that's grand!--Oh,
+you needn't tell me! I can imagine it's been a beastly piece of work,
+but anyway it's over now. You must go home and go to bed, and I'll
+account for you somehow to Louisa. My mind's becoming quite inventive
+to-night, I promise you.--There, get in--try to pull yourself together.
+Miss St. Quentin, upon my word, I don't know how to thank you. You've
+been magnificent, and put us under an everlasting obligation, Con and
+Decies, and my father and I.--Nice night, isn't it? You'll put us down
+in Albert Gate? All right. A thousand thanks.--Yes, I'll go on the box
+again. You haven't much room for my legs among all those flounces.
+Bless me, it occurs to me I'm getting confoundedly hungry. I shall be
+awfully glad of some supper."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A MANIFESTATION OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+Brockhurst House had slumbered all day long in the steady warmth of the
+July sun. The last three weeks had been rainless, so that the short
+turf of the uplands began to grow crisp and discoloured, while the
+resinous scent of the fir forest, at once stimulating and soothing, was
+carried afar out over the sloping corn-fields and low-lying pastures.
+Above the stretches of purple-budding heather and waste sandy places,
+upon the moors, the heat-haze danced and quivered as do vapours arising
+from a furnace. Along the underside of the great woods, and in the turn
+of the valleys, shadows lingered, which were less actual shadows than
+blottings of blue light. The birds, busy feeding wide-mouthed, hungry
+fledglings, had mostly ceased from song. But the drowsy hum of bees and
+chirrup of grasshoppers was continuous, and told, very pleasantly, of
+the sunshine and large plenty reigning out of doors.
+
+For Katherine the day in question had passed in Martha-like
+occupations.--A day of organising, of ordering and countermanding, a
+day of much detail, much interviewing of heads of departments, a day of
+meeting respectful objections, enlightening thick understandings,
+gently reducing decorously opposing wills. Commissariat, transport,
+housing of guests, and the servants of guests--all these entered into
+the matter of the coming wedding. To compass the doing of all things,
+not only decently and in order, but handsomely, and with a becoming
+dignity, this required time and thought. And so, it was not until after
+dinner that Katherine found herself at leisure to cease taking thought
+for the morrow. Too tired to rest herself by reading, she wandered out
+on the troco-ground followed by Camp.
+
+London had not altogether suited the bull-dog as the summer wore on.
+Now, in his old age, so considerable a change of surroundings put him
+about both in body and mind. Seeing which, Richard had begged his
+mother to take the dog with her on leaving town. Camp benefited,
+unquestionably, by his return to country air. His coat stared less. He
+carried his ears and tail with more sprightliness and conviction. Still
+he fretted after his absent master, and followed Katherine's footsteps
+very closely, his forehead more than ever wrinkled, and his unsightly
+mouth pensive notwithstanding its perpetual grin. He attended her now,
+squatting beside her when she paused, trotting slowly beside her when
+she moved, a silent, persistent, and, as it might seem, somewhat
+fatefully faithful companion.
+
+Yet the occasion was to all appearances far from fateful, the night and
+the scene, alike, being very fair. The moon had not yet risen, but a
+brightness behind the sawlike edge of the fir woods eastward heralded
+its coming, while sufficient light yet remained in the western and
+northern sky for the mass of the house, its ruddy walls and ranges of
+mullioned windows, its pierced, stone parapet and stacks of slender,
+twisted chimneys, to be seen with a low-toned distinctness of form and
+colour infinitely charming. Soft and rich as velvet, it rose, with a
+certain noble serenity, above its terraces and fragrant, red-walled
+gardens, under the enormous dome of the tranquil, far-off, evening sky.
+
+Every aspect of this place, in rain and shine, summer and winter, from
+dawn to dark and round to dawn again, was familiar to Katherine
+Calmady. Coming here first, as a bride, the homely splendour of the
+house, and the gladness of its situation crowning the ridge of hill,
+appealed strongly to her imagination. Later it sheltered her long
+sorrow, following so hard on the heels of her brief joy. But in both
+alike, during all the vicissitudes of her thought and of her career,
+the face of Brockhurst remained as that of a friend, kindly,
+beneficent, increasingly trusted and beloved. And so she had come to
+know every stick and stone of it, from spacious, vaulted cellar to
+equally spacious, low-roofed, sun-dried attic--the outlook from each
+window, the character of each room, the turn of each stairway, the
+ample proportions of each lobby and stairhead, all the pleasant scents,
+and sounds, and colours, that haunted it both within and without. It
+might have been supposed that after so many years of affectionate
+observation and commerce, Brockhurst could have no new word in its
+tongue, could hold no further self-revelation, for Lady Calmady. Yet,
+as she passed now from the arcaded garden-hall, supporting the eastern
+bay of the Long Gallery, on to the level, green square of the
+troco-ground, and stood gazing out over the downward sloping park--the
+rough, short turf of it dotted with ancient thorn trees and broken by
+beds of bracken and dog-roses--to the Long Water, glistening like some
+giant mirror some quarter-mile distant in the valley, she became
+sensible of a novel element in her present relation to this place.
+
+For the first time, in all her long experience, she was at Brockhurst
+quite alone. The house was vacant even of a friend. For Julius March
+had, rather to Katherine's surprise, selected just this moment for the
+paying of his yearly visit to a certain college friend, a scholarly and
+godly person, now rector of a sleepy, country parish away in the heart
+of the great, Midlandshire grasslands. Katherine experienced a
+momentary sense of injury at his going. Yet perhaps it was as well.
+Between the turmoil of the past London season, the coming turmoil of
+the wedding, and the large and serious issues which that wedding
+involved, this time of solitude might be salutary. To Katherine, just
+now, it seemed as a bridge carrying her over from one way of life to
+another. A but slightly known country lay ahead. Solitude and
+self-recollection are good for the soul if it would possess itself in
+peace. The fair brightness of the Indwelling Light had not been
+obscured in her during these months devoted to the world and to
+society. But it was inevitable that her consciousness of it, and
+consequently its clear-shining, should have suffered diminution at
+times. The eager pressure of things to be done, things to be seen, of
+much conversation, the varied pageant of modern life perpetually
+presented to her eyes and her intelligence, could not but crowd out the
+spiritual order somewhat. Of late she had had only time to smile upon
+her God in passing, instead of spending long hours within the courts of
+His temple. This she knew. It troubled her a little. She desired to
+return to a condition of more complete self-collectedness. And so, the
+first movement of surprise past, she hailed her solitude as a means of
+grace, and strove, in sweet sincerity, to make good use of it.
+
+And yet--since the human heart, if sound and wholesome, hungers, even
+when penetrated by Godward devotion, for some fellow-creature on whom
+to expend its tenderness--Katherine, just now, regretted to be alone.
+The scene was so beautiful, she would gladly have had some one look on
+it beside herself, and share its charm. Then thoughts of the future
+obtruded themselves. How would little Constance Quayle view Brockhurst?
+Would it claim her love? Would she embrace the spirit of it, and make
+it not only the home of her fair young body, but the home of her
+guileless heart? Katherine yearned in spirit over this girl standing on
+the threshold of all the deeper experiences of a woman's life, of those
+amazing revelations which marriage holds for an innocent and modest
+maiden.--But oh! how lovely are such revelations when the lover is also
+the beloved!
+
+Katherine moved on a few paces. The thought of all that, even now at
+forty-eight, cut her a little too sharply. It is not wise to call up
+visions of joys that are dead. She would think of something else, so
+she told herself, as she paused in her rustling gray dress upon the
+dry, gravel path, the surface of which still sensibly held the warmth
+of the sun, while Camp squatted soberly on his haunches beside her.
+But, at first, only worrying thoughts responded to her call.--It was
+not quite kind, surely, of Julius to have left home just now. It was a
+little inconsiderate of him. If she dwelt on the thought of that,
+clearly it would vex her--so it must be banished. Reynolds, the
+housekeeper, had really been very perverse about the turning of the two
+larger china-closets into extra dressing-rooms for the week of the
+wedding, and Clara showed an inclination to back her up in opposition.
+Of course the maids would give in--they always did, and that without
+any subsequent attempt at small reprisals. Still the thought of that,
+too, was annoying and must be banished. At dinner she had received a
+singular letter from Honoria St. Quentin. It contained what appeared to
+Katherine as rather over-urgent protestations of affection and offers
+of service, if at any future time she--the writer--could be of use. The
+letter was charming in its slight extravagance. But it struck Katherine
+as incomprehensibly penitent in tone--the letter of one who has not
+treated a friend quite loyally and is hot with anxiety to atone. It was
+dated this morning too, and must have been posted at some surprisingly
+early hour to have thus reached Brockhurst by the day mail. Lady
+Calmady did not quite relish the missive, somehow, notwithstanding its
+affection. It lacked the perfection of personal dignity which had
+pleased her heretofore in Honoria St. Quentin. She felt vaguely
+disappointed. And it followed that this thought, therefore, must go
+along with the rest. For she refused to be disquieted. She would compel
+herself to be at peace.
+
+So, putting these small sources of discomfort from her, as unworthy
+both of her better understanding and of this fair hour and fair place,
+Katherine yielded herself wholly to the influences of her surroundings.
+The dew was rising--promise of another hot, clear day to-morrow--and
+along with it rose a fragrance of wild thyme from the grass slopes
+immediately below. That fragrance mingled with the richer scents of
+jasmine, full-cupped, July roses, scarlet, trumpet-flowered
+honeysuckle, tall lilies, and great wealth of heavy-headed, clove
+carnations, veiling the red walls or set in the trim borders of the
+gardens behind. A strangely belated nightingale still sang in the big,
+Portugal laurel beside the quaint, pepper-pot summer-house in the far
+corner of the troco-ground, where the twenty-foot brick wall dips, in
+steps of well-set masonry, to the gray three-foot balustrade. She never
+remembered to have heard one sing so late in the summer. The bird was
+answered moreover by another singer from the coppice, bordering the
+trout-stream which feeds the Long Water, away across the valley. In
+each case the song was, note for note, the same. But the chant of the
+near bird was hotly urgent in its passion of "wooing and winning,"
+while the song of the answerer came chastened and etherealised by
+distance. A fox barked sharply on the left, out in the Warren. And the
+churring of the night-jars, as they flitted hither and thither over the
+beds of bracken and dog-roses, like gigantic moths, on swift, silent
+wings, formed a continuous accompaniment, as of a spinning-wheel, to
+the other sounds.
+
+Never, as she watched and listened, had the genius of Brockhurst
+appeared more potent or more enthralling. For a space she rested in it,
+asking nothing beyond that which sight and hearing could give. It was
+very good to breathe the scented air and be lulled by the inarticulate
+music of nature. It was good to cease from self and from all individual
+striving, to become a part merely of the universal movement of things,
+a link merely in the mighty chain of universal being. But such an
+impersonal attitude of mind cannot last long, least of all in the case
+of a woman! Katherine's heart awoke and cried again for some human
+object on which to expend itself, some kindred intelligence to meet and
+reflect her own. Ah, were she but better, more holy and more wise,
+these cravings would doubtless not assail her! The worship of the
+Indwelling Light would suffice, and she would cease from desire of the
+love of any creature. But she had not journeyed so far upon the road of
+perfection yet, as she sadly told herself. Far from it. The nightingale
+sang on, sang of love, not far hence, not far above, not within the
+spirit only, but here, warm, immediate, and individual. And, do what
+she would, the song brought to her mind such love, as she herself had
+known it during the few golden months of her marriage--of meetings at
+night, sweet and sacred, of partings, sweet and sacred too, at morning,
+of secret delights, of moments, at once pure and voluptuous, known only
+to virtuous lovers. It was not often that remembrance of all this came
+back to her, save as a faint echo of a once clear-sounding voice.
+Indeed she had supposed it all laid away forever, done with, even as
+the bright colours it had once so pleased her to wear were laid away in
+high mahogany presses that lined one side of the lofty state-bedroom
+up-stairs. But now remembrance laid violent hands on her, shaking both
+mind and body from their calm. The passion of the bird's song, the
+caressing suavity of the summer night, the knowledge, too, that so soon
+another bride and bridegroom would dwell here at Brockhurst, worked
+upon her strangely. She struggled with herself, surprised and half
+angered by the force of her own emotion, and pleaded at once against,
+and for, the satisfaction of the immense nostalgia which possessed her.
+
+"Ah! it is bitter, very bitter, to have had at once so much and so
+little. Bow my proud neck, O Lord, to Thy yoke. If my beloved had but
+been spared to me I had never walked in darkness, far from the way of
+faith, and my child had never suffered bodily disfigurement. Perfect
+me, O God, even at the cost of further suffering. It is sad to be shut
+away from the joys of my womanhood, while my life is still strong in
+me. Break me, O Lord, even as the ploughshare breaks the reluctant
+clod. Hold not Thy hand till the work be fully accomplished, and the
+earth be ready for the sowing which makes for harvest. Give me back the
+beloved of my youth, the beloved of my life, if only for an hour. Teach
+me to submit. Show me, beyond all dread of contradiction that vows,
+truly made, hold good even in that mysterious world beyond the grave.
+Show me that though the body--dear home and vehicle of love--may die,
+yet love in its essence remains everlastingly conscious, faithful and
+complete. Bend my will to harmony with Thine, O Lord, and cleanse me of
+self-seeking. Ah! but still let me see his face once again, once again,
+oh, my God--and I will rebel no more. Let me look on him, once again,
+if only for a moment, and I shall be content. Hear me, I am greatly
+troubled, I am athirst--I faint----"
+
+Katherine's prayer, which had risen into audible speech, sank away into
+silence. The near nightingale had fallen silent also. But from across
+the valley, chastened and etherealised by distance, still came the song
+of the answering bird. To Katherine those fine and delicate notes were
+full of promise. They bore testimony to the soul which dwells forever
+behind the outward aspect and sense. Whether she fainted in good truth,
+or whether she passed, for a while, into that sublimated state of
+consciousness wherein the veils of habit cease to blind and something
+of the eternal essence and values of things is revealed, perception
+overstepping, for once, the limits of ordinary, earth-bound
+apprehension and transcending ordinary circumscription of time and
+place, she could not tell. Nor did she greatly care. For a great peace
+descended upon her, accompanied by a gentle, yet penetrating
+expectancy. She stood very still, her feet set on the warm gravel, the
+night air wrapping her about as with a fragrant garment, the ghostly
+sweetness of that far-away bird-song in her ears, while momentarily the
+conviction of the near presence of the man who had so loved her, and
+whom she had so loved, deepened within her. And therefore it was
+without alarm, without any shock of amazement, that gradually she found
+her awareness of that presence change from something felt, to something
+actually seen.
+
+He came towards her--that first Richard Calmady, her husband and
+lover--across the smooth, green levels of the troco-ground which lay
+dusky in the mingling half-lights of the nearly departed sunset and the
+rising moon, as he had come to her a hundred times in life, back from
+the farms or the moorlands, from sport or from business, or from those
+early morning rides, the clean freshness of the morning upon him, after
+seeing his race-horses galloped. He came bareheaded, in easy
+workmanlike garments, short coat, breeches, long boots and spurs. He
+came with the repose of movement which is born of a well-knit frame,
+and a temperate life, and the grace of gentle blood. He came with the
+half smile on his lips, and the gladness in his eyes when they first
+met hers, which had always been there however brief the parting. And
+Katherine perceived it was just thus our beloved dead must needs return
+to us--should they return at all--laying aside the splendours of the
+spirit in tenderness for mortal weakness. Even as the Christ laid aside
+the visible glory of the Godhead, and came a babe among men, so must
+they come in humble, every-day fashion, graciously taking on the manner
+and habit common to them during earthly life. Therefore she suffered no
+shrinking, but turned instinctively, as she had turned a hundred times,
+laughing very softly in the fulness of content, raising her hands,
+throwing back her head, knowing that he would come behind her and take
+her hands in his, and kiss her, so, bending down over her shoulder.
+And, when he came, she did not need to speak, but only to gaze into the
+well-beloved face, familiar, yet touched--as it seemed to her--with a
+mysterious and awful beauty, beholding which she divined the answer to
+many questions.
+
+For she perceived, as one waking from an uneasy dream perceives the
+comfortable truth of day, that her love was not given back to her, for
+the dear reason that her love had never been taken away. The fiction of
+Time ceased to rule in her, so that the joy of bride and new-wed wife,
+the strange, sweet perplexities of dawning motherhood were with her
+now, not as memories merely, but as actual, ever present, deathless
+fact--the culminating, and therefore permanent, revelation of her
+individual experience. She perceived this continued and must continue,
+since it was the fine flower of her nature, the unit of her personal
+equation, the realisation of the eternal purpose concerning her of
+Almighty God. This fiction of old age was discredited, so was the
+bitterness of deposition, the mournful fiction of being passed by and
+relegated to the second place. Her place was her own. Her standing
+ground in the universal order, a freehold, absolute and inalienable.
+She could not abdicate her throne, neither could any wrest it away from
+her. She perceived that not self-effacement, but self-development, not
+dissolution, but evolution, was the service required of her. And, as
+divinely designed contribution to that end was every joy, every sorrow,
+laid upon her, since by these was she differentiated from all others,
+by these was she built up into a separate existence, sane, harmonious,
+well-proportioned, a fair lamp lighted with a burning coal from off the
+altar of that God of whom it is written, not only that He is a
+consuming fire, but that He is Love.
+
+All this, and more, did Katherine apprehend, beholding the familiar,
+yet mysterious countenance of her well-beloved. And the tendency of
+that apprehension made for tranquillity of spirit, for a sure and
+certain hope. The faculty which reasons, demands explanation and proof,
+might not be satisfied, but that higher faculty which divines, accepts,
+believes, assuredly was so. Nor could it be otherwise, since it is the
+spirit, the idea, not the letter, which giveth life.
+
+How long she stood thus, in tender and illuminating, though wordless,
+communion with the dead, Katherine did not know. The deepest spiritual
+experiences, like the most exquisite physical ones, are to be measured
+by intensity rather than duration. For a space the vision sensibly held
+her, the so ardently desired presence there incontestibly beside her, a
+personality vivid and distinct, yet in a way remote, serene as the
+immense dome of the cloudless sky, chastened and etherealised as the
+song of the answering nightingale, and in this differing from any
+bodily presence, as the song in question differed from that of the bird
+in the laurel close at hand.
+
+Gradually, and with such sense of refreshment as one enjoys who,
+bathing in some clear stream at evening, washes away all soil and sweat
+of a weary journey, Katherine awoke to more ordinary observation of her
+material surroundings. She became aware that the dog, Camp, had turned
+singularly restless. He slunk away as though wishing to avoid her near
+neighbourhood, crawled back to her, with dragging hind quarters,
+cringing and whining as though in acute distress. And, by degrees,
+another sound obtruded itself, speaking of haste and effort, notably at
+variance with the delicate and gracious stillness. It came from the
+highroad crossing the open moor, which loomed up a dark, straight ridge
+against the southern horizon. It came in rising and falling cadence,
+but ever nearer and nearer, increasingly distinct, increasingly
+urgent--the fast, steady trot of a horse. The moon, meanwhile, had
+swept clear of the saw-like edge of the fir forest, and, while the
+thin, white light of it broadened upon the dewy grass and the beat of
+the horse-hoofs rang out clearer and clearer, Katherine was aware that
+the dear vision faded and grew faint. As it had come, softly, without
+amazement or fear, so it departed, without agitation or sadness of
+farewell, leaving Katherine profoundly consoled, the glory of her
+womanhood restored to her in the indubitable assurance that what had
+been of necessity continued, and forever was.
+
+And, therefore, she still listened but idly to the approaching sound,
+not reckoning with it as yet, though the roll of wheels was now added
+to the rapid beat of the hoofs of the trotting horse. It had turned
+down over the hillside by the crossroad leading to the upper lodge.
+Suddenly it ceased. The shout of a man's voice, loud and imperative, a
+momentary pause, then the clang of heavy, iron gates swinging back into
+place, and once again the roll of wheels and that steady, urgent,
+determined trot, coming nearer and nearer down the elm avenue, whose
+stately rows of trees looked as though made of ebony and burnished
+silver in the slanting moonlight. On it came across the bridge spanning
+the glistering whiteness of the Long Water. And on again steadily, and
+no less rapidly, as though pressed by the hand of a somewhat merciless
+driver, hot to arrive, bearer of stirring tidings, up the steeply
+ascending hill to the house.
+
+Lady Calmady listened, beginning to question whom this nocturnal
+disturber of the peace of Brockhurst might be. But only vaguely as yet,
+since that which she had recently experienced was so great, so
+wide-reaching in its meaning and promise, that, for the moment, it
+dwarfed all other possible, all other imaginable, events. The gracious
+tranquillity which enveloped her could not be penetrated by any anxiety
+or premonition of momentous happenings as yet. It was not so, however,
+with Camp. For a spirit of extravagant and unreasoning excitement
+appeared to seize on the dog. Forgetful of age, of stiff limbs and
+short-coming breath, he gamboled round Lady Calmady, describing crazy
+circles upon the grass, and barking until the unseemly din echoed back
+harshly from against the great red and gray facade. He fawned upon her,
+abject, yet compelling, and, at last, as though exasperated by her
+absence of response, turned tail and bounded away through the
+garden-hall and along the terrace, disappearing through the small,
+arched side-door into the house. And there, within, stir and movement
+became momentarily more apparent. Shifting lights flashed out through
+the many-paned windows, as though in quick search of some eagerly
+desired presence.
+
+Nevertheless, for a little space, Katherine lingered, the fragrance of
+the wild thyme and of the fair gardens still about her, the somnolent
+churring of the night-jars and faint notes of the nightingale's song
+still saluting her ears. It was so difficult to return to and cope with
+the demands of ordinary life. For had she not been caught up into the
+third heaven and heard words unspeakable, unlawful, in their entirety,
+for living man to utter?
+
+But things terrestrial, in this case as in so many other cases, refused
+to make large room for, or brook delay from, things celestial. Two
+servants came out, hurriedly, from that same arched side-door. Then
+Clara, that devoted handmaiden, called from the window of the red
+drawing-room.
+
+"Her ladyship's there, on the troco-ground. Don't you see, Mr. Winter?"
+
+The butler hurried along the terrace. Katherine met him on the steps of
+the garden-hall.
+
+"Is anything wrong, Winter?" she asked kindly, for the trusted servant
+betrayed unusual signs of emotion. "Am I wanted?"
+
+"Sir Richard has returned, my lady," he said, and his voice trembled.
+"Sir Richard is in the Gun-Room. He gave orders that your ladyship
+should be told that he would be glad to speak to you immediately."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+IN WHICH DICKIE SHAKES HANDS WITH THE DEVIL
+
+
+"My dear, this is quite unexpected."
+
+Lady Calmady's tone was one of quiet, innate joyousness. A gentle
+brightness pervaded her whole aspect and manner. She looked wonderfully
+young, as though the hands of the clock had been put back by some
+twenty and odd years. Every line had disappeared from her face, and in
+her eyes was a clear shining very lovely to behold. Richard glanced at
+her as she came swiftly towards him across the room. Then he looked
+down again, and answered deliberately:--
+
+"Yes, it is, as you say, quite unexpected. This time last night I as
+little anticipated being back here as you anticipated my coming. But
+one's plans change rapidly and radically at times. Mine have done so."
+
+He sat at the large, library writing-table, a pile of letters, papers,
+circulars before him, judged unworthy of forwarding, which had
+accumulated during his absence. He tore off wrappers, tore open
+envelopes, quickly yet methodically, as though bending his mind with
+conscious determination to the performance of a self-inflicted task.
+Looking at the contents of each in turn, with an odd mixture of
+indifference and close attention, he flung the major part into the
+waste-paper basket set beside his revolving-chair. A tall, green-shaded
+lamp shed a circle of vivid light upon the silver and maroon leather
+furnishings of the writing-table, upon the young man's bent head, and
+upon his restless hands as they grasped, and straightened, and then
+tore, with measured if impatient precision, the letters and papers
+lying before him.
+
+Lady Calmady stood resting the tips of her fingers on the corner of the
+table, looking down at him with those clear shining eyes. His reception
+of her had not been demonstrative, but of that she was hardly sensible.
+The reconciling assurances of faith, the glories of the third heaven,
+still dazzled her somewhat. Her feet hardly touched earth yet, so that
+her mother-love and all its sensitive watchfulness was, as yet,
+somewhat in abeyance. She spoke again with the same quiet joyousness of
+tone.
+
+"You should have telegraphed to me, dearest, and then all would have
+been ready to welcome you. As it is, I fear, you must feel yourself a
+trifle neglected. I have been, or have fancied myself, mightily busy
+all day--foolishly cumbered about much serving--and had gone out to
+forget maids, and food, and domesticities generally, into the dear
+garden."--She paused, smiling. "Ah! it is a gracious night," she said,
+"full of inspiration. You must have enjoyed the drive home. The
+household refuses to take this marriage of yours philosophically,
+Dickie. It demands great magnificence, quite as much, be sure, for its
+own glorification as for yours. It also multiplies small difficulties,
+after the manner of well-conducted households, as I imagine, since the
+world began."
+
+Richard tore the prospectus of a mining company, offering wealth beyond
+the dreams of avarice, right across with a certain violence.
+
+"Oh, well, the household may forego its magnificence and cease from the
+multiplication of small difficulties alike, as far as any marriage of
+mine is concerned. You can tell the household so to-morrow, mother, or
+I can. Perhaps the irony of the position would be more nicely pointed
+by the announcement coming directly from myself. That would heighten
+the drama."
+
+"But, Dickie, my dearest?" Katherine said, greatly perplexed.
+
+"The whole affair is at an end. Lady Constance Quayle is not going to
+marry me, and I am not going to marry Lady Constance Quayle. On that
+point at least she and I are entirely at one. All London will know this
+to-morrow. Perhaps Brockhurst, in the interest of its endangered
+philosophy, had better know it to-night."
+
+Richard leaned forward, opening, tearing, sorting the papers again. A
+rasping quality was in his voice and speech, hitherto unknown to his
+mother, a cold, imperious quality in his manner, also, new to her. And
+these brought her down to earth, setting her feet thereon
+uncompromisingly. And the earth on which they were thus set was, it
+must be owned, rather ugly. A woman made of weaker stuff would have
+cried out against such sudden and painful declension. But Katherine,
+happily both for herself and for those about her, waking even from
+dreams of noble and far-reaching attainment, waked with not only her
+wits, but her heart, in steady action. Yet she in nowise went back on
+the revelation that had been vouchsafed to her. It was in nowise
+disqualified or rendered suspect, because the gamut of human emotion
+proved to have more extended range and more jarring discords than she
+had yet reckoned with. Her mind was large enough to make room for novel
+experience in sorrow, as well as in joy, retaining the while its poise
+and sanity. Therefore she, recognising a new phase in the development
+of her child, without hesitation or regret of self-love for the
+disturbance of her own gladness braced herself to meet it. His pride
+had been wounded--somehow, she knew not how--to the very quick. And the
+smart of that wound was too shrewd, as yet, for any precious balms of
+articulate tenderness to soothe it. She must give it time to heal a
+little, meanwhile setting herself scrupulously to respect his dark
+humour, meet his pride with pride, his calm with at least equal
+calmness.
+
+She drew a chair up to the end of the table, and settled herself to
+listen quite composedly.
+
+"It will be well, dearest," she said, "that you should explain to me
+clearly what has happened. To do so may avert possible complications."
+
+Richard's hands paused among the papers. He regarded Lady Calmady
+reflectively, not without a grudging admiration. But an evil spirit
+possessed him, a necessity of mastery--inevitable reaction from
+recently endured humiliation--which provoked him to measure his
+strength against hers. He needed a sacrifice to propitiate his anger.
+That sacrifice must be in some sort a human one. So he deliberately
+pulled the tall lamp nearer, and swung his chair round sideways,
+leaning his elbow on the table, with the result that the light rested
+on his face. It did more. It rested upon his body, upon his legs and
+feet, disclosing the extent of their deformity.
+
+Involuntarily Katherine shrank back. It was as though he had struck
+her. Morally, indeed, he had struck her, for there was a cynical
+callousness in this disclosure, in this departure from his practice of
+careful and self-respecting concealment. Meanwhile Richard watched her,
+as, shrinking, her eyelids drooped and quivered.
+
+"Mother," he said, quietly and imperatively.--And when, not without
+perceptible effort, she again raised her eyes to his, he went on:--"I
+quite agree with you that it will be well for me to explain with a view
+to averting possible complications. It has become necessary that we
+should clearly understand one another--at least that you, my dear
+mother, should understand my position fully and finally. We have been
+too nice, you and I, heretofore, and, the truth being very far from
+nice, have expended much trouble and ingenuity in our efforts to ignore
+it. We went up to London in the fond hope that the world at large would
+support us in our self-deception. So it did, for a time. But, being in
+the main composed of very fairly honest and sensible persons, it has
+grown tired of sentimental lying, of helping us to bury our heads
+ostrich-like in the sand. It has gone over to the side of truth--that
+very far from flattering or pretty truth to which I have just
+alluded--with this result, among others, that my engagement has come to
+an abrupt and really rather melodramatic conclusion."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Go on, Richard," Lady Calmady said, "I am listening."
+
+He drew himself up, sitting very erect, keeping his eyes steadily fixed
+on her, speaking steadily and coldly, though his lips twitched a
+little.
+
+"Lady Constance did me the honour to call on me last night, rather
+later than this, absenting herself in the very thick of Lady Louisa
+Barking's ball for that purpose."
+
+Katherine moved slightly, her dress rustled.
+
+"Yes--considering her character and her training it was a rather
+surprising _demarche_ on her part, and bore convincing testimony to her
+agitation of mind."
+
+"Did she come alone?"
+
+Richard lapsed into an easier position.
+
+"Oh, dear no!" he said. "Allowing for the desperation which dictated
+her proceedings, they were carried out in a very regular manner, with a
+praiseworthy regard for appearances. Lady Constance is, in my opinion,
+a very sweet person. She is perfectly modest and has an unusual
+regard--as women go--for honour and duty--as women understand
+them."--Again his voice took on that rasping quality. "She brought a
+friend, a young lady, with her. Fortunately there was no occasion for
+me to speak to her--she had the good taste to efface herself during our
+interview. But I saw her in the hall afterwards. I shall always
+remember that very distinctly. So, I imagine, will she. Then Lord
+Shotover waited outside with the carriage. Oh! believe me, admitting
+its inherent originality, the affair was conducted with an admirable
+regard for appearances."
+
+Again the regular flow of Richard's speech was broken. His throat had
+gone very dry.
+
+"Lady Constance appealed to me in extremely moving terms, articulate
+and otherwise, to set her free."
+
+"To set her free--and upon what grounds?"
+
+"Upon the rather crude, but preeminently sensible grounds, my dear
+mother, that after full consideration, she found the bid was not high
+enough."
+
+"Indeed," Katherine said.
+
+"Yes, indeed, my dear mother," Richard repeated. "Does that surprise
+you? It quite ceased to surprise me, when she pointed out the facts of
+the case. For she was touchingly sincere. I respected her for that. The
+position was an ungracious one for her. She has a charming nature, and
+really wanted to spare me just as much as was possible along with the
+gaining of her cause. Her gift of speech is limited, you know, but then
+no degree of eloquence or diplomacy could have rendered that which she
+had to say agreeable to my self-esteem. Oh! on the whole she did it
+very well, very conclusively."
+
+Richard raised his head, pausing a moment. Again that dryness of the
+throat checked his utterance. And then, recalling the scene of the past
+night, a great wave of unhappiness, pure and simple, of immense
+disappointment, immense self-disgust broke over him. His anger, his
+outraged pride, came near being swamped by it. He came near losing his
+bitter self-control and crying aloud for help. But he mastered the
+inclination, perhaps unfortunately, and continued speaking.
+
+"Yes, decidedly, with the exception of Ludovic, that family do not
+possess ready tongues, yet they contrive to make their meaning pretty
+plain in the end. I have just driven over from Whitney, and am fresh
+from a fine example of eventual plain speaking from that excellent
+father of the family, Lord Fallowfeild. It was instructive. For the
+main thing, after all, as we must both agree, mother, is to understand
+oneself clearly and to make oneself clearly understood. And in this
+respect you and I, I'm afraid, have failed a good deal. Blinded by our
+own fine egoism we have even failed altogether to understand others.
+Lady Constance, for instance, possesses very much more character than
+it suited us to credit her with."
+
+"You are harsh, dearest," Katherine murmured, and her lips trembled.
+
+"Not at all," he answered. "I have only said good-bye to lying. Can you
+honestly deny, my dear mother, that the whole affair was just one of
+convenience? I told you--it strikes me now as a rather brutally
+primitive announcement--that I wanted a wife because I wanted a son--a
+son to prove to me the entirety of my own manhood, a son to give me at
+second hand certain obvious pleasures and satisfactions which I am
+debarred, as you know, from obtaining at first hand. You engaged to
+find me a bride. Poor, little Lady Constance Quayle, unfortunately for
+her, appeared to meet our requirements, being pretty and healthy, and
+too innocent and undeveloped to suspect the rather mean advantage we
+proposed to take of her.--What? I know it sounds rather gross stated
+thus plainly. But, the day of lies being over, dare you deny it?--Well
+then, we proceeded to traffic for this desirable bit of young
+womanhood, of prospective maternity,--to buy her from such of her
+relations as were perverted enough to countenance the transaction, just
+as shamelessly as though we had gone into the common bazar, after the
+manner of the cynical East, and bargained for her, poor child, in
+fat-tailed sheep or cowries. Doesn't it appear to you almost
+incredible, almost infamous that we--you and I, mother--should have
+done this thing? The price we offered seemed sufficient to some of her
+people--not to all, I have learned that past forgetting to-day, thanks
+to Lord Fallowfeild's thick-headed, blundering veracity. But, thank
+heaven, she had more heart, more sensibility, more self-respect, more
+decency, than we allowed for. She plucked up spirit enough to refuse to
+be bought and sold like a pedigree filly or heifer. I think that was
+rather heroic, considering her traditions and the pressure which had
+been brought to bear to keep her silent. I can only honour and
+reverence her for coming to tell me frankly, though at the eleventh
+hour, that she preferred a man of no particular position or fortune,
+but with the ordinary complement of limbs, to Brockhurst, and the house
+in London, and my forty to forty-five thousand a year, plus----"
+
+Richard laughed savagely, leaning forward, spreading out his arms.
+
+"Well, my dear mother,--since as I say the day of lies is over,--plus
+the remnant of a human being you may see here, at this moment, if you
+will only have the kindness to look!"
+
+At first Katherine had listened in mute surprise, bringing her mind,
+not without difficulty, into relation to the immediate and the present.
+Then watchful sympathy had been aroused, then anxiety, then tenderness,
+denying itself expression since the time for it was not yet ripe. But
+as the minutes lengthened and the flow of Richard's speech not only
+continued, but gained in volume and in force, sympathy, anxiety,
+tenderness, were merged in an emotion of ever-deepening anguish, so
+that she sat as one who contemplates, spellbound, a scene of veritable
+horror. From regions celestial to regions terrestrial she had been
+hurried with rather dislocating suddenness. But her sorry journey did
+not end there. For hardly were her feet planted on solid earth again,
+than the demand came that she should descend still further--to regions
+sub-terrestrial, regions frankly infernal. And this descent to hell,
+though rapid to the point of astonishment, was by no means easy. Rather
+was it violent and remorseless--a driving as by reiterated blows, a
+rude merciless dragging onward and downward. Yet even so, for all the
+anguish and shame--as of unseemly exposure--the perversion of her
+intention and action, the scorn so ruthlessly poured upon her, it was
+less of herself, the compelled, than of Richard, the compelling, that
+she thought. For even while his anger thus drove and dragged her, he
+himself was tortured in the flame far below,--so it seemed, and that
+constituted the finest sting of her agony--beyond her power to reach or
+help. She, after all, but stood on the edge of the crater, watching. He
+fought, right down in the molten waves of it--fought with himself, too,
+more fiercely even than he fought with her. So that now, as years ago
+waiting outside the red drawing-room, hearing the stern, peremptory
+tones of the surgeons, the moan of unspeakable physical pain, the
+grating of a saw, picturing the dismemberment of the living body she so
+loved, Katherine was tempted to run a little mad and beat her beautiful
+head against the wall. But age, while taking no jot or tittle from the
+capacity of suffering, still, in sane and healthy natures, brings a
+certain steadiness to the brain and coolness to the blood. Therefore
+Katherine sat very still and silent, her sweet eyes half closed, her
+spirit bowed in unspoken prayer. Surely the all-loving God, who, but a
+brief hour ago, had vouchsafed her the fair vision of the delight of
+her youth, would ease his torment and spare her son?
+
+And, all the while, outward nature remained reposeful and gracious in
+aspect as ever. The churring of the night-jars, the occasional bark of
+the fox in the Warren, the song of the answering nightingales, wandered
+in at the open casements. And, along with these, came the sweetness of
+the beds of wild thyme from the grass slopes, and the rich, languid
+scent of the blossom of the little, round-headed, orange trees set, in
+green tubs below the carven guardian griffins, on the flight of steps
+leading up to the main entrance. That which had been lovely, continued
+lovely still. And, therefore perhaps,--she could hope it even in the
+fulness of her anguish,--the gates of hell might stand open to
+ascending as well as descending feet and so that awful road might at
+last--at last--be retraced by this tormented child of hers, whom,
+though he railed against her, she still supremely loved.
+
+But Richard, whether actually or intentionally it would be difficult to
+say, misinterpreted and resented her silence and apparent calm. He
+waited for a time, his eyes fastened upon her half-averted face. Then
+he picked up one of the remaining packets from the table, tore off the
+wrapper, glanced at the contents, stretched out his left arm holding
+the said contents suspended over the waste-paper basket.
+
+"Yes, it is evident," he declared, "even you do not care to look! Well,
+then, must you not admit that you and I have been guilty of an
+extravagance of fatuous folly, and worse, in seriously proposing that a
+well-born, sensitive girl should not only look at, habitually and
+closely, but take for all her chance in life a crippled dwarf like
+me--an anomaly, a human curiosity, a creature so unsightly that it must
+be carried about like any baby-in-arms, lest its repulsive ungainliness
+should sicken the bystanders if, leaving the shelter of a railway-rug
+and an armchair, it tries--unhappy brute--to walk?--Oh! I'm not angry
+with her. I don't blame her. I'm not surprised. I agree with her down
+to the ground. I sympathise and comprehend--no man more. I told her so
+last night--only amazed at the insane egoism that could ever have
+induced me to view the matter in any other light. Women are generally
+disposed to be hard on one another. But if you, my dear mother, should
+be in any degree tempted to be hard on Constance Quayle, I beg you to
+consider your own engagement, your own marriage, my father's----"
+
+Here Katherine interrupted him, rising in sudden revolt.
+
+"No, no, Richard," she said, "that is more, my dear, than I can either
+permit or can bear. If you have any sort of mercy left in you, do not
+bring your father's name, and that which lies between him and me, into
+this hideous conversation."
+
+The young man looked hard at her, and then opening his hand, let the
+pieces of torn paper flutter down into the basket. It was done with a
+singularly measured action, symbolic of casting off some last tie,
+severing some last link, which bound his life and his allegiance to his
+companion.
+
+"Yes, exactly," he said. "As I expected, the day of lying being over,
+you as good as own it an outrage to your taste, and your affections,
+that so frightful a thing, as I am, should venture to range itself
+alongside your memories of your husband. Out of your own mouth are you
+judged, my dear mother. And, if I am thus to you, upon whom, after all,
+I have some natural claim, what must I be to others? Think of it! What
+indeed?"
+
+Katherine made no attempt to answer. Perception of the grain of truth
+which seasoned the vast, the glaring, injustice of his accusations
+unnerved her. His speech was ingeniously cruel. His humour such, that
+it was vain to protest. And the hopelessness of it all affected her to
+the point of physical weakness. She moved across the room, intending to
+gain the door and go, for it seemed to her the limit of her powers of
+endurance had been reached. But her strength would not carry her so
+far. She stumbled on the upturned corner of the shining, tiger-skin
+rug, recovered herself trembling, and laid hold of the high, narrow,
+marble shelf of the chimneypiece for support. She must rest a little
+lest her strength should wholly desert her, and she should fall before
+reaching the door.
+
+Behind her, within the circle of lamplight, Richard remained, still
+sorting, tearing, flinging away that which remained of the pile of
+papers. This deft, persistent activity of his, in its mixture of
+purpose and abstraction was agitating--seeming, to Katherine's
+listening ears, as though it might go on endlessly, until not only
+these waste papers, but all and everything within his reach, things
+spiritual, things of the heart, duties, obligations, gracious and
+tender courtesies, as well as things merely material, might be thus
+relentlessly scrutinised, judged worthless, rent asunder and cast
+forth. What would be spared she wondered, what left? And when the work
+of destruction was completed, what would follow next?--Bracing herself,
+she turned, purposing to close the interview by some brief pleading of
+indisposition and to escape. But, as she did so, the sound of tearing
+ceased. Richard slipped down from his place at the writing-table, and
+shuffling across the room, flung himself down in the long, low armchair
+on the opposite side of the fireplace.
+
+"I don't want to detain you for an unreasonable length of time,
+mother," he said. "We understand each other in the main, I think, and
+that without subterfuge or self-deception at last. But there are
+details to be considered, and, as I leave here early to-morrow morning,
+I think you'll feel with me it's desirable we should have our talk out.
+There are a good many eventualities for which it's only reasonable and
+prudent to make provision on the eve of an indefinitely long absence.
+Practically a good many people are dependent on me, one way and
+another, and I don't consider it honourable to leave their affairs at
+loose ends, however uncertain my own future may be."
+
+Richard's voice had still that rasping quality, while his bearing was
+instinct with a coldly dominating, and almost aggressive, force.
+Katherine, though little addicted to fear, felt strangely shaken,
+strangely alienated by the dead weight of the personality, by
+perception of the innate and tremendous vigour, of this being to whom
+she had given birth. She had imagined, specially during the last few
+months of happy and intimate companionship, that if ever mother knew
+her child, she knew Richard--through and through. But it appeared she
+had been mistaken. For here was a new Richard, at once terrible and
+magnificent, regarding whom she could predicate nothing with certainty.
+He defied her tenderness, he out-paced her imagination, he paralysed
+her will. Between his thoughts, desires, intentions, and hers, a blind
+blank space had suddenly intruded itself, impenetrable to her thought.
+In person he was here close beside her, in mind he was despairingly far
+away. And to this last, not only his words, but his manner, his
+expression, his singular, yet sombre, beauty, bore convincing
+testimony. He had matured with an almost unnatural rapidity, leaving
+her far behind. In his presence she felt diffident, mentally insecure,
+even as a child.
+
+She remained standing, holding tightly to the narrow ledge of the
+mantelpiece. She felt dazed and giddy as in face of some upheaval, some
+cataclysm, of nature. In relation to her son she was conscious, in
+truth, that her whole world had suffered shipwreck.
+
+"Where are you going, Dickie?" she asked at last very simply.
+
+"Anywhere and everywhere where amusement, or even the semblance of it,
+is to be had," he answered.--"Do you wish to know how long I shall be
+away? Just precisely as long as amusement in any form offers itself,
+and as my power of being amused remains to me. This strikes you as
+slightly ignoble? I am afraid that's a point, my dear mother, upon
+which I am supremely indifferent. You and I have posed rather
+extensively on the exalted side of things so far, have strained at
+gnats and finished up by swallowing a remarkably full-grown camel. This
+whole business of my proposed marriage has been anything but graceful,
+when looked at in the common-sense way in which most people, of
+necessity, look at it. Lord Fallowfeild appealed to me against
+myself--which appeared to me slightly humorous--as one man of the world
+to another. That was an eye-opener. It was likewise a profitable
+lesson. I promptly laid it to heart. And it is exclusively from the
+point of view of the man of the world that I propose to regard myself,
+and my circumstances, and my personal peculiarities, in future. So, to
+begin with, if you please, from this time forth, we put aside all
+question of marriage in my case. We don't make any more attempts to buy
+innocent and well-bred, young girls, inviting them to condone my
+obvious disabilities in consideration of my little title and my money."
+
+Richard ceased to look at Lady Calmady. He looked away through the open
+window into the serene sky of the summer night, a certain hunger in his
+expression not altogether pleasant to witness.
+
+"Fortunately," he continued, with something between a laugh and a
+sneer, "there is a mighty army of women--always has been--who don't
+come under the head of innocent, young girls, though some of them have
+plenty of breeding of a kind. They attach no superstitious importance
+to the marriage ceremony. My position and money may obtain me
+consolations in their direction."
+
+Lady Calmady ceased to require the cold support of the marble
+mantelshelf.
+
+"It is unnecessary for us to discuss that subject, at least, Richard,"
+she said.
+
+The young man turned his head again, looking full at her. And again the
+distance that divided her from him became to her cruelly apparent,
+while his strength begot in her a shrinking of fear.
+
+"I am sorry," he replied, "but I can't agree with you there. It is
+inevitable that we should differ in the future, and that you should
+frequently disapprove. I can't expect you to emancipate yourself from
+prejudice, as I am already emancipated. I am not sure I even wish that.
+Still, whatever the future may bring forth, of this, my dear mother, I
+am determined to make a clean breast to-night, so that you shall never
+have cause to charge me with lack of frankness or of attempt to deceive
+you."
+
+Yet, at the moment, the poor mother's heart cried out to be deceived,
+if thereby it might be eased a little of suffering. Then, a nobler
+spirit prevailing within her, Katherine rallied her fortitude. Better
+he should be bound to her even by cynical avowal of projected vice,
+than not bound at all. Listening now, she gained the right--a bitter
+enough right--to command a measure of his confidence in those still
+darker days which, as she apprehended, only too certainly lay ahead. So
+she answered calmly:--
+
+"Go on, Richard. As you say we may differ in the future. I may
+disapprove, but I can be silent. You are right. It is better for us
+both that I should hear."
+
+And once more the young man was compelled to yield her a grudging
+admiration. His tone softened somewhat.
+
+"I don't like to see you stand, mother," he said. "Our conversation may
+be prolonged. One never quite knows what may crop up. You will be
+overtired. And to-morrow, when I am gone, there will be things to do."
+
+Lady Calmady drew forward the chair from the end of the writing-table.
+Her back was towards the lamp, her face in shadow. Of this she was
+glad. In a degree it lessened the strain. The sweet, night air, coming
+in at the open casements, fluttered the lace on her bodice, as with the
+touch of a light, cool hand. Of this she was glad too. It was
+refreshing, and she grew increasingly exhausted and physically weak.
+Richard observed her, not without solicitude.
+
+"I am afraid you are not well, mother," he said.
+
+But Katherine shook her head, smiling upon him with misty eyes and lips
+somewhat tremulous.
+
+"I am always well," she replied. "Only to-night it has been given me to
+scale heights and sound opposing depths, and I am a little overcome by
+perplexity and by surprise. But what does that signify? I shall have
+plenty of time--too much probably--in which to rest and range my ideas
+when--you are gone, my dearest."
+
+"You must not be here alone."
+
+"Oh no! People will visit me, no doubt, animated by kindly wishes to
+lessen my solitude," she answered, still smiling. Remembrance of
+Honoria St. Quentin's letter came to her mind. Could it be that the
+girl had some inkling of what was in store for her, and that this had
+inspired the slight over-warmth of her protestations of
+affection?--"Honoria would always be ready to come, should I ask her,"
+she said.
+
+All solicitude passed from Richard's expression, all softening from his
+tone.
+
+"By all means ask her. That would cap the climax, and round the irony
+of the situation to admiration!"
+
+"Indeed? Why?" Katherine inquired, painfully impressed by the renewed
+bitterness of his manner.
+
+"If you're fond of her that is convincingly sufficient. She and I have
+never been very sympathetic, but that's a detail. I shall be gone.
+Therefore pray have her, or anybody else you happen to fancy, so long
+as you do have some one. You mustn't be here alone."
+
+"Julius remains faithful through all chances and changes."
+
+"But I imagine even Julius has sufficient social sense to perceive that
+faithfulness may be a little out of place at this juncture. At least I
+sincerely hope he'll perceive it, for otherwise he will have to be made
+to do so--and that will be a nuisance."
+
+"Dickie, Dickie, what are you implying?" Lady Calmady exclaimed. "By
+what strange and unlovely thoughts are you possessed to-night?"
+
+"I am learning to look at things as the average man of the world looks
+at them, that's all," he said. "We have been too refined, you and I, to
+be self-critical, with the consequence that we have allowed ourselves a
+considerable degree of latitude in many directions. Julius' permanent
+residence here ranks among the fine-fanciful disregardings of accepted
+proprieties with which we have indulged ourselves. But spades are to be
+called spades in future--at least by me. So, for the very same reason
+that I go forth, like the average man of the world, to enjoy the
+pleasures of sin for a season, do I object to Julius, or any other man,
+being your guest during my absence, unless you have some woman of your
+own position in life living here with you. The levels in social matters
+have changed, once and for all. I have come to a sane mind and
+renounced the eccentric subterfuges and paltry hypocrisies, by means of
+which we have attempted, you and I, to keep disagreeable facts at bay.
+Truth, naked and unabashable, is the only goddess I worship
+henceforth."
+
+He leaned forward, laying his hands upon the arms of his chair. His
+manner was harsh still. But all coldness had departed from it, rather
+did a white heat of passion consume him dreadful to witness.
+
+"Yes, it is wisest to repeat that, so that, on your part, there may be
+no excuse for any shadow of misapprehension. The levels have altered.
+The old ones can never be restored. I want to have you grasp this,
+mother--swallow it, digest it, so that it passes into fibre and tissue
+of your every thought about me. For an acutely, unscientific, an
+ingeniously unreasonable, idea obtains widely among respectable,
+sentimental, so-called religious persons, regarding those who are the
+victims of disfiguring accident, or, like myself, are physically
+disgraced from birth. Because we have been deprived of our natural
+rights, because we have so abominably little, we are expected to be
+slavishly grateful for the contemptible pittance that we have. Because,
+slothfully, by His neglect, or, wantonly, for His amusement, the
+Creator has tortured us, maiming, distorting us up as a laughing-stock
+before all man and womankind--because He has played a ghastly and
+brutal practical joke on us, fixing the marks of low comedy in our
+living flesh and bone--therefore we, forsooth, are to be more pious,
+more clean-living, temperate, and discreet than the rest--to bow
+amiably beneath the cross, gratefully to kiss the rod! Those
+irregularities of conduct which are smiled at, and taken for granted,
+in a man made after the normal, comely fashion, become a scandal in the
+case of a poor, unhappy devil like me, at which good people hold up
+their hands in horror. Faugh!--I tell you I'm sick of such cowardly
+cant. A pretty example the Almighty's set me of justice and mercy!
+Handsome encouragement He has given me to be virtuous and sober! Much I
+have for which to praise His holy name! Arbitrarily, without excuse, or
+faintest show of antecedent reason, He has elected to curse. And the
+curse will cling forever and ever, till they lay me in a coffin nearly
+half as short again as that of any other man, and leave the hideousness
+of my deformity to be obliterated and purged at last--eaten away by the
+worms in the dark."
+
+Richard stretched out his hands, palms upward.
+
+"And in return for all this shall I bless? No, indeed--no, thank you.
+Not even towards God Almighty Himself will I play the part of
+lick-spittle and sycophant. I have fine enough stuff in me, let alone
+the energy begotten by the flagrance of His injustice, to take higher
+grounds with Him than that. I will break what men hold to be His laws,
+wherever and whenever I can--I will make hay of His so-called natural
+and moral order, just as often as I get the chance. I will curse, and
+again, curse back."
+
+The speaker's voice was deep and resonant, filling the whole room. His
+utterance deliberate and unshaken. His face dark with the malign beauty
+of implacable hatred. Hearing him, seeing him thus, Katherine Calmady's
+fortitude forsook her. She ceased to distinguish or discriminate.
+Nature gave way. She knelt upon the floor before him, her hands
+clasped, tears coursing down her cheeks. But of her attitude and aspect
+she was unconscious.
+
+"Oh, Richard, Richard!" she cried, "forgive me. Curse me, my dearest,
+throw all the blame on me, my dearest--I accept it--not on God. Only
+try, try to forgive! Forgive me for being your mother. Forgive me that
+I ever loved and married. Forgive me the intolerable wrong which, all
+unknowingly, I did you before your birth. I humble myself before you,
+and with reason. For I am the cause, I, who would give my life for your
+happiness, my blood for your healing, a thousand times. But through all
+these years I have done my poor best to serve you and to make up. The
+hypocrisies and subterfuges which you lash so scornfully--and rightly
+perhaps--were the fruit of my overcare for you. Rail at me. I deserve
+it. Perhaps I have been faithless, but only once or twice, and for a
+moment. I was faithless towards you here, in the garden to-night. But
+then I supposed you content. Ah! I hardly know what I say!--Only rail
+at me, my beloved, not at God. And then try--try not to leave me in
+anger. Try, before you go, to forgive!"
+
+Richard had sunk back in his chair, his hands clasped under his head,
+watching her. It gave him the strangest sensation to see his mother
+kneeling before him thus. At first it shocked him almost to the point
+of heated protest, as against a thing unpermissible and indecorous.
+Then the devils of wounded pride, of anarchy, and of revolt asserting
+themselves, he began to relish, to be appeased by, the unseemly sight.
+Little Lady Constance Quayle, and all that of which she was the symbol,
+had disappointed and escaped him. But here was a woman, worth a dozen
+Constance Quayles, in beauty, in intellect, and in heart, prostrate
+before him, imploring his clemency as the penitent implores the
+absolution of the priest! An evil gladness took him that he had power
+thus to subjugate so regal a creature. His gluttony of inflicting
+pain--since he himself suffered--his gluttony of exercising
+dominion--since he himself had been defied and defrauded--was in a
+degree satisfied. His arrogance was at once reinforced and assuaged.
+
+"It is absurd to speak of forgiveness," he said presently, and slowly,
+"as it is absurd to speak of restitution. These are mere words, having
+no real tally in fact. We appear to have volition, but actually and
+essentially we are as leaves driven by the wind. Where it blindly
+drives, there we blindly go. So it has been from the beginning. So it
+always will be. In the last twenty-four hours there are many things I
+have ceased to believe in, and among them, my dear mother, is human
+responsibility."
+
+He paused, and motioned Lady Calmady towards her chair with a certain
+authority.
+
+"Therefore calm yourself," he said. "Grieve as little as may be about
+all this matter, and let us talk it over without further emotion."
+
+He waited a brief space, giving her time to recover her composure, and
+then continued coldly, with a careful abstention from any show of
+feeling.
+
+"Let us clear our minds of cant, and go forward knowing that there is
+really neither good nor evil. For these--even as God Himself, whose
+existence I treated from the anthro-pomorphic standpoint just now, so
+as to supply myself with a target to shoot at, a windmill at which to
+tilt, a row of ninepins set up for the mere satisfaction of knocking
+them down again--these are plausible delusions invented by man, in the
+vain effort to protect himself and his fellows from the profound sense
+of loneliness, and impotence, which seizes on him if he catches so much
+as a passing glimpse of the gross comedy of human aspiration, human
+affection, briefly, human existence."
+
+But, strive as he might, excitement gained on Richard once more, for
+young blood is hot and gallops masterfully along the veins, specially
+under the whip of real or imagined disgrace. He sat upright, grasping
+the arms of his chair, and looking, not at his mother, but away into
+the deep of the summer night.
+
+"Perhaps my personal peculiarities confer on me unusually acute
+perception of the inherent grossness of the human comedy. I propose to
+take the lesson to heart. They teach me not to sacrifice the present to
+the future, but to fling away ideals like so much waste paper, and just
+take that which I can immediately get. They tell me to limit my
+horizon, and go the common way of common, coarse-grained, sensual
+man--in as far as that way is possible to me--and be of this world
+worldly. And so, mother, I want you to understand that from this day
+forth I turn over a new leaf, not only in thought, but in conduct. I am
+going to have just all that my money and position, and even this vile
+deformity--for, by God, I'll use that too--what people won't give for
+love they'll give for curiosity--can bring me of pleasure and
+notoriety. I am going to lay hold of life with these rather horribly
+strong arms of mine"--he looked across at Lady Calmady with a sneering
+smile.--"Strong?" he repeated, "strong as a young bull-ape's. I mean to
+tear the very vitals out of living, to tear knowledge, excitement,
+intoxication, out of it, making them, by right of conquest, my own. I
+will compel existence to yield me all that it yields other men, and
+more--because my senses are finer, my acquaintance with sorrow more
+intimate, my quarrel with fortune more vital and more just. As I cannot
+have a wife, I'll have mistresses. As I cannot have honest love, I'll
+have gratified lust. I am not stupid. I shall not follow the beaten
+track. My imagination has been stimulated into rather dangerous
+activity by the pre-natal insult put upon me. And now that I have
+emancipated myself, I propose to apply my imagination practically."
+
+The young man flung himself back in his chair again.
+
+"There ought to be startling results," he said, with gloomy exultation.
+"Don't you think so, mother? There should be startling results."
+
+Lady Calmady bowed herself together, putting her hands over her eyes.
+Then raising her head, she managed to smile at him, though very sadly,
+her sweet face drawn by exhaustion and marred by lately shed tears.
+
+"Ah! yes, my dearest," she answered, "no doubt the results will be
+startling, but whether any sensible increase of happiness, either to
+yourself or others, will be counted among them is open to question."
+
+Richard laughed bitterly.--"I shall have lived, anyhow," he rejoined.
+"Worn out, not rusted and rotted out--which, according to our former
+fine-fanciful programme, seemed the only probable consummation of my
+unlucky existence."
+
+His tone changed, becoming quietly businesslike and indifferent.
+
+"I am entering horses for some of the French events, and I go through
+to Paris to-morrow to see various men there and make the necessary
+arrangements. I shall take Chifney with me for a few days. But the
+stables will not give you any trouble. He will have given all the
+orders."
+
+"Very well," Katherine said mechanically.
+
+"Later I shall go on to Baden-Baden."
+
+Katharine rallied somewhat.
+
+"Helen de Vallorbes is there," she said, not without a trace of her
+former pride.
+
+"Certainly Helen de Vallorbes is there," he answered. "That is why I
+go. I want to see her. It is inconsistent, I admit, for Helen remains
+the one person gloriously untouched by the wreck of the former order of
+things. Pray let there be no misconception on that point. She belonged
+to the ideal order, she belongs to it still."
+
+"Ah, my dear, my dear!" Katharine almost cried. His perversity hurt her
+a little too much so that the small, upspringing flame of decent pride
+was quenched.
+
+"Yes," he went on, "there was my initial, my cardinal, mistake. For I
+was a traitor to all that was noblest and best in me, when I persuaded
+myself, and weakly permitted you to persuade me, that a loveless
+marriage is better than a love in which marriage is impossible,--that
+Lady Constance Quayle, poor little soul, bought, paid for, and my
+admitted property, could fill Helen's place,--though Helen was--and I
+intend her to remain so, for I care for her enough to hold her honour
+as sacred as I do your own--forever inaccessible."
+
+Lady Calmady staggered to her feet.
+
+"That is enough, Richard," she said. "That is enough. If you have more
+to say, in pity leave it until to-morrow."
+
+The young man looked at her strangely.
+
+"You are ill, mother," he said.
+
+"No, no, I am only broken-hearted," she replied. "And a broken heart,
+alas! never killed so healthy a body as mine. I shall survive this--and
+more perhaps. God knows. Do not vex yourself about me, Dickie.--Go,
+live your life as it seems fit to you. I have not the will, even had I
+the right, to restrain you. And meanwhile I will be the steward of your
+goods, as, long ago, when you were a child and belonged to me wholly.
+You can trust me to be faithful and discreet, at least in financial and
+practical matters. If you ever need me, I will come even to the ends of
+the earth. And should the desire take you to return, here you will find
+me.--And so, good-bye, my darling. I am foolishly tired. I grow
+lightheaded, and dare not linger, lest in my weakness I say that which
+I afterwards regret."
+
+She passed to the door and went out, without looking back.
+
+Left to himself Richard Calmady crossed to the writing-table, swung
+himself up into the revolving-chair, and remained there sorting and
+docketing papers far into the night. But once, stooping, with
+long-armed adroitness, to unlock the lowest drawer of the table, a
+madness of disgust towards the unsightliness of his own person seized
+on and tore him.
+
+"Oh! God, God, God," he cried aloud, in the extremity of his passion,
+"why hast Thou made me thus?"
+
+And to that question, as yet, there was no answer, though it rang afar
+over the sleeping park, and up to the clear shining stars of the
+profound and peaceful summer night.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+RAKE'S PROGRESS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN WHICH THE READER IS COURTEOUSLY ENTREATED TO GROW OLDER BY THE SPACE
+OF SOME FOUR YEARS, AND TO SAIL SOUTHWARD HO! AWAY
+
+
+The southeasterly wind came fresh across the bay from the crested range
+of the Monte Sant' Angelo. The blossoms of the Judas-trees, breaking
+from the smooth gray stems and branches--on which they perch so
+quaintly--fell in a red-mauve shower upon the slabs of the marble
+pavement, upon the mimic waves of the fountain basin, and upon the
+clustering curls, and truncated shoulders, of the bust of Homer
+standing in the shade of the grove of cypress and ilex which sheltered
+the square, high-lying hill-garden, at this hour of the morning, from
+the fierceness of the sun. They floated as far even as the semicircular
+steps of the pavilion on the extreme right--the leaded dome of which
+showed dark and livid on the one side, white and glistering on the
+other, against the immense and radiant panorama of mountain, sea, and
+sky.
+
+The garden, its fountains, neatly clipped shrubs, and formal paved
+alleys, was backed by a large villa of the square, flat-roofed order
+common to southern Italy. The record of its age had recently suffered
+modification by application of a coat of stucco, of a colour
+intermediate between faint lemon-yellow and pearl-gray, and by the
+renovation of the fine arabesques--Pompeian in character--decorating
+the narrow interspaces between its treble range of Venetian shutters.
+Otherwise, the aspect of the Villa Vallorbes showed but small
+alteration since the year when, for a few socially historic weeks, the
+"glorious Lady Blessington," and her strangely assorted train,
+condescended to occupy it prior to taking up their residence at the
+Palazzo Belvedere near by. The walls were sufficiently massive to
+withstand a siege. The windows of the ground floor, set in deeply-hewn
+ashlar work, were cross-barred as those of a prison. Above, the central
+windows and door of the entresol, opened on to a terrace of black and
+white marble, from which at either end a wide, shallow-stepped, curved
+stairway led down into the garden. The first floor consisted of a suite
+of noble rooms, each of whose lofty windows gave on to a balcony of
+wrought ironwork, very ornate in design. The topmost story, immediately
+below the painted frieze of the parapet, coincided in height and in
+detail with the entresol.
+
+The villa was superbly situated upon an advancing spur of hill, so
+that, looking down from its balconies, looking out from between the
+pale and slender columns of the pavilion, the whole city of Naples lay
+revealed below.--Naples, that bewildering union of modern commerce and
+classic association--its domes, its palms, its palaces, its crowded,
+hoarse-shouting quays, its theatres and giant churches, its steep and
+filthy lanes black with shadow, its reeking markets, its broad,
+sun-scorched piazzas, its glittering, blue waters, its fringing forest
+of tall masts, and innumerable, close-packed hulls of oceangoing ships!
+Naples, city of glaring contrasts--heaven of rascality, hell of horses,
+unrivaled all the western world over for natural beauty, for spiritual
+and moral grossness! Naples, breeding, teeming, laughing, fighting,
+festering, city of music, city of fever and death! Naples, at once
+abominable and enchanting--city to which, spite of noise, stenches,
+cruelty and squalor, those will return, of necessity, and return again,
+whose imagination has once been taken captive in the meshes of her
+many-coloured net!
+
+And among the captives of Naples, on the brilliant morning in question
+in the early spring of the year 1871, open-eared and open-eyed to its
+manifest and manifold incongruities, relishing alike the superficial
+beauty and underlying bestiality of it, was very certainly Helen de
+Vallorbes. Several years had elapsed since she had visited this
+fascinating locality, and she could congratulate herself upon
+conditions adapted to a more intimate and comprehensive acquaintance
+with its very various humours than she had ever enjoyed before. She had
+spent more than one winter here, it is true, immediately subsequent to
+her marriage. But she had then been required to associate exclusively
+with the members of her husband's family, and to fill a definite
+position in the aristocratic society of the place. The tone of that
+society was not a little lax. Yet, being notably defective in the
+saving grace of humour--as to the feminine portion of it, at all
+events--its laxity proved sadly deficient in vital interest. The fair
+Neapolitans displayed as small intelligence in their intrigues as in
+their piety. In respect of both they remained ignorant, prejudiced,
+hopelessly conventional. Their noble ancestresses of the Renaissance
+understood and did these things better--so Helen reflected. She found
+herself both bored and irritated. She feared she had taken up her
+residence in southern Italy quite three centuries too late.
+
+But all that was in the past--heaven be praised for it! Just now she
+was her own mistress, at liberty--thanks to the fortune of war--to
+comport herself as she pleased and obey any caprice that took her. The
+position was ideal in its freedom, while the intrinsic value of it was
+enhanced by contrast with recent disagreeable experiences. For the
+alarms and deprivations of the siege of Paris were but lately over. She
+had come through them unscathed in health and fortune. Yet they had
+left their mark. During those months of all-encompassing disappointment
+and disaster the eternal laughter--in which she trusted--had rung
+harshly sardonic, to the breaking down of self-confidence, and
+light-hearted, cynic philosophy. It scared her somewhat. It made her
+feel old. It chilled her with suspicion of the actuality of The Four
+Last Things--death and judgment, heaven and hell. The power of a merry
+scepticism waxed faint amid the scream of shells and long-drawn,
+murderous crackle of the _mitrailleuse_. Helen, indeed, became actively
+superstitious, thereby falling low in her own self-esteem. She took to
+frequenting churches, and spending long, still days with the nuns, her
+former teachers, within the convent of the Sacre Coeur. Circumstances
+so worked upon her that she made her submission, and was solemnly and
+duly received back into the fold of the Church. She confessed ardently,
+yet with certain politic reservations. The priest, after all, is but
+human. It is only charitable to be considerate of his feelings--so she
+argued--and avoid overburdening his conscience, poor dear man, by
+blackening your own reputation too violently! The practice of religion
+was a help--truly it was, since it served to pass the time. And then,
+who could tell but that it might not prove really useful hereafter, as,
+when all is said and done, those dread Four Last Things will present
+themselves to the mind, in hours of depression with haunting
+pertinacity? It is clearly wise, then, to be on the safe side of Holy
+Church in these matters, accepting her own assertion that she is very
+certainly on the safe side of the Deity.
+
+Yet, notwithstanding her pious exercises, Helen de Vallorbes found
+existing circumstances excessively disturbing and disquieting. She was
+filled with an immense self-pity. She feared her health was failing.
+She became nervously sensible of her eight-and-twenty years, telling
+herself that her youth and the glory of it had departed. She wore black
+dresses, rolled bandages, pulled lint. Selecting Mary Magdalene as her
+special intercessor, she made a careful study of the life and legends
+of that saint. This proved stimulating to her imagination. She
+proceeded to write a little one-act drama concerning the holy woman's
+dealings, subsequent to her conversion, quite late in life in fact,
+with such as survived of her former lovers. The dialogue was very
+moving in parts. Helen read it aloud one bleak January evening, by the
+light of a single candle, to her friend M. Paul Destournelle, poet and
+novelist--with whom, just then, by her own desire, her relations were
+severely platonic--and they both wept. The application, though
+delicate, was obvious. And those tears appeared to lay the dust of so
+many pleasant sins, and promise fertilisation of so heavy a crop of
+virtue, that--by inevitable action of the law of contraries--the two
+friends found it more than ever difficult to say farewell and part that
+night.
+
+Now looking back on all that, viewing it calmly in perspective, her
+action and attitude struck Helen as somewhat imbecile. Prayer and
+penitence have too often a tendency to kick the beam when fear ceases
+to weight the balance. And so it followed that the lust of the flesh,
+the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, presented themselves to her
+as powers by no means contemptible, or unworthy of invocation, this
+morning, while she sat at the luxuriously furnished breakfast-table
+beneath the glistering dome of the airy pavilion and gazed out between
+its slender columns, over the curving lines of the painted city and
+glittering waters of the bay, to the cone of Vesuvius rising, in
+imperial purple, against the azure sky. To-day, sign, as she noted, of
+fine weather, omen, as she trusted, of good fortune, the smoke of its
+everlasting burnings towered up and up into the translucent atmosphere,
+and then drifted away--a gigantic, wedge-shaped pennon--towards Capri
+and the open sea. And, beholding these things, out of simple, physical
+well-being, fulness of bread, conviction of her own undiminished
+beauty, and the merry devilry begotten of these, she fell to projecting
+a second, a companion, one-act drama founded upon the life of the
+Magdalene, but, this time, before the saint's conversion, at an
+altogether earlier stage of her very instructive history. And this
+drama she would not read to M. Destournelle--not a bit of it. In it he
+should have neither part nor lot.--Registering which determination, she
+shook her charming, honey-coloured head, holding up both hands with a
+gesture of humorous and well-defined repudiation.
+
+For, in truth, the day of M. Destournelle appeared, just now, to be
+very effectually over. It had been reasonable enough to urge her
+natural fears in journeying through a war-distracted land--although
+guarded by Charles, most discreet and resourceful of English
+men-servants, and Zelie Forestier, most capable of French
+lady's-maids--as excuse for Paul Destournelle joining her at a wayside
+station a short distance out of Paris and accompanying her south. _A la
+guerre comme a la guerre._ A beautiful woman can hardly be too careful
+of her person amid the many and primitive dangers which battle and
+invasion let loose. De Vallorbes himself--detestably jealous though he
+was--could hardly have objected to her thus securing effective
+protection, had he been acquainted with the fact. That he was not so
+acquainted was, of course, the veriest oversight. But, the frontier
+once reached--the better part of three weeks had elapsed in the
+reaching of it--and all danger of war and tumult past, both the
+necessity and, to be frank, the entertainment of M. Destournelle's
+presence became less convincing. Helen grew a trifle weary of his
+transports, his suspicions, his _bel tete de Jesu souffrant_, his
+insatiable literary and personal vanity. The charm, the excitement, of
+the situation, began to wear rather threadbare, while the practical
+inconveniences and restrictions it imposed increasingly disclosed
+themselves. A lover, as Helen reflected, provided you see enough of
+him, offers but small improvement upon a husband. He is liable to
+become possessive and didactic, after the manner of the natural man. He
+is liable to forget that the relation is permitted, not legalised--that
+it exists on suffrance merely, and is therefore terminable at the will
+of either party. The last days of that same southern journey had been
+marked by misunderstandings and subsequent reconciliations, in an
+ascending scale of acrimony and fervour on the part of her companion.
+In Helen's case familiarity tended very rapidly to breed contempt. She
+ceased to be in the least amused by these recurring agitations. At
+Pisa, after a scene of a particularly excited nature, she lost all
+patience, frankly told her admirer that she found him not a little
+ridiculous, and requested him to remove himself, his grievances, and
+his _bel tete de Jesu_ elsewhere. M. Destournelle took refuge in
+nerves, threats of morphia, and his bedchamber,--in the chaste
+seclusion of which apartment Helen left him, unvisited and unconsoled,
+while, attended by her servants, she gaily resumed her journey.
+
+An adorable sense of independence possessed her, of the charm of her
+own society, of the absence of all external compelling or directing of
+her movements--no circumscription of her liberty possible--the world
+before her where to choose! Not only were privations, dismal hauntings
+of siege and slaughter, left behind, and M. Destournelle, just now most
+wearisome of lovers, left behind also, but de Vallorbes himself had,
+for the time being, become a permissibly negligible quantity. The news
+of more fighting, more bloodshed, had just reached her, though the
+German armies were marching back to the now wholly German Rhine. For
+upon unhappy Paris had come an hour of deeper humiliation than any
+which could be procured by the action of foreign foes. She was a
+kingdom divided against herself, a mother scandalously torn by her own
+children. News had reached Helen too, news special and highly
+commendatory of her husband, Angelo Luigi Francesco. Early in that
+eventful struggle he had enlisted in the Garde Mobile, all the manhood
+and honest sentiment resident in him stirred into fruitful activity by
+the shame and peril of his adopted country. Now Helen learned he had
+distinguished himself in the holding of Chatillon against the
+insurgents, had been complimented by MacMahon upon his endurance and
+resource, had been offered, and had accepted, a commission in the
+regular army. Promotion was rapid during the later months of the war,
+and probability pointed to the young man having started on a serious
+military career.
+
+"Well, let him both start and continue," Helen commented. "I am the
+last person to be otherwise than delighted thereat. Just in proportion
+as he is occupied he ceases to be inconvenient. If he succeeds--good.
+If he is shot--good likewise. For him laurels and a hero's tomb. For me
+crape and permanent emancipation. An agreeably romantic conclusion to a
+profoundly unromantic marriage--fresh proof, were such needed, of the
+truth of the immortal Dr. Pangloss' saying, that 'all is for the best
+in this best of all possible worlds!'"
+
+In such happy frame of mind did Madame de Vallorbes continue during her
+visit to Florence and upon her onward way to Perugia. But there
+self-admiration ceased to be all-sufficient for her. She needed to read
+confirmation of that admiration in other eyes. And the gray Etruscan
+city, uplifted on its star-shaped hill, offered her a somewhat grim
+reception. Piercing winds swept across the Tiber valley from the still
+snow-clad Apennines above Assisi. The austere, dark-walled,
+lombard-gothic churches and palaces showed forbidding, merciless
+almost, through the driving wet. Even in fair summer weather suspicion
+of ancient and implacable terror lurks in the shadow of those cyclopean
+gateways, and stalks over the unyielding, rock-hewn pavements of those
+solemn mediaeval streets. There was an incalculable element in Perugia
+which raised a certain anger in Helen. The place seemed to defy her and
+make light of her pretensions. As during the siege of Paris, so now,
+echoes of the eternal laughter saluted her ears, ironic in tone.
+
+Nor was the society offered by the residents in the hotel,
+weather-bound like herself, of a specially enlivening description. It
+was composed almost exclusively of middle-aged English and American
+ladies--widows and spinsters--of blameless morals and anxiously active
+intelligence. They wrapped their lean forms in woolen shawls and
+ill-cut jackets. They pervaded salon and corridors guide-book in hand.
+They discoursed of Umbrian antiquities, Etruscan tombs, frescoes and
+architecture. Having but little life in themselves, they tried, rather
+vainly, to warm both hands at the fire of the life of the past. Among
+them, Helen, in her vigorous and self-secure, though fine-drawn,
+beauty, was about as much at home as a young panther in a hen-roost.
+They admired, they vaguely feared, they greatly wondered at her. Had
+one of those glorious young gallants, Baglioni or Oddi, clothed in
+scarlet, winged, helmeted, sword on thigh, as Perugino has painted them
+on the walls of the Sala del Cambio--very strangest union of sensuous
+worldliness and radiant arch-angelic grace--had one of these
+magnificent gentlemen ruffled into the hotel parlour, he could hardly
+have startled the eyes, and perplexed the understanding, of the
+virtuous and learned Anglo-Saxon and Transatlantic feminine beings
+there assembled, more than did Madame de Vallorbes.
+
+For all such sexless creatures, for the great company of women in whose
+outlook man plays no immediate or active part, Helen had, in truth,
+small respect. They appeared to her so absurdly inadequate, so
+contemptibly divorced from the primary interests of existence. More
+than once, in a spirit of mischievous malice, she was tempted to bid
+the good ladies lay aside their Baedekers and Murrays, and increase
+their knowledge of the Italian character and language by study of the
+_Novelle_ of Bandello, or of certain merry tales to be found in the
+pages of the _Decameron_. She had copies of both works in her
+traveling-bag. She was prepared, moreover, to illustrate such ancient
+saws by modern instances, for the truth of which last she could quite
+honestly vouch. But on second thoughts she spared her victims. The
+quarry was not worth the chase. What self-respecting panther can, after
+all, go a-hunting in a hen-roost? So from the neighbourhood of their
+unlovely clothes, questioning glances, and under-vitalised pursuit of
+art and literature, she removed herself to her sitting-room up-stairs.
+Charles should serve her meals there in future, for to sit at table
+with these neuters, clothed in amorphous garments, came near upsetting
+her digestion.
+
+Meanwhile, as she watched the rain streaming down the panes of the big
+windows, watched thin-legged, heavily-cloaked figures tacking,
+wind-buffeted, across the gray-black street into the shelter of some
+cavernous _port cochere_, it must be owned her spirits went very
+sensibly down into her boots. Even the presence of the despised and
+repudiated Destournelle would have been grateful to her. Remembrance of
+all the less successful episodes of her career assaulted her. And in
+that connection, of necessity, the thought of Brockhurst returned upon
+her. For neither the affair of her childhood--that of the little dancer
+with blush-roses in her hat--or the other affair--of now nearly four
+years back--the intimate drama frustrated, within sight of its climax,
+by intervention of Lady Calmady--could be counted otherwise than as
+failures. It was strange how deep-seated was her discontent under this
+head. As on Queen Mary's heart the word Calais, so on hers Brockhurst,
+she sometimes thought, might be found written when she was dead. In the
+last four years Richard had given her princely gifts. He had treated
+her with a fine, old-world chivalry, as something sacred and apart. But
+he rarely sought her society. He seemed, rather carefully, to elude her
+pursuit. His name was not exactly a patent of discretion and rectitude
+in these days, unfortunately. Still Helen found his care of her
+reputation--as far as association of her name with his went--somewhat
+exaggerated. She could hardly believe him to be indifferent to her, and
+yet---- Oh! the whole matter was unsatisfactory, abominably
+unsatisfactory--of a piece with the disquieting influences of this grim
+and fateful city, with the detestable weather evident there without!
+
+And then, suddenly, an idea came to Helen de Vallorbes, causing the
+delicate colour to spring into her cheeks, and the light into her eyes,
+veiled by those fringed, semitransparent lids. For, some two years
+earlier, Richard Calmady had taken her husband's villa at Naples on
+lease, it offering, as he said, a convenient _pied a terre_ to him
+while yachting along the adjacent coasts, up the Black Sea to Odessa,
+and eastward as far as Aden, and the Persian Gulf. The house, save for
+the actual fabric of it, had become rather dilapidated and ruinate. To
+de Vallorbes it appeared clearly advantageous to get the property off
+his hands, and touch a considerable yearly sum, rather than have his
+pocket drained by outgoings on a place in which he no longer cared to
+live. So the Villa Vallorbes passed for the time being into Richard
+Calmady's possession. It pleased his fancy. Helen heard he had restored
+and refurnished it at great expenditure of money and of taste.
+
+These facts she recalled. And, recalling them, found both the actuality
+of rain-blurred, wind-scourged town without, and anger-begetting
+memories of Brockhurst within, fade before a seductive vision of
+sun-bathed Naples and of that nobly placed and painted villa, in
+which--as it seemed to her--was just now resident promise of high
+entertainment, the objective delight of abnormal circumstance, the
+subjective delight of long-cherished revenge. All the rapture of her
+existing freedom came back on her, while her brain, fertile in forecast
+of adventure, projected scenes and situations not unworthy of the pen
+of Boccaccio himself. Fired by such thoughts, she moved from the
+window, stood before a tall glass at right angles to it and
+contemplated her own fair reflection long and intimately. An absorbing
+interest in the general effect, and in the details, of her person
+possessed her. She moved to and fro observing the grace of her
+carriage, the set of her hips, the slenderness of her waist. She
+unfastened her soft, trailing tea-gown, throwing the loose bodice of it
+back, critically examining her bare neck, the swell of her beautiful
+bosom, the firm contours of her arms from shoulder to elbow. Her skin
+was of a clear, golden whiteness, smooth, fine in texture, as that of a
+child. Placing her hands on the gilded frame of the mirror, high up on
+either side, she observed her face, exquisitely healthful in colour,
+even as seen in this mournful, afternoon light. She leaned forward,
+gazing intently into her own eyes--meeting in them, as Narcissus in the
+surface of the fatal pool, the radiant image of herself. And this
+filled her with a certain intoxication, a voluptuous self-love, a
+profound persuasion of the power and completeness of her own beauty.
+She caressed her own neck, her own lips, with lingering finger-tips.
+She bent her bright head and kissed the swell of her cuplike breasts.
+Never had she received so entire assurance of the magic of her own
+personality.
+
+"It is all--all, as perfect as ever," she exclaimed exultantly. "And
+while it remains perfect, it should be made use of."
+
+Helen waved her hand, smiling, to the smiling image in the mirror.
+
+"You and I together--your beauty and my brains--I pit the pair of us
+against all mankind! Together we have worked pretty little miracles
+before now, causing the proud to lay aside their pride and the godly
+their virtue. A man of strange passions shall hardly escape us--nor
+shall the mother that bare him escape either."
+
+Her face hardened, her laughing eyes paled to the colour of fine steel.
+She lifted the soft-curling hair from off her right temple disclosing a
+small, crescent-shaped scar.
+
+"That is the one blemish, and we will exact the price of it--you and
+I--to the ultimate _sou_."
+
+Then she moved away, overcome by sudden amusement at her own attitude,
+which she perceived risked being slightly comic. Heroics were, to her
+thinking, unsuitable articles for home consumption. Yet her purpose
+held none the less strongly and steadily because excitement lessened.
+She refastened her tea gown, tied the streaming azure ribbons of it,
+patted bows and laces into place, walked the length of the room a time
+or two to recover her composure, then rang the bell. And, on the
+arrival of Charles,--irreproachably correct in dress and demeanour, his
+clean-shaven, sharp-featured, rakish countenance controlled to
+praiseworthy nullity of expression, she said:--
+
+"The weather is abominable."
+
+The man-servant set down the tray on a little table before her, turned
+out the corners of the napkin, deftly arranged the tea-things.
+
+"It is a little dull, my lady."
+
+"How is the glass?"
+
+"Falling steadily, my lady."
+
+"I cannot remain here."
+
+"No, my lady?"
+
+"Find out about the trains south--to Naples."
+
+"Yes, my lady. We can join the Roman express at Chiusi. When does your
+ladyship wish to start?"
+
+"I must telegraph first."
+
+"Certainly, my lady."
+
+Charles produced telegraph forms. It was Helen's boast that, upon
+request, the man could produce any known object from a packet of pins
+to a white elephant, or fully manned battleship. She had a lively
+regard for her servant's ability. So had he, it may be added, for that
+of his mistress. The telegram was written and despatched. But the reply
+took four days in reaching Madame de Vallorbes, and during those days
+it rained incessantly. The said reply came in the form of a letter. Sir
+Richard Calmady was at Constantinople, so the writer--Bates, his
+steward--had reason to believe. But it was probable he would return to
+Naples shortly. Meanwhile he--the steward--had permanent orders to the
+effect that the villa was at Madame de Vallorbes' disposition should
+she at any time express the wish to visit it. She would find everything
+prepared for her reception. This information caused Helen singular
+satisfaction. It was very charming, very courteous, of Richard thus to
+remember her. She set forth from Perugia full of ingenious purpose,
+deliciously light of heart.
+
+Thus did it come about that, on the afore-mentioned gay, spring
+morning, Madame de Vallorbes breakfasted beneath the glistering dome of
+the airy pavilion, all Naples outstretched before her, while the
+blossoms of the Judas-trees fell in a red-mauve shower upon the slabs
+of the marble pavement, and the mimic waves of the fountain basin, and
+upon the clustered curls and truncated shoulders of the bust of Homer
+stationed within the soft gloom of the ilex and cypress grove. She had
+arrived the previous evening, and had met with a dignified welcome from
+the numerous household. Her manner was gracious, kindly,
+captivating--she intended it to be all that. She slept well, rose in
+buoyant health and spirits, partook of a meal offering example of the
+most finished Italian cooking. Finish, in any department, appealed to
+Helen's artistic sense. Life was sweet--moreover it was supremely
+interesting! Her breakfast ended, rising from her place at table, she
+looked away to the purple cone of the great volcano and the uprising of
+the smoke of its everlasting burnings. The sight of this, magnificent,
+menacing evidence of the anarchic might of the powers of nature,
+quickened the pagan instinct in her. She wanted to worship. And even in
+so doing, she became aware of a kindred something in herself--of an
+answering and anarchic energy, a certain menace to the conventional
+works and ways, and fancied security, of groping, purblind man. The
+insolence of a great lady, the dangerously primitive instincts of a
+great courtesan, filled her with an enormous pride, a reckless
+self-confidence.
+
+Turning, she glanced back across the formal garden, bright with waxen
+camellias set in glossy foliage, with early roses, with hyacinths,
+lemon and orange blossom, towards the villa. Upon the black-and-white
+marble balustrade a man leaned his elbows. She could see his broad
+shoulders, his bare head. From his height she took him, at first, to be
+kneeling, as, motionless, he looked towards her and towards the
+splendid view. Then she perceived that he was not kneeling, but
+standing upright. She understood, and a very vital sensation ran right
+through her, causing the queerest turn in her blood.
+
+"Mercy of heaven!" she said to herself, "is it conceivable that now, at
+this time of day, I am capable of the egregious folly of losing my
+head?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WHEREIN TIME IS DISCOVERED TO HAVE WORKED CHANGES
+
+
+Helen, however, did not stay to debate as to the state of her
+affections. She had had more than enough of reflection of late. Now
+action invited her. She responded. The sweep of her turquoise-blue
+cloth skirts sent the fallen Judas-blossoms dancing, to left and right,
+in crazy whirling companies. She did not wait even to put on her
+broad-brimmed, garden hat,--the crown of it encircled, as luck would
+have it, by a garland of pale, pink tulle and pale, pink roses,--but
+braved the sunshine with no stouter head-covering than the coils of her
+honey-coloured hair. Rapidly she passed up the central alley between
+the double row of glossy leaved camellia bushes, laughter in her
+downcast eyes and a delicious thrill of excitement at her heart. She
+felt strong and light, her being vibrant, penetrated and sustained
+throughout by the bracing air, the sparkling, crystal-clear atmosphere.
+Yet for all her eagerness Helen remained an artist. She would not
+forestall effects. Thriftily she husbanded sensations. Thus, reaching
+the base of the black-and-white marble wall supporting the terrace,
+where, midway in its long length, it was broken by an arched grotto of
+rough-hewn stonework, in which maiden-hair fern rooted,--the delicate
+fronds of it caressing the shoulders of an undraped nymph, with
+ever-dripping water-pitcher upon her rounded hip,--Helen turned sharp
+to the left, and arrived at the bottom of the descending flight of
+steps without once looking up. That Richard Calmady still leaned on the
+balustrade some twelve to fourteen feet above that same cool, green
+grotto she knew well enough. But she did not choose to anticipate
+either sight or greeting of him. Both should come to her as a whole.
+She would receive a single and unqualified impression.
+
+So, silently, without apparent haste, she passed up the flight of
+shallow steps on to the edge of the wide black-and-white chequer-board
+platform. It was sun-bathed, suspended, as it seemed, between that
+glorious prospect of city, mountain, sea, and the unsullied purity of
+the southern heavens. It was vacant, save for the solitary figure and
+the sharp-edged, yet amorphous, shadow cast by that same figure. For
+the young man had moved as she came up from the garden below. He stood
+clear of the balustrade, only the fingers of his left hand resting upon
+the handrail of it. Seeing him thus the strangeness, the grotesque
+incompleteness, of his person struck her as never before. But this,
+though it did not move her to mirth as in her childhood, moved her to
+pity no more now than it then had. That which it did was to deepen, to
+stimulate, her excitement, to provoke and to satisfy the instinct of
+cruelty latent in every pagan nature such as hers. Could Helen have
+chosen the moment of her birth she would have been a great lady of
+Imperial Rome, holding power of life and death over her slaves, and the
+mutes and eunuchs with which the East should have furnished her palace
+in the eternal city, and her dainty villa away there on the purple
+flanks of Vesuvius at Herculaneum or Pompeii. The delight of her own
+loveliness, of her own triumphant health and activity, would have been
+increased tenfold by the sight of, by power over, such stultified and
+hopelessly disfranchised human creatures. And the first sight of
+Richard Calmady now, though she did not stop very certainly to analyse
+the exact how and why of her increasing satisfaction, took its root in
+this same craving for ascendency by means of the suffering and loss of
+others. While, unconsciously, the fine flavour of her satisfaction was
+heightened by the fact that the victim, now before her, was her equal
+in birth, her superior in wealth, in intelligence and worldly station.
+
+But as she drew nearer, Richard the while making no effort to go
+forward and receive her, buoyant self-complacency and self-congratulation
+suffered diminution. For, rehearsing this same meeting during those
+rain-blotted days of waiting at Perugia, imagination had presented
+Dickie as the inexperienced, tender-hearted, sweet-natured lad she had
+known and beguiled at Brockhurst four years earlier. As has already
+been stated her meetings with him, since then, had been brief and
+infrequent. Now she perceived that imagination had played a silly trick
+upon her. The boy she had left, the man who stood awaiting her so
+calmly were, save in one distressing peculiarity, two widely different
+persons. For in the interval Richard Calmady had eaten very freely of
+the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that diet
+had left its mark not only on his character, but on his appearance. He
+had matured notably, all trace of ingenuous, boyish charm having
+vanished. His skin, though darkened by recent seafaring, was
+colourless. His features were at once finer and more pronounced than of
+old--the bone of the face giving it a noticeable rigidity of outline,
+index at once of indomitable will and irreproachable breeding. The
+powerful jaw and strong muscular neck might have argued a measure of
+brutality. But happily the young man's mouth had not coarsened. His
+lips were compressed, relaxing rarely into the curves which, as a lad,
+had rendered his smile so peculiarly engaging. Still there was no trace
+of grossness in their form or expression. Hard living had, indeed, in
+Richard's case, been matter of research rather than of appetite. The
+intellectual part of him had never fallen wholly into bondage to the
+animal. He explored the borders of the Forbidden hoping to find some
+anodyne with which to assuage the ache of a vital discontent, rather
+than by any compulsion of natural lewdness.
+
+Much of this quick-witted Helen quickly apprehended. He was cleverer,
+more serious, and mentally more distinguished, than she had supposed
+him. And this, while opening up new sources of interest and pricking
+her ambition of conquest, disclosed unforeseen difficulties in the way
+of such conquest. Moreover, she was slightly staggered by the strength
+and inscrutability of his countenance, the repose of his bearing and
+manner. His eyes affected her oddly. They were cold and clear as some
+frosty, winter's night, the pupils of them very small. They seemed to
+see all things, yet tell nothing. They were as windows opening onto an
+endless perspective of empty space. They at once challenged curiosity
+and baffled inquiry. Helen's excitement deepened, and she was sensible
+it needed all the subjective support, all the indirect flattery, with
+which the fact of his deformity supplied her self-love to prevent her
+standing in awe of him. As consequence her address was impulsive rather
+than studied.
+
+"Richard, I have had a detestable winter," she said. "It wore upon me.
+It demoralised me. I was growing dull, superstitious even. I wanted to
+get away, to put a long distance between myself and certain
+experiences, certain memories. I wanted to hear another language. You
+have always been sympathetic to me. It was natural, if a little
+unconventional, to take refuge with you."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes spoke with an unaccustomed and very seductive air
+of apology, her face slightly flushed, her arms hanging straight at her
+sides, the long, pink, tulle strings of the hat she carried in her left
+hand trailing upon the black-and-white squares of the pavement.
+
+"To do so seemed obvious in contemplation. I did not stop to consider
+possible objections. But, in execution, the objections become hourly
+more glaringly apparent. I want you to reassure me. Tell me I have not
+dared too greatly in coming thus uninvited?"
+
+"Of course not," he answered. "I hope you found the house comfortable
+and everything prepared for you. The servants had their orders."
+
+"I know, I know. That you should have provided against the possibility
+of my coming some day moved me a little more than I care to tell
+you."--Helen paused, looking upon him, and that look had in it a
+delicate affinity to a caress. But the young man's manner, though
+faultlessly courteous, was lacking in any hint of enthusiasm. Helen
+could have imagined, and that angered her, something of irony in his
+tone.
+
+"Oh, there's no matter for thanks," he said. "The house was yours, will
+be yours again. The least I can do, since you and de Vallorbes are good
+enough to let me live in it meanwhile, is to beg you to make any use
+you please of it. Indeed it is I, rather than you, who come uninvited
+just now. I had not intended being back here for another month. But
+there was a case of something suspiciously like cholera on board my
+yacht at Constantinople, and it seemed wisest to get away to sea as
+soon as possible. One of the firemen--oh, he's all right now! Still I
+shall send him home to England. He's a married man--the only one I have
+on board. A useful fellow, but he must go. I don't choose to take the
+responsibility of creating the widow and the fatherless whenever one of
+my crew chances to fall sick and depart into the unknown."
+
+Richard talked on, very evidently for the mere sake of passing the
+time. And all the while those eyes, which told nothing, dwelt quietly
+upon Helen de Vallorbes until she became nervously impatient of their
+scrutiny. For it was not at all thus that she had pictured and
+rehearsed this meeting during those days of waiting at Perugia!
+
+"We got in last night," he continued. "But I slept on board. I heard
+you had just arrived, and I did not care to run the risk of disturbing
+you after your journey."
+
+"You are very considerate," Helen remarked.
+
+She was surprised out of all readiness of speech. This new Richard
+impressed her, but she resented his manner. He took her so very much
+for granted. Admiration and homage were to her as her daily bread, and
+that any man should fail to offer them caused her frank amazement. It
+did more. It raised in her a longing to inflict pain. He might not
+admire, but at least he should not remain indifferent. Therefore she
+backed a couple of steps, so as to get a good view of Richard Calmady.
+And, without any disguise of her purpose, took a comprehensive and
+leisurely survey of his dwarfed and mutilated figure. While so doing
+she pinned on her rose-trimmed hat, and twisted the long, tulle strings
+of it about her throat.
+
+"You have altered a good deal, Richard," she said reflectively.
+
+"Probably," he answered. "I had a good deal to learn, being a very
+thin-skinned young simpleton. In part, anyhow, I have learned it. And I
+do my best practically to apply my knowledge. But if I have altered,
+so, happily, have not you."
+
+"I remain a simpleton?" she inquired, her irritation finding voice.
+
+"You cannot very well remain that which you never have been. What you
+do remain is--if I may say so--victoriously yourself, unspoiled,
+unmodified by contact with that singularly stupid invention, society,
+true to my earliest recollections of you even----" Richard shuffled
+closer to the balustrade, threw his left arm across it, grasping the
+outer edge of the broad coping,--"even in small details of dress."
+
+He looked away over the immense and radiant prospect, and then up at
+the radiant woman in her vesture of turquoise, pink, and gold.
+
+And, so doing, for the first time his face relaxed, being lighted up by
+a flickering, mocking smile. And something in his shuffling movements,
+in the fine irony of his expression, pierced Helen with a sensation
+hitherto unknown, broke up the absoluteness of her egotism, stirred her
+blood. She forgot resentment in an absorbed and absorbing interest. The
+ordinary man of the world she knew as thoroughly as her old shoe. Such
+an one presented small field of discovery to her. But this man was
+unique in person, and promised to be so in character also. Her
+curiosity regarding him was profound. For the moment it sunk all
+personal considerations, all humorous or angry criticism, either of her
+own attitude towards him or of his attitude towards her. Silently she
+came forward, sat down on the marble bench, close to where he stood,
+and, turning sideways, leaned her elbows upon the top of the balustrade
+beside him. She looked up now, rather than down at him, and it went
+home to her, had nature spared him infliction of that hideous
+deformity, what a superb creature physically he would have been! There
+was a silence, Helen remaining intent, quiet, apprehension and
+imagination sensibly upon the stretch.
+
+At last Richard spoke abruptly.
+
+"By the way, did you happen to observe the decorations of your room? Do
+you like them?"
+
+"Yes and no," she answered. "They struck me as rather wonderful, but
+liable to induce dreams of Scylla and Charybdis, of the Fata Morgana,
+and other inconvenient accidents of the deep. Fortunately I was too
+tired last night to be excursive in fancy, or I might have slept badly.
+You have gathered all the colours of the ocean and fixed them, somehow,
+on those carpets and hangings and strangely frescoed walls."
+
+"You saw that?"
+
+"How could I fail to see it, since you kindly excuse me of being, or
+ever having been, a simpleton?"--Helen spoke lightly, tenderly almost.
+An overmastering desire to please had overtaken her. "You have employed
+a certain wizardry in the furnishing of that room," she continued. "It
+lays subtle influences upon one. What made you think of it?"
+
+"A dream, an idea, which has stuck by me queerly, though all other fond
+things of the sort were pitched overboard long ago. I suppose one is
+bound to be illogical on one point, if only to prove to oneself the
+absolutism of one's logic on all others. Thus do I, otherwise sane and
+consistent realist, materialist, pessimist, cling to my one dream and
+ideal--take it out, dandle it, nourish and cherish it, with weakly
+sentimental faithfulness. To do so is ludicrous. But then my being here
+at all, calmly considered, is ludicrous. And it, too, is among the
+results of the one idea."
+
+He paused, and Helen, leaning beside him, waited. The sunshine covered
+them both. The sea wind was fresh in their faces. While the many voices
+of Naples came up to them confused, strident, continuous, with
+sometimes a bugle-call, sometimes a clang of hammers, or quick pulse of
+stringed instruments, or jangle of church-bells, or long-drawn bellow
+of a steamship clearing for sea, detaching itself from the universal
+chorus. Capri, Ischia, Procida, floated, islands of amethyst, upon the
+sapphire of the bay, and the smoke of Vesuvius rolled ceaselessly
+upward.
+
+"You see and hear and feel all this," Richard continued presently.
+"Well, when I saw it for the first time I was pretty thoroughly out of
+conceit with myself and all creation. I had been experimenting freely
+in things not usually talked of in polite society. And I was abominably
+sold, for I found the enjoyment such things procure is decidedly
+overrated. Unmentionable matters, once fully explored, are just as
+tedious and inadequate as those which supply the most unexceptionable
+subjects of conversation. Moreover, in the process of exploration I had
+touched a good deal of pitch, and, the simpleton being still
+superfluously to the fore in me, I was squeamishly sensible of
+defilement."
+
+The young man shifted his position slightly, resting his chin in the
+hollow of his hands, speaking quietly and indifferently, as of some
+matter foreign to himself and his personal interests.
+
+"I have reason to believe I was as fairly and squarely wretched as it
+is possible for an intelligent being to be. I had convinced myself,
+experimentally, that human existence, human nature, was a bottomless
+pit and an uncommonly filthy one at that. Reaction was inevitable. Then
+I understood why men have invented gods, subscribed to irrational
+systems of theology, hailed and accredited transparently ridiculous
+miracles. Such lies are necessary to certain stages of development
+simply for the preservation of sanity, just as, at another stage,
+sanity, for its own preservation, is necessarily driven to declare
+their falsehood. And so I, after the manner of my kind, was driven to
+take refuge in a dream. The subjective, in some form or other, alone
+makes life continuously possible. And all this, we now look at,
+determined the special nature of my attempt at subjective support and
+consolation."
+
+Richard paused again, contemplating the view.
+
+"All this--its splendour, its diversity, its caprices and seductions,
+its suggestion of underlying danger--presented itself to me as the
+embodiment of a personality that has had remarkable influence in the
+shaping of my life."
+
+So far Helen had listened intently and silently. Now she moved a
+little, straightening up her charming figure, pulling down the wide
+brim of her hat to shelter her eyes from the heat and brightness of the
+sun.
+
+"A woman?" she asked briefly.
+
+Richard turned to her, that same flickering of mockery in his still
+face.
+
+"Oh! you mustn't require too much of me!" he said. "Remember the
+simpleton was not wholly eradicated then.--Yes, very much a woman. Of
+course. How should it be otherwise? It gave me great pleasure to look
+at that which looked like her. It gives me pleasure even yet. So I
+wrote and asked de Vallorbes to be kind enough to let me rent the
+villa. You remember it was not particularly well cared for. There was
+an air of fallen greatness about the poor place. Inside it was
+something of a barrack."
+
+"I remember," Helen said.
+
+"Well, I restored and refurnished it--specially the rooms you now
+occupy, in accordance with what I imagined to be her taste. The whole
+proceeding was not a little feeble-minded, since the probability of her
+ever inhabiting those rooms was more than remote. But it amused, it
+pacified me, as prayer to their self-invented deities pacifies the
+devout. I never stay here for long together. If I did the spell might
+be broken. I go away, I travel. I even experiment in things not usually
+spoken of, but with a cooler judgment and less morbidly sensitive
+conscience than of old. I amuse myself after more active and practical
+fashions in other places. Here I amuse myself only with my idea."
+
+The even flow of his speech ceased.--"What do you think of it, Helen?"
+he demanded, almost harshly.
+
+"I think it can't last. It is too intangible, too fantastic."
+
+"I admit that to keep it intact needs an infinity of precautions. For
+instance, I can make no near acquaintance with Naples. I cannot permit
+myself to see the town at close quarters. I only look at it from here.
+If I want to go to or from the yacht, I do so at night and in a closed
+carriage. I took on de Vallorbes' box at the San Carlo. If any good
+opera is given I go and hear it. Otherwise I remain exclusively in the
+house and garden. I am not acquainted with a single soul in the place."
+
+"And the woman," Helen exclaimed, a singular emotion at once of envy
+and protest upon her. "Do you treat her with the same cold-blooded
+calculation?"
+
+"Of the woman I know just as much and just as little as I know of
+Naples. It is conceivable there may be unlovely elements in her
+character, as well as unlovely quarters of this beautiful city. I have
+avoided knowledge of both. You see the whole arrangement is designed
+not for her benefit, but for my own. It's an elaborate piece of
+self-seeking on my part, but, so far, it has really worked rather
+successfully."
+
+"It is preposterous. It cannot in the nature of things continue
+successful," Helen declared.
+
+"I am not so sure of that," he replied calmly. "Even the most
+preposterous of religious systems proves to have a remarkable power of
+survival. Why not this one? In any case, neither the success nor the
+failure depends on me. I shall be true, on my part. The rest depends on
+her."
+
+As Richard spoke he turned, leaning his back against the balustrade,
+his face away from the sunlight and the wide view. Again the extent of
+his deformity became arrestingly apparent to Madame de Vallorbes.
+
+"Has this woman ever been here?" she asked.
+
+"Yes--she has been here."
+
+"And then? And then?" Helen cried.
+
+The young man looked up at her, his face keen yet impassive, his
+eyes--as windows opening on to endless perspective of empty
+space--telling nothing. She recognised, once again, that he was very
+strong. She also recognised that, notwithstanding his strength, he was
+horribly sad.
+
+"Ah! then," he said, "the last of the poor, little, subjective supports
+and consolations seemed in danger of going overboard and joining their
+fellows in the uneasy deeps of the sea.--But the history of that will
+keep till a more convenient season, Cousin Helen. You have stood in the
+midday sun, and I have talked about myself, quite long enough. However,
+it was only fair to acquaint you with the limited resources in the way
+of society and amusement offered by your present dwelling. There are
+horses and carriages of course. Give what orders you please. Only
+remember both the town and the surrounding country are pretty rough. It
+is not fit for a lady to drive by herself. Always take your own man, or
+one of mine, with you if you go out. I hope you won't be quite
+intolerably bored. Ask for whatever you want.--You let me dine with
+you? Thanks."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+HELEN DE VALLORBES APPREHENDS VEXATIOUS COMPLICATIONS
+
+
+Four gowns lay outspread upon the indigo-purple, embroidered coverlet
+of the bed. The afterglow of an orange and crimson sunset touched the
+folds of them, ranged upward to the vaultings of the frescoed ceiling,
+and stained the lofty walls as with the glare of a furnace. Sea-greens,
+sea-blues, died in the heat of it, abashed and vanquished. But so did
+not Madame de Vallorbes' white lawn and lace _peignoir_, or her
+abundant hair, which Zelie Forestier--trim of figure, and sour of
+countenance--was in the act of dressing. These caught the fiery light
+and held it, so that from head to foot Helen appeared as an image of
+living gold. Sitting before the toilet-table, her reflection in the
+great, oval mirror pleased her.
+
+"Which shall I wear?"
+
+"That depends upon the length of time madame proposes to stay here. The
+black dress might be worn on several occasions with impunity. The
+peacock brocade, the _eau de Nil_, the crocus yellow, but once--twice
+at the uttermost. They are ravishing costumes, but wanting in repose.
+They are unsuited for frequent repetition."
+
+Zelie's lean fingers twisted, puffed, pinned, the shining hair very
+skilfully.
+
+"I will put on the black dress."
+
+"Relieved by madame's _parure_ of pink topaz?"
+
+"Yes, I will wear the pink topazes."
+
+"Then it will be necessary to modify the style of madame's _coiffure_."
+
+"There is plenty of time."
+
+Helen took a hand-glass from the table and leaned forward in the low,
+round-backed chair--faithful copy of a fine classic model. She wanted
+to see the full glory of the afterglow upon her profile, upon her neck,
+and bosom. Thus might Cassiopeia, glass in hand, in her golden chair
+sit in high heaven!--Helen smiled at the pretty conceit. But the glory
+was already departing. Sea-blues, sea-greens, sad by contrast, began to
+reassert their presence on walls and carpet and hangings.
+
+"The black dress? madame decides to remain then?"
+
+As she spoke the lady's-maid laid out the jewels,--chains, bracelets,
+brooches,--each stone set in a rim of tiny rose-knots of delicate
+workmanship. As she fingered them little, yellow-pink flames seemed to
+dance in their many facets. Then the afterglow died suddenly. The
+flames ceased to dance. Helen's white garments turned livid, her neck
+and bosom gray--and that, somehow, was extremely unpleasing to Madame
+de Vallorbes.
+
+"Light the candles," she said, almost sharply. "Yes, I remain. Do
+hurry, Zelie. It is impossible to see. I detest darkness. Hurry. Do you
+suppose I want to stay here all night? And look--you must bring that
+chain further forward. It is not graceful. Make it droop. Let it follow
+the line of my hair so that the pendant may fall there, in the centre.
+You have it too much to the right. The centre--the centre--I tell you.
+There, let the drop just clear my forehead."
+
+Thus admonished the French woman wound the jewels in her mistress'
+hair. But Madame de Vallorbes remained dissatisfied. The day had been
+one of uncertainty, of conflicting emotions, and Helen's love of
+unqualified purposes was great. Confusion in others was highly
+diverting. But in herself--no thank you! She hated it. It touched her
+self-confidence. It endangered the absoluteness of her self-belief and
+self-worship. And these once shaken, small superstitions assaulted her.
+In trivial happenings she detected indication of ill-luck. Now Zelie's
+long, narrow face, divided into two unequal portions by a straight bar
+of black eyebrow, and her lean hands, as reflected in the mirror, awoke
+unreasoning distrust. They appeared to be detached from the woman's
+dark-clothed person, the outlines of which were absorbed in the
+increasing dimness of the room. The sallow face moved, peered, the
+hands clutched and hovered, independent and unrelated, about Helen's
+graceful head.
+
+"For pity's sake, more candles, Zelie!" she repeated. "You look
+absolutely diabolic in this uncertain light."
+
+"In an instant, madame. I am compelled first to fix this curl in
+place."
+
+She accomplished the operation with most admired deliberation, and
+moved away more than once, to observe the effect, before finally
+adjusting the hairpin.
+
+"I cannot but regret that madame is unable to wear her hair turned back
+from the face. Such an arrangement confers height and an air of
+spirituality, which, in madame's case, would be not only becoming but
+advantageous."
+
+Helen skidded the hand-glass down upon the dressing-table, causing
+confusion amid silver-topped pots and bottles, endangering a jar of
+hyacinths, upsetting a tray of hairpins.
+
+"Have I not repeatedly given you orders never to allude to that
+subject," she cried.
+
+The maid was on her knees calmly collecting the scattered contents of
+the tray.
+
+"A thousand pardons, madame," she said, with a certain sour impudence.
+"Still, it must ever be a matter of regret to any one truly
+appreciating madame's style of beauty, that she should be always
+constrained to wear her hair shading her forehead."
+
+Modern civilisation imposes restrictions even upon the most
+high-spirited. At that moment Madame de Vallorbes was ripe for the
+commission of atrocities. Had she been--as she coveted to be--a lady of
+the Roman decadence it would have gone hard with her waiting-woman, who
+might have found herself ordered for instant execution or summarily
+deprived of the organs of speech. But, latter-day sentiment happily
+forbidding such active expressions of ill-feeling on the part of the
+employer towards the employed, Helen was forced to swallow her wrath,
+reminding herself, meanwhile, that a confidential servant is either
+most invaluable of friends or most dangerous of enemies. There is no
+_via media_ in the relation. And Zelie as an enemy was not to be
+thought of. She could not--displeasing reflection--afford to quarrel
+with Zelie. The woman knew too much. Therefore Madame de Vallorbes took
+refuge in lofty abstraction, while the tiresome uncertainties, the
+conflicting inclinations of the past day, quick to seize their
+opportunity, as is the habit of such discourteous gentry,--returned
+upon her with redoubled importunity and force.
+
+She had not seen Richard since parting with him at noon, the enigmatic
+suggestions of his conversation still unresolved, the alternate
+resentment at his apparent indifference and attraction of his strong
+and somewhat mysterious personality still vitally present to her. Later
+she had driven out to Pozzuoli. But neither stone-throwing urchins,
+foul and disease-stricken beggars, the pale sulphur plains and
+subterranean rumblings of the Solfaterra, nor stirring of nether fires
+therein resident by a lanky, wild-eyed lad--clothed in leathern jerkin
+and hairy, goatskin leggings--with the help of a birch broom and a few
+local newspapers, served effectually to rouse her from inward debate
+and questioning. The comfortable, cee-spring carriage might swing and
+sway over the rough, deep-rutted roads behind the handsome, black,
+long-tailed horses, the melodramatic-looking coachman might lash
+stone-throwing urchins and anathematise them, their ancestors and
+descendants, alike, to the third and fourth generation in the vilest,
+Neapolitan argot, Charles might resort to physical force in the removal
+of wailing, alms-demanding, vermin-eaten wrecks of humanity, but still
+Helen asked herself only--should she go? Should she stay? Was the game
+worth the candle? Was the risk, not only of social scandal, but of
+possible _ennui_, worth the projected act of revenge? And worth
+something more than that. For revenge, it must be owned, already took a
+second place in her calculations. Worth, namely, the enjoyment of
+possible conquest, the humiliation of possible defeat and rejection, by
+that strangely coercive, strangely inscrutable, being, her cousin,
+Dickie Calmady?
+
+No man had ever impressed her thus. And she returned on her thought,
+when first seeing him upon the terrace that morning, that she might
+lose her head. Helen laughed a little bitterly. She, of all women, to
+lose her head, to long and languish, to entreat affection, and to be
+faithful--heaven help us, faithful!--could it ever come to that?--like
+any sentimental schoolgirl, like--and the thought turned her not a
+little wicked--like Katherine Calmady herself! And then, that other
+woman of whom Richard had told her, with a cynical disregard of her own
+claims to admiration, who on earth could she be? She reviewed those
+ladies with whom gossip had coupled Richard's name. Morabita, the
+famous _prima donna_, for instance. But surely, it was inconceivable
+that mountain of fat and good nature, with the voice of a seraph,
+granted, but also with the intellect of a frog, could ever inspire so
+fantastic and sublimated a passion! And passing from these less
+legitimate affairs of the heart--in which rumour accredited Richard
+with being very much of a pluralist--her mind traveled back to the
+young man's projected marriage with Lady Constance Decies, sometime
+Lady Constance Quayle. Remembering the slow, sweet, baby-face and
+gentle, heifer's eyes, as she had seen them that day at luncheon at
+Brockhurst, nearly five years ago, she again laughed.--No, very
+certainly there was no affinity between the glorious and naughty city
+of Naples and that mild-natured, well-drilled, little, English girl!
+Who was it then--who? But, whoever the fair unknown rival might be,
+Helen hated her increasingly as the hours passed, regarding her as an
+enemy, a creature to be exterminated, and swept off the board. Jealousy
+pricked her desire of conquest. An intrigue with Richard Calmady
+offered singular, unique attractions. But the force of such attractions
+was immensely enhanced by the excitement of wresting his affections
+away from another woman.
+
+Suddenly, in the full swing of these meditations, as she reviewed them
+for the hundredth time, Zelie's voice claimed her attention.
+
+"I made the inquiries madame commanded."
+
+"Well?" Helen said. She was standing fastening clusters of topaz in the
+bosom of her dress.
+
+"The servants in this house are very reserved. They are unwilling to
+give information regarding their master's habits. I could only learn
+that Sir Richard occupies the entresol. Communicating as it does with
+the garden, no doubt it is convenient to a gentleman so afflicted as
+himself."
+
+Helen bowed herself together, while the black lace and China-crape
+skirt slipped over her head. Emerging from which temporary eclipse, she
+said:--
+
+"But do people stay here much? Does my cousin entertain? That is what I
+told you to find out."
+
+"As I tell madame, the servants are difficult of approach. They are
+very correct. They fear their master, but they also adore him. Charles
+can obtain little more information than myself. But he infers that Sir
+Richard, when at the villa, lives in retirement--that he is subject to
+fits of melancholy. There will be little diversion for madame it is to
+be feared! But what would you have? Even though one should be young and
+rich _ce ne serait que peu amusant d'etre estropie, d'etre monstre
+enfin_."
+
+Helen drew in her breath with a little sigh of content, while taking a
+final look at herself in the oval glass. The soft, floating draperies,
+the many jewels, each with its heart of quick, yellow-pink light,
+produced a combination at once sombre and vivid. It satisfied her sense
+of artistic fitness. Decidedly she did well to begin with the black
+dress, since it had in it a quality rather of romance than of
+worldliness! Meanwhile Zelie, kneeling, straightened out the folds of
+the long train.
+
+"Ah!" she exclaimed. "I had forgotten also to inform madame that M.
+Destournelle has arrived in Naples. Charles, thinking of nothing less
+than such an encounter, met him this morning on the quay of the Santa
+Lucia."
+
+Helen wheeled round violently, much to the discomfiture of those
+carefully adjusted folds.
+
+"Intolerable man!" she cried. "What on earth is he doing here?"
+
+"That, Charles naturally could not inquire.--Will madame kindly remain
+tranquil for a moment? She has torn a small piece of lace which must be
+controlled by a pin. Probably _monsieur_ is still _en voyage_, is
+visiting friends as is madame herself."
+
+A sudden distrust that the black dress was too mature, that it
+constituted an admission of departing youth, invaded Helen. The
+reflection in the oval mirror once more caused her discomfort.
+
+"Tell Charles that I am no longer acquainted with M. Destournelle. If
+he presumes to call he is to be refused."
+
+Helen set her teeth. But whether in anger towards her discarded lover,
+or the black dress, she would have found it difficult to declare. Again
+uncertainty held her, suspicion of circumstance, and, in a degree, of
+herself. The lady's-maid, imperturbable, just conceivably impertinent,
+in manner, had risen to her feet.
+
+"There," she said, "it will be secure for to-night, if madame will
+exercise a moderate degree of caution and avoid abrupt movements.
+Charles says that _monsieur_ inquired very urgently after madame. He
+appeared dejected and in weak health. He was agitated on meeting
+Charles. He trembled. A little more and he would have wept. It would be
+well, perhaps, that madame should give Charles her orders regarding
+_monsieur_ herself."
+
+"You should not have made me wear this gown," Helen broke out
+inconsequently. "It is depressing, it is hideous. I want to change it."
+
+"Impossible. Madame is already a little late, and there is nothing
+wrong with the costume. Madame looks magnificent. Also her wardrobe is,
+at present, limited. The evening dresses will barely suffice for a stay
+of a week, and it is not possible for me to construct a new one under
+ten days."
+
+Thereupon an opening of doors and voice from the anteroom announcing:--
+
+"Dinner is served, my lady. Sir Richard is in the dining-room."
+
+And Helen swept forward, somewhat stormy and Cassandra-like in her
+dusky garments. Passing out through the high, narrow doorway, she
+turned her head.
+
+"Charles, under no circumstance--none, understand--am I at home to
+Monsieur Destournelle."
+
+"Very good, my lady," and, as he closed the double-doors, the
+man-servant looked at the lady's-maid his tongue in his cheek.
+
+But, on the journey through the noble suite of rooms, Helen's spirits
+revived somewhat. Her fair head, her warm glancing jewels, her graceful
+and measured movements, as given back by many tall mirrors, renewed her
+self-confidence. She too must be fond of her own image, by the way,
+that unknown rival to the dream of whose approval Richard Calmady had
+consecrated these splendid furnishings--witness the multiplicity of
+looking-glasses!--And then the prospect of this _tete-a-tete_ dinner,
+the interest of her host's powerful and enigmatic personality, provoked
+her interest to the point not only of obliterating remembrance of the
+ill-timed advent of her ex-lover, but of inducing something as closely
+akin to self-forgetfulness as was possible to her self-centred nature.
+She grew hotly anxious to obtain, to charm--if it might be, to usurp
+the whole field of Richard's attention and imagination.
+
+A small round table showed as an island of tender light in the dimness
+of the vast room. And Richard, sitting at it awaiting her coming,
+appeared more nearly related to the Richard of Brockhurst and of five
+years ago than he had done during the interview of the morning. In any
+case, she took him more for granted. While he, if still inscrutable and
+unsmiling, proved an eminently agreeable companion, ready of
+conversation, very much at his ease, very much a cultivated man of the
+world, studious--a little excessively so, she thought--in his avoidance
+of the personal note. And this at once piqued Helen, and incited her to
+intellectual effort. If this was what he wanted, well, he should have
+it! If he elected to talk of travel, of ancient and alien religions, of
+modern literature and art, she could meet him more than half-way. Her
+intelligence ran nimbly from subject to subject, point to point. She
+struck out daring hypotheses, indulged in ingenious paradox, her mind
+charmed by her own eloquence, her body comforted by costly wines and
+delicate meats. Nor did she fail to listen also, knowing how very dear
+to every man is the sound of his own voice, or omit to offer refined
+flattery of quick agreement and seasonable laughter. It was late when
+she rose from the table at last.
+
+"I have had a delightful dinner," she said. "Absolutely delightful. And
+now I will encroach no longer on your time or good nature, Richard. You
+have your own occupations, no doubt. So, with thanks for shelter and
+generous entertainment, we part for to-night."
+
+She held out her hand smiling, but with an admirable effect of
+discretion, all ardour, all intimacy, kept in check by self-respect and
+well-bred dignity. Madame de Vallorbes was enchanted with the reserve
+of her own demeanour. Let it be well understood that she was the least
+importunate, the least exacting, the most adaptable, of guests!
+
+Richard took her outstretched hand for the briefest period compatible
+with courtesy. And a momentary spasm--so she fancied--contracted his
+face.
+
+"You are very welcome, Helen," he said. "If it is warm let us breakfast
+in the pavilion to-morrow. Twelve--does that suit you? Good-night."
+
+Upon the inlaid writing-table in the anteroom, Helen found a long and
+impassioned epistle from Paul Destournelle. Perusal of it did not
+minister to peaceful sleep. In the small hours she left her bed, threw
+a silk dressing-gown about her, drew aside the heavy, blue-purple,
+window curtain and looked out. The sky was clear and starlit. Naples,
+with its curving lines of innumerable lights, lay outstretched below.
+In the southeast, midway between the two, a blood-red fire marked the
+summit of Vesuvius. While in the dimly seen garden immediately
+beneath--the paved alleys of which showed curiously pale, asserting
+themselves against the darkness of the flower borders, and otherwise
+impenetrable shadows of the ilex and cypress grove--a living creature
+moved, black, slow of pace, strange of shape. At first Helen took it
+for some strayed animal. It alarmed her, exciting her to wildest
+conjectures as to its nature and purpose, wandering in the grounds of
+the villa thus. Then, as it passed beyond the dusky shade of the trees,
+she recognised it. Richard Calmady shuffled forward haltingly, to the
+terminal wall of the garden, leaned his arms on it, looking down at the
+beautiful and vicious city and out into the night.
+
+Helen de Vallorbes shivered--the marble floor striking up chill, for
+all the thickness of the carpet, to her bare feet. Her eyes were hard
+with excitement and her breath came very quick. Suddenly, yielding to
+an impulse of superstitious terror, she dragged the curtains together,
+shutting out that very pitiful sight, and, turning, fled across the
+room and buried herself, breathless and trembling, between the sheets
+of the soft, warm, faintly fragrant bed.
+
+"He is horrible," she said aloud, "horrible! And it has come to me at
+last. It has come--I love--I love!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+"MATER ADMIRABILIS"
+
+
+"There, there, my good soul, don't blubber. Hysterics won't restore
+Lady Calmady to health, or bring Sir Richard back to England, home, and
+duty, or be a ha'porth of profit to yourself or any other created
+being. Keep your tears for the first funeral. For I tell you plainly I
+shan't be surprised out of seven days' sleep if this business involves
+a visit to the churchyard before we get to the other side of it."
+
+John Knott stood with his back to the Chapel-Room fire, his shoulders
+up to his ears, his hands forced down into the pockets of his
+riding-breeches. Without, black-thorn winter held the land in its
+cheerless grasp. The spring was late. Night frosts obtained, followed
+by pallid, half-hearted sunshine in the early mornings, too soon
+obliterated by dreary, easterly blight. This afternoon offered
+exception to the rule only in the additional discomfort of small,
+sleeting rain and a harsh skirling of wind in the eastward-facing
+casements.--"Livery weather," the doctor called it, putting down his
+existing lapse from philosophic tolerance to insufficient secretions of
+the biliary duct.
+
+Before him stood Clara--sometime Dickie Calmady's devoted nurse and
+playfellow--her eyes very bright and moist, the reds and whites of her
+fresh complexion in lamentable disarray.
+
+"I'd never have believed it of Sir Richard," she assented, chokingly.
+"It isn't like him, so pretty as he was in all his little ways, and
+loving to her ladyship, and civilly behaved to everybody, and careful
+of hurting anybody's feelings--more so than you'd expect in a young
+gentleman like him. No! it isn't like him. In my opinion he's been got
+hold of by some designing person, who's worked on him to keep him away
+to serve their own ends. There, I'd never have believed it of him, that
+I wouldn't!"
+
+The doctor's massive head sank lower, his massive shoulders rose
+higher, his loose lips twisted into a snarling smile.
+
+"Lord bless you, that's nothing new! We none of us ever do believe it
+of them when the little beggars are in long clothes, or first breeched
+for that matter. It's a trick of Mother Nature's--one-idead old lady,
+who cares not a pin for morality, but only for increase. She knows well
+enough if we did believe it of them we should clear them off wholesale,
+along with the blind kittens and puppies. A bucket full of water, and
+broom to keep them under, would make for a mighty lessening of
+subsequent violations of the Decalogue! Don't tell me King Herod was
+not something of a philanthropist when he got to work on the infant
+population of Bethlehem. One woman wept for each of the little brats
+then, but his Satanic Majesty only knows how many women wouldn't have
+had cause to weep for each one of them later, if they'd been spared to
+grow up."
+
+While speaking, Dr. Knott kept his gaze fixed upon his companion. His
+humour was none of the gentlest truly, yet he did not let that obscure
+the main issue. He had business with Clara, and merely waited till the
+reds and whites of her comely face should have resumed their more
+normal relations before pursuing it. He talked, as much to afford her
+opportunity to overcome her emotion, as to give relief to his own.
+Though now well on the wrong side of sixty, John Knott was hale and
+vigorous as ever. His rough-hewn countenance bore even closer
+resemblance, perhaps, to that of some stone gargoyle carved on
+cathedral buttress or spout. But his hand was no less skilful, his
+tongue no less ready in denunciation of all he reckoned humbug, his
+heart no less deeply touched, for all his superficial irascibility, by
+the pains, and sins, and grinding miseries, of poor humanity than of
+old.
+
+"That's right now," he said approvingly, as the heaving of Clara's
+bosom became less pronounced. "Wipe your eyes, and keep your nerves
+steady. You've got a head on your shoulders--always had. Well, keep it
+screwed on the right way, for you'll need all the common sense that is
+in it if we are to pull Lady Calmady through. Do?--To begin with this,
+give her food every two hours or so. Coax her, scold her, reason with
+her, cry even.--After all, I give you leave to, just a little, if that
+will serve your purpose and not make your hand shake--only make her
+take nourishment. If you don't wind up the clock regularly, some fine
+morning you'll find the wheels have run down."
+
+"But her ladyship won't have any one sit up with her."
+
+"Very well, then sleep next door. Only go in at twelve and two, and
+again between five and six."
+
+"But she won't have anybody occupy the dressing-room. It used to be the
+night nursery you remember, sir, and not a thing in it has been touched
+since Sir Richard moved down to the gun-room wing."
+
+"Oh, fiddle-de-dee! It's just got to be touched now, then. I can't be
+bothered with sentiment when it's ten to one whether I save my
+patient."
+
+Again sobs rose in Clara's throat. The poor woman was hard pressed. But
+that fixed gaze from beneath the shaggy eyebrows was upon her, and,
+with quaint gurglings, she fought down the sobs.
+
+"My lady's as gentle as a lamb," she said, "and I'd give the last drop
+of my blood for her. But talk of managing her, of making her do
+anything, as well try to manage the wind, she's that set in her ways
+and obstinate!"
+
+"If you can't manage her, who can?--Mr. March?"
+
+Clara shook her head. Then reluctantly, for though honestly ready to
+lay down her life for her mistress, she found it far from easy to
+invite supersession in respect of her, she said:--"Miss St. Quentin's
+more likely to get round my lady than any one else."
+
+"Well, then, I'll talk to her. Where is Miss St. Quentin?"
+
+"Here, Dr. Knott. Do you want me?"
+
+Honoria had strolled into the room from the stairhead, her attention
+arrested by the all-too-familiar sound--since sorrowful happenings
+often of late had brought him to Brockhurst--of the doctor's voice. The
+skirt of the young lady's habit, gathered up in her left hand,
+displayed a slightly unconventional length of muddy riding-boot. The
+said skirt, her tan, covert coat, and slouched, felt hat, were furred
+with wet. Her garments, indeed, showed evident traces of hard service,
+and, though notably well cut, were far from new or smart. They were
+sad-coloured, moreover, as is the fashion of garments designed for
+work. And this weather-stained, mud-bespattered costume, taken in
+connection with her pale, sensitive face, her gallant bearing, and the
+luminous smile with which she greeted not only Dr. Knott but the
+slightly flustered Clara, offered a picture pensive in tone, but very
+harmonious, and of a singularly sincere and restful quality. To all,
+indeed, save those troubled by an accusing conscience and fear of
+detection, Honoria St. Quentin's presence brought a sense of security
+and reassurance at this period of her development. Her enthusiasms
+remained to her, but they were tempered by a wider experience and a
+larger charity--at least in the majority of cases.
+
+"I'm in a beastly mess," she observed casually.
+
+"So are we," Knott answered. He had a great liking for this young lady,
+finding in her a certain stoicism along with a quickness of practical
+help. "But our mess is worse than yours, in that it is internal rather
+than external. Yours'll brush off. Not so ours--eh, Clara? There, you
+can go. I'll talk things over with Miss St. Quentin, and she'll talk
+'em over with you later."
+
+Honoria's expression had grown anxious. She spoke in a lower tone of
+voice.
+
+"Is Lady Calmady worse?"
+
+"In a sense, yes--simply because she is no better. And she's ill, I
+tell you, just as dangerously ill as any woman can be, who has nothing
+whatever actually the matter with her."
+
+"Except an only son," put in Honoria. "I am beginning to suspect that
+is about the most deadly disease going. The only thing to be said in
+its favour is that it is not infectious."
+
+John Knott could not quite keep admiration from his eyes, or
+provocation from his tongue. He richly enjoyed getting a rise out of
+Miss St. Quentin.
+
+"I am not so sure of that," he said. "In the case of beautiful women,
+judging by history, it has shown a tendency to be recurrently sporadic
+in any case."
+
+"Recommend all such to spend a few months at Brockhurst then, under
+existing circumstances," Honoria answered. "There will be very little
+fear for them after that. They will have received such a warning,
+swallowed such an antidote!--It is like assisting at the infliction of
+slow torture. It almost gets on one's brain at times."
+
+"Why do you stay on then?"
+
+Honoria looked down at her muddy boots and then across at the doctor.
+She was slightly the taller of the two, for in these days his figure
+had fallen together and he had taken to stooping. Her expression had a
+delightful touch of self-depreciation.
+
+"Why does any one stay by a sinking ship, or volunteer for a forlorn
+hope? Why do you sit up all night with a case of confluent smallpox, or
+suck away the poisonous membrane from a diphtheric throat, as I hear
+you did only last week? I don't know. Just because, if we are made on
+certain lines, we have to, I suppose. One would be a trifle too much
+ashamed to be seen in one's own company, afterwards, if one deserted.
+It really requires less pluck to stick than to run--that's the reason
+probably.--But about dear Lady Calmady. The excellent Clara was in
+tears. Is there any fresh mischief over and above the only son?"
+
+"Not at present. But it's an open question how soon there may
+be.--Good-day, Mr. March. Been riding? Ought to be a bit careful of
+that cranky chest of yours in this confounded weather.--Lady
+Calmady?--Yes, as I was telling Miss St. Quentin, her strength is so
+reduced that complications may arise any day. A chill, and her lungs
+may go; a shock, and her heart. It comes to a mere question of the
+point of least resistance. I won't guarantee the continued soundness of
+any organ unless we get changed conditions, a let up of some sort."
+
+The doctor looked up from under his eyebrows, first at Honoria and then
+at Julius. He spoke bitterly, defiant of his inclination towards
+tenderness.
+
+"She's just worn herself out," he said, "that's the fact, in the
+service of others, loving, giving, attempting the impossible in the way
+of goodness all round. 'Be not righteous over much'--there's a text to
+that effect in the Scriptures, Mr. March, isn't there? Preach a good,
+rattling sermon on it next Sunday to Lady Calmady, if you want to keep
+her here a bit longer. Nature abhors a vacuum. Granted. But nature
+abhors excess, even of virtue. And punishes it just as harshly as
+excess of vice.--Yes, I tell you, she's worn herself out."
+
+Miss St. Quentin dropped into a chair and sat bowed together, her hands
+on her knees, her feet rather far apart. The brim of her hat, pulled
+down in front to let the rain run off, partially concealed her face.
+She was not sorry, for a movement of defective courage was upon her,
+evidence of which she preferred to keep to herself. Julius March
+remained silent. And this she resented slightly, for she badly wanted
+somebody to say something, either vindictive or consolatory. Then,
+indignation getting the better alike of reticence and charity, she
+exclaimed:--
+
+"It is unpardonable. It ought to be impossible one person should have
+power to kill another by inches, like this, with impunity."
+
+Ludovic Quayle had sauntered into the room behind Julius March. He too
+was wet and dirty, but such trifles in no wise affected the
+completeness of his urbanity. His long neck directed forward, as in
+polite inquiry, he advanced to the little group by the fire, and took
+up his station beside Honoria's chair.
+
+"Pardon me, my dear Miss St. Quentin," he asked sweetly, "but why the
+allusions to murder? What is unpardonable?"
+
+"Sir Richard Calmady's conduct," she answered shortly. She threw back
+her head and addressed Dr. Knott. "It is so detestably unjust. What
+possible quarrel has he with her, after all?"
+
+"Ah! that--that--lies very deep. A thing, perhaps, only a man, or a
+mother, can quite comprehend," the doctor answered slowly.
+
+Honoria's straight eyebrows drew together. She objected to extenuating
+circumstances in this connection, yet, as she admitted, reason usually
+underlay all Dr. Knott's statements. She divined, moreover, that
+reason, just now, touched upon matters inconveniently intimate. She
+abstained, therefore, from protest or comment. But, since feminine
+emotion, even in the least weakly of the sex, is bound to find an
+outlet, she turned upon poor Mr. Quayle.
+
+"He is your friend," she said. "The rest of us are helpless. You ought
+to take measures. You ought to suggest a remedy."
+
+"With all the pleasure in life," the young man answered. "But you may
+remember that you delivered yourself of precisely the same sentiments a
+year and a half ago. And that, fired with the ardour of a chivalrous
+obedience, I fled over the face of the European continent in hot
+pursuit of poor, dear Dickie Calmady."
+
+"Poor, dear!" ejaculated Honoria.
+
+"Yes, very much poor, dear, through it all," the young man affirmed.
+"Breathless, but still obedient, I came up with him at Odessa."
+
+"What was he doing there?" put in the doctor.
+
+Mr. Quayle regarded him not without humour.
+
+"Really, I am not my friend's keeper, though Miss St. Quentin is
+pleased to make me a handsome present of that enviable office. And
+so--well--I didn't inquire what he was doing. To tell the truth, I had
+not much opportunity, for though I found him charming,--yes, charming,
+Miss St. Quentin,--I also found him wholly unapproachable regarding
+family affairs. When, with a diplomatic ingenuity upon which I cannot
+but congratulate myself, I suggested the advisability of a return to
+Brockhurst, in the civilest way in the world he showed me the door.
+Impertinence is not my _forte_. I am by nature humble-minded. But, I
+give you my word, that was a little episode of which I do not crave the
+repetition."
+
+Growling to himself, clasping his hands behind his back, John Knott
+shifted his position. Then, taken with that desire of clergy-baiting,
+which would seem to be inherent in members of the Faculty, he addressed
+Julius March.
+
+"Come, now," he said, "your pupil doesn't do you an overwhelming amount
+of credit it must be admitted, still you ought to be able to give an
+expert's opinion upon the tendencies of his character. How much longer
+do you allow him before he grows tired of filling his belly with the
+husks the swine eat?"
+
+"God knows, not I," Julius answered sadly, but without rancour. "I
+confess to the faithlessness of despair at times. And yet, being his
+mother's son, he cannot but tire of it eventually, and when he does so
+the revulsion will be final, the restoration complete----"
+
+"He'll die the death of the righteous? Oh yes! I agree there, for
+there's fine stuff in him, never doubt that. He'll end well enough.
+Only the beginning of that righteous ending, if delayed much longer,
+may come a bit too late for the saving of my patient's life
+and--reason."
+
+"Do you mean it is as serious as all that?" Ludovic asked with sudden
+anxiety.
+
+"Every bit as serious!--Oh! you should have let your sister marry him,
+Mr. Quayle. Then he would have settled down, come into line with the
+average, and been delivered from the morbid sense of outlawry which had
+been growing on him--it couldn't be helped, on the whole he has kept
+very creditably sane in my opinion--from the time he began to mix
+freely in general society. I'm not very soft or sickly sentimental at
+my time of day, but I tell you it turns my stomach to think of all he
+must have gone through, poor chap. It's a merciless world, Miss St.
+Quentin, and no one knows that better than we case-hardened old sinners
+of doctors.--Yes, your sister should have married him, and we might
+have been saved all this. I doubted the wisdom of the step at the time.
+But I was a fool. I see now his mother's instinct was right."
+
+Mr. Quayle pursed up his small mouth and gently shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"It is a delicate subject on which to offer an opinion," he said. "I
+debated it freely in the privacy of my inner consciousness at the time,
+I assure you. If Lady Calmady had lighted upon the right, the uniquely
+right, woman--perhaps--yes. But to shore up a twenty-foot, stone wall
+with a wisp of straw,--my dear doctor, does that proceeding approve
+itself to your common sense? And, as is a wisp of straw to such a wall,
+so was my poor, little sister,--it's hardly flattering to my family
+pride to admit it,--but thus indeed was she, and no otherwise, to
+Dickie Calmady."
+
+Whereupon Honoria glanced up gratefully at the speaker, for even yet
+her conscience pricked her concerning the part she had played in
+respect of that broken engagement. While John Knott, observant of that
+upward glance, was once again struck by her manifest sincerity, and the
+gallant grace of her, heightened by those workmanlike and
+mud-bespattered garments. And, being so struck, he was once again
+tempted by, and once again yielded himself to, the pleasures of
+provocation.
+
+"Marry him yourself, Miss St. Quentin," he growled, a touch of earnest
+behind his raillery, "marry him yourself and so set the rest of us free
+of the whole pother. I'd back you to handle him or any fellow living,
+with mighty great success, if you'd the mind to!"
+
+For a moment it seemed open to question whether that very fair fish
+might not make short work of angler as well as of bait. But Honoria
+relented, refusing provocation. And this not wholly in mercy to the
+speaker, but because it offered her an opportunity of reading Mr.
+Quayle a, perhaps useful, lesson. Her serious eyes narrowed, and her
+upper lip shortened into a delightful smile.
+
+"Hopeless, Dr. Knott!" she answered. "To begin with he'll never ask me,
+since we like each other very royally ill. And to end with--" she
+carefully avoided sight of Mr. Quayle--"I--you see--I'm not what you
+call a marrying man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+EXIT CAMP
+
+
+About twenty minutes later the young lady, still booted and spurred,
+opened the door which leads from the Chapel-Room into Lady Calmady's
+bedchamber. As she did so a gentle warmth met her, along with a
+sweetness of flowers. Within, the melancholy of the bleak twilight was
+mitigated by the soft brightness of a pink-shaded lamp, and a fitful
+flickering of firelight. This last, playing upon the blue-and-white,
+Dutch tiling of the hearth and chimney-space conferred a quaint effect
+of activity upon the actors in the biblical scenes thereon depicted.
+The patriarch Abraham visibly flourished his two-inch sword above the
+prostrate form of hapless Isaac. The elders pranced, unblushingly, in
+pursuit of the chaste Susanna. While poor little Tobit, fish in hand,
+clung anxiously to the flying draperies of his long-legged, and
+all-too-peripatetic, guardian angel. Such profane vivacity, on the part
+of persons usually accounted sacred, offered marked an almost cynical
+contrast to the extreme quiet otherwise obtaining, accentuated the
+absoluteness, deepened the depth, of it. For nothing stirred within the
+length and breadth of the room, nor did any smallest sound disturb the
+prevailing silence. At these southward-facing casements no harsh wind
+shrilled. The embroidered curtains of the state-bed hung in stiff,
+straight folds. The many-coloured leaves and branches of the trees of
+the Forest of This Life were motionless. Care, the Leopard, crouched,
+unobservant, forgetful to spring, while the Hart was fixed spellbound
+in the midst of its headlong flight. A spell seemed, indeed, to rest on
+all things, which had in it more than the watchful hush of the ordinary
+sickroom. It suggested a certain moral attitude--a quiet, not
+acquiesced in merely, but promoted.
+
+Upon Honoria--her circulation quickened by recent exercise, her cheeks
+still tingling from the stinging sleet, her retina still retaining
+impressions of the stern grandeur of the wide-ranging fir woods and
+gray-brown desolation of the moors--this extreme quiet produced an
+extremely disquieting effect. Passing from the Chapel-Room and the
+society of her late companions--all three persons of distinct
+individuality, all three possessing, though from very differing
+standpoints, a definitely masculine outlook on life--into this silent
+bedchamber, she seemed to pass with startling abruptness from the
+active to the passive, from the objective to the subjective side of
+things, from the world that creates to that which obeys, merely, and
+waits. The present and masculine, with its clear practical reason, its
+vigorous purposes, was exchanged for a place peopled by memories only,
+dedicated wholly to submissive and patient endurance. And this fell in
+extremely ill with Honoria's present humour, while the somewhat
+unseemly antics of the small, scriptural personages, pictured upon the
+chimney-space and hearth, troubled her imagination, in that they added
+a point of irony to this apparent triumph of the remote over the
+immediate, of tradition over fact.
+
+Nor as, stung with unspoken remonstrance, she approached Lady Calmady
+was this sense of intrusion into an alien region lessened, or her
+appreciation of the difficulties of the mission she had been deputed by
+doctor, priest, and amiable young fine gentleman--her late
+companions--to fulfil, by any means lightened.
+
+For Katherine lay back in the great rose-silk and muslin-covered
+armchair, at right angles to the fireplace, motionless, not a
+participant merely, so it seemed to the intruder, in that all-embracing
+quiet, but the very source and centre of it, its nucleus and heart. The
+lines of her figure were shrouded in a loose, wadded gown of
+dove-coloured silk, bordered with swan's-down. A coif of rare, white
+lace covered her upturned hair. Her eyes were closed, the rim of the
+eye-socket being very evident. While her face, though smooth and still
+graciously young, was so attenuated as to appear almost transparent.
+Now, as often before, it struck Honoria that a very exquisite spiritual
+quality was present in her aspect--her whole bearing and expression
+betraying, less the languor and defeat of physical illness, than the
+exhaustion of long sustained moral effort, followed by the calm of
+entire self-dedication and renunciation of will.
+
+On the table at her elbow were a bowl of fresh-picked violets and
+greenhouse-grown tea-roses, some books of the hour, both English and
+French, a miniature of Dickie at the age of thirteen--the proud, little
+head and its cap of close-cropped curls showing up against a background
+of thick-set foliage. On the table, too, lay a well-worn, vellum-bound
+copy of that holiest of books ever, perhaps, conceived by the heart and
+written by the hand of man--Thomas a Kempis' _Imitation of Christ_. It
+was open at the chapter which is thus entitled--"Of the Zealous
+Amendment of our Whole Life." While close against it was a packet of
+Richard's letters--those curt, businesslike communications, faultlessly
+punctual in their weekly arrival, which, while they relieved her
+anxiety as to his material well-being, stabbed his mother's heart only
+less by the little they said, than by all they left unsaid.
+
+And looking upon that mother now, taking cognisance of her
+surroundings, Honoria St. Quentin's young indignation, once again,
+waxed hot. While, since it was the tendency of her mind to run eagerly
+towards theory, to pass from the particular to the general, and
+instinctively to apprehend the relation of the individual to the mass,
+looking thus upon Katherine, she rebelled, not only against the doom of
+this one woman, but against that doom of universal womanhood of which
+she offered, just now, only too eloquent an example. And a burning
+compassion animated Honoria for feminine as against all masculine
+creatures, for the bitter patience demanded of the passive, as against
+the large latitude permitted the active principle; for the perpetual
+humiliation of the subjective and spiritual under the heavy yoke of the
+objective and practical,--for the brief joy and long barrenness of all
+those who are condemned to obey and to wait, merely, as against those
+who are born to command and to create.
+
+From a child she had been aware of the element of tragedy inherent in
+the fact of womanhood. It had quickened exaggerations of sentiment in
+her at times, and pushed her into not a little knight-errantry,--witness
+the affair of Lady Constance Quayle's engagement. But, though more
+sober in judgment than of old and less ready to get her lance in rest,
+the existence of that tragic element had never disclosed itself more
+convincingly to her than at the present moment, nor had the necessity
+to attempt the assuaging of the smart of it called upon her with more
+urgent voice. Yet she recognised that such attempt taxed all her
+circumspection, all her imaginative sympathy and tact. Very free
+criticism of the master of the house, of his sins of omission and
+commission alike, were permissible in the Chapel-Room and in the
+presence of her late companions. The subject, unhappily, had called for
+too frequent mention, by now, for any circumlocution to be incumbent in
+the discussion of it. But here, in the brooding quiet of this
+bedchamber, and in Lady Calmady's presence, all that was changed.
+Trenchant statements of opinion, words of blame, were proscribed. The
+sinner, if spoken of at all, must be spoken of with due reticence and
+respect, his wilfulness ignored, the unloveliness of his conduct
+gently, even eagerly, explained away.
+
+And, therefore, it came about that this fair champion of much-wronged
+womanhood, though fired with the zeal of righteous anger, had to go
+very softly and set a watch before her lips. But as she paused, fearful
+to break in too abruptly upon Lady Calmady's repose, she began to
+question fearfully whether speech was, in truth, still available as a
+means of communication between herself and the object of her
+solicitude. For Lady Calmady lay so very still, her sweet face showed
+so transparent against the rose-silk, muslin-covered pillows, that the
+younger woman was shaken by a swift dread that Dr. Knott's melancholy
+predictions had already found fulfilment, and that the lovely,
+labour-wasted body had already let the valiant, love-wasted soul
+depart.
+
+"Cousin Katherine, dear Cousin Katherine," she called very gently,
+under her breath, and then waited almost awestricken, sensible, to the
+point of distress, alike of the profound quiet, which it seemed as an
+act of profanity to have even assayed to break, and of the malign
+activity of those little, scriptural figures anticking so wildly in the
+chimney-space and on the hearth.
+
+Seconds, to Honoria of measureless duration, elapsed before Lady
+Calmady gave sign of life. At length she moved her hands, as though
+gathering, with infinite tenderness, some small and helpless creature
+close and warm against her bosom. Honoria's vision grew somewhat
+blurred and misty. Then, with a long-drawn, fluttering sigh, Katherine
+looked up at the tall, straight figure.
+
+"Dick--ah, you've come in! My beloved--have you had good sport?" she
+said.
+
+Honoria sat down on the end of the sofa, bowing her head.
+
+"Alas, alas, it is only me, Cousin Katherine. Nothing better than me,
+Honoria St. Quentin. Would that it were some one better," and her voice
+broke.
+
+But Lady Calmady had come into full possession of herself.
+
+"My dear, I must have been dozing, and my thoughts had wandered far on
+the backward road, as is the foolish habit of thoughts when one grows
+old and is not altogether well and strong."--Katherine spoke faintly,
+yet with an air of sweetly playful apology. "One is liable to be
+confused, under such circumstances, when one first wakes--and--you have
+the smell of the sleet and the freshness of the moors upon you." She
+paused, and then added:--"But, indeed, the confusion of sleep once
+past, I could hardly have anything dearer for my eyes first to light on
+than your very dear self."
+
+Hearing which gracious words, indignation in the cause of this woman,
+burning compassion for the wrongs and sorrows of universal womanhood,
+both of which must be denied utterance, worked very forcibly in
+Honoria. She bent down and taking Lady Calmady's hand kissed it. And,
+as she did this, her eyes were those of an ardent, yet very reverent
+lover, and so, when next she spoke, were the tones of her voice.
+
+But Katherine, still anxious to repair any defect in her recognition
+and greeting, and still with that same effect of playful
+self-depreciation, spoke first.
+
+"I had been reviewing many things, with the help of blessed Thomas a
+Kempis here, before I became so drowsy. The dear man lays his finger
+smartly upon all the weak places in one's fancied armour of
+righteousness. It is sometimes not quite easy to be altogether grateful
+to him. For instance, he has pointed out to me conclusively that I grow
+reprehensibly selfish."
+
+"Oh come, come!" Honoria answered, in loving raillery. "Thomas is acute
+to the point of lying if he has convinced you of that!"
+
+"Unhappily, no," Katherine returned. "I know it, I fear, without any
+pointing of Thomas's finger. But I rather shirked admission of my
+knowledge--well, for the very bad reason that I wanted very badly to
+put off the day of amendment. Now the holy man has touched my witness
+and"--she turned her head against the pillows and looked full at the
+younger woman, while her under-lip quivered a little. "My dear, I have
+come to be very greedy of the comfort of your companionship. I have
+been tempted to consider not your advantage, but solely my own. The
+pointing finger of Thomas has brought it home to me that Brockhurst and
+I are feeding upon your generosity of time, and helpfulness, to an
+unconscionable extent. We are devouring the best days of your life, and
+hindering you alike from work and from pleasure. It must not be. And
+so, my dear, I beg you go forth, once more, to all your many friends
+and to society. You are too young, and too gifted, to remain here in
+this sluggish backwater, alongside a derelict like me. It is not right.
+You must make for the open stream again and let the free wind and the
+strong current bear you gladly on your appointed course. And my
+gratitude and my blessing will go with you always. But you must delay
+no longer. For me you have done enough."
+
+For a little space Honoria held her friend's hand in silence.
+
+"Are--are--you tired of me then?" she said.
+
+"Ah, my dear!" Katherine exclaimed. And the exclamation was more
+reassuring, somehow, than any denial could have been.
+
+"After all," Honoria went on, "I really don't see why you're to have a
+monopoly of faithfulness. There's selfishness now, if you like--to
+appropriate a virtue _en bloc_ not leaving a rag, not the veriest
+scrappit of it for anybody else! And then, has it never occurred to
+you, that I may be just every bit as greedy of your companionship as
+you of mine--more so, I fancy, because--because----"
+
+Honoria bowed her head and kissed the hand she held, once again.
+
+"You see--I know it sounds as if I was rather a beast--perhaps I
+am--but I never cared for any one--really to care, I mean--till I cared
+for you."
+
+"My dear!"--Katherine said again, wondering, shrinking somewhat, at
+once touched and almost repulsed. The younger woman's attitude was so
+far removed from her own experience.
+
+"Does it displease you? Does it seem to you unnatural?" Honoria asked
+quickly.
+
+"A little," Lady Calmady answered, smiling, yet very tenderly.
+
+"All the same it's quite true. You opened a door, somehow, that had
+always been shut. I hardly believed in its existence. Of course I had
+read plenty about the--affections, shall we call them? And had heard
+women and girls, and men, too, for that matter, talk about them pretty
+freely. But it bored me a good deal. I thought it all rather silly, and
+rather nasty perhaps."--Honoria shook her head. "It didn't appeal to me
+in the least. But when you opened the door"--she paused, her face very
+grave, yet with a smile on it, as she looked away at the little figures
+anticking upon the hearth. "Oh, dear me, I own I was half scared," she
+said, "it let in such a lot of light!"
+
+But, for this speech, Lady Calmady had no immediate answer. And so the
+quiet came back, settling down sensibly on the room again--even as,
+when at dawn the camp is struck, the secular quiet of the desert comes
+back and possesses its own again. And, in obedience to that quiet,
+Katherine's hand rested passively in the hand of her companion, while
+she gazed wonderingly at the delicate, half-averted face, serious, lit
+up by the eagerness of a vital enthusiasm. And, having a somewhat
+sorrowful fund of learning to draw upon in respect of the dangers all
+eccentricity, either of character or development, inevitably brings
+along with it, she trembled, divining that noble and strong and pure
+though it was, that face, and the temperament disclosed by it, might
+work sorrow, both to its possessor and to others, unless the enthusiasm
+animating it should find some issue at once large and simple enough to
+engage its whole aspiration and power of work.
+
+But abruptly Honoria broke up the brooding quiet, laughing gently, yet
+with a catch in her throat.
+
+"And when you had let in the light, Cousin Katherine, good heavens, how
+thankful I was I had never married. Picture finding out all that after
+one had bound oneself, after one had given oneself! What an awful
+prostitution."--Her tone changed and she stroked the elder woman's hand
+softly. "So you see you can't very well order me off, the pointing
+finger of Thomas notwithstanding. You have taught me----"
+
+"Only half the lesson as yet," Katherine said. "The other half, and the
+doxology which closes it, neither I, nor any other woman, can teach
+you."
+
+"You really believe that?"
+
+"Ah! my dear," Katherine said, "I do more than believe. I know it."
+
+The younger woman regarded her searchingly. Then she shook her charming
+head.
+
+"It's no good to arrive at a place before you've got to it," she
+declared. "And I very certainly haven't got to the second half of the
+lesson, let alone the doxology, yet. And then I'm so blissfully content
+with the first half, that I've no disposition to hurry. No, dear Cousin
+Katherine, I am afraid you must resign yourself to put up with me for a
+little while longer. Your foes, unfortunately, are of your own
+household in this affair. Dr. Knott has just been holding forth to
+us--Julius March, and Mr. Quayle, and me--and swearing me over, not
+only to stay, but to make you eat and drink and come out of doors, and
+even to go away with me. Because--yes, in a sense your Thomas is right
+with his pointing finger, though he got a bit muddled, good man, not
+being quite up-to-date, and pointed to the wrong place----"
+
+Honoria left her sentence unfinished. She knelt down--her tall, slender
+figure, angular, more like that of a youth, than like that of a maid,
+in her spare mud-stained habit and coat. Impulsively she put her hands
+on Lady Calmady's hips, laid her head in her lap.
+
+"Have you but one blessing, oh! my more than mother?" she cried. "Do we
+count for nothing, all the rest of us--your household, and tenants rich
+and poor, and Julius the faithful, and Ludovic the bland, and that
+queer lump of sagacity and ugliness, John Knott? Why will you kill
+yourself? Why will you die and leave us all, just because one person is
+perverse? That's hardly the way to make us--who love you--bear with and
+pity him and welcome him home.--Oh! I know I am treading on dangerous
+ground and venturing to approach very close. But I don't care--not a
+hang! We're at the end of our patience. We want you, and we mean to
+have you back."
+
+Honoria raised herself, knelt bolt upright, her hands on the arms of
+Lady Calmady's chair, her expression full of appeal.
+
+"Be kind to us, be kind," she said. "We only ask you, after all, to eat
+and drink--to let Clara take care of you at night, and I'll do so by
+day.--And then, when you are stronger, you must come away with me, up
+north, to Ormiston. You have not been there for years, and its gray
+towers are rather splendid overlooking that strong, uneasy, northern
+sea. It stirs the Viking blood in one, and makes that which was hard
+seem of less moment. Roger and Mary are there, too--will be all this
+summer. And you know it refreshed you to see them last year. And if we
+go pretty soon the boys will be at school, so they won't tire you with
+their racketing. They're jolly monkeys, though, in my opinion, Godfrey
+wants smacking. He comes the elder-brother a lot too much over poor
+little Dick.--But that's neither here nor there. Oh! it's for you to
+get out of the backwater into the stream, ten times more than for me.
+Dearest physician, heal thyself!"
+
+But Katherine, though deeply touched by the loving ardour of the
+younger woman's appeal, and the revelation of tenderness and watchful
+care, constantly surrounding her, which that appeal brought along with
+it, could not rouse herself to any immediate response. Sternly,
+unremittingly, since the fair July night when Richard had left her
+nearly five years earlier, she had schooled herself into unmurmuring
+resignation and calm. In the prosecution of such a process there must
+be loss as well as gain. And Katherine had, in great measure, atrophied
+impulse, and, in eradicating personal desire, had come near destroying
+all spontaneity of emotion. She could still give, but the power of
+receiving was deadened in her. And she had come to be jealous of the
+quiet which surrounded her. It was her support and solace. She asked
+little more than not to have it broken up. She dreaded even affection,
+should that strive to draw her from the cloistered way of life. The
+world, and its many interests, had ceased to be of any moment to her.
+She asked to be left to contemplation of things eternal and to the
+tragedy of her own heart. And so, though it was beautiful to know
+herself to be thus cherished and held in high esteem, that beauty came
+to her as something unrelated, as sweet words good to hear, yet spoken
+of some person other than herself, or of a self she had ceased to be.
+All privilege implies a corresponding obligation, and to the meeting of
+fresh obligations Katherine felt herself not only unequal, but
+indisposed. And so, she smiled now upon Honoria St. Quentin, leaning
+back against the rose-silk and muslin-covered pillows, with a lovely
+indulgence, yet rather hopelessly unmoved and remote.
+
+"Ah! my dear, I am beyond all wish to be healed after the fashion you,
+in your urgent loving-kindness, would have me," she said. "I look
+forward to the final healing, when my many mistakes and shortcomings
+shall be forgiven and the smart of them removed. And I am very tired. I
+do not think it can be required of me to go back."
+
+"I know, I know," Honoria replied.--She rose to her feet and moved
+across to the fireplace, her straight eyebrows drawn together, her
+expression one of perplexity. "I must seem a brute for trying to drag
+you back. When Dr. Knott, and the other two men, asked me to come and
+reason with you, I was on the edge of refusing. I hardly had the heart
+to worry you. And yet," she added wistfully, "after all, in a way, it
+is just simply your own, dear fault. For if you will be a sort of
+little kingdom of heaven to us, you see, it's inevitable that, when you
+threaten to slip away from us, we should play the part of the violent
+and do our best to take our kingdom by force and keep it in spite of
+itself."
+
+"You overrate the heavenliness of the poor little kingdom," Katherine
+said. "Its soil has become barren, its proud cities are laid waste.
+It's an unprofitable place, believe me, dearest child. Let it be. Seek
+your fortune in some kingdom from which the glory has not departed and
+whose motto is not _Ichabod_."
+
+"Unfortunately, I can't do that," the younger woman answered. "I've
+explained why already. Where my heart is, there, you see, my kingdom is
+also."
+
+"Ah! my dear, my dear," Katherine said, touched, yet somewhat weary.
+
+"And after all it is not wholly for our own sakes we make this fight to
+keep you."--Miss St. Quentin's voice sank. She spoke slowly and as
+though with reluctance. "We do it for the sake of the person you love
+best in the world. I don't say we love him very much, but that is
+beside the mark. We owe him a certain duty--I, because I am living in
+his house, the others because they are his friends. When he comes
+home--as come he surely will--they all say that, even while they blame
+him--would it not be an almost too cruel punishment if he found
+Brockhurst empty of your presence? You would not wish that. It's not a
+question of me, of course. I don't count. But you gone, no one--not
+even the old servants, I believe--would stay. Blame would be turned
+into something awkwardly near to hatred."
+
+Lady Calmady's serenity did not desert her, but a touch of her old
+loftiness of manner was apparent. And Miss St. Quentin was very glad.
+Anything, even anger, would be welcome if it dissipated that unnatural,
+paralysing calm.
+
+"You forget Julius, I think," she said. "He will be faithful to the
+very end, faithful unto death. And so will another friend of happier
+days, poor, blind, old Camp."
+
+A sudden inspiration came to Honoria St. Quentin.
+
+"You must only count on Julius, I am afraid, Cousin Katherine--not on
+Camp."
+
+And to her immense relief she perceived Lady Calmady's serenity give a
+little. It was as though she came nearer. Her sweet face was troubled,
+her eyes full of questioning.
+
+"Camp grew a little too tired of waiting about three weeks ago. You did
+not ask for him----"
+
+"Didn't I?" Katherine said, smitten by self-reproach.
+
+"Never once--and so we did not tell you, fearing to distress you."
+
+Miss St. Quentin came over and sat down on the end of the sofa again.
+She rested her hands on her knees. Her feet were rather far apart. She
+fixed her eyes upon the small prophets and patriarchs anticking upon
+the hearth.
+
+"But it wasn't really so very bad," she said reflectively. "And we did
+all we could to smooth his passage, poor, dear beast, to the place
+where all good dogs go. We had the vet out from Westchurch two or three
+times, but there was nothing much he could do. And I thought him a bit
+rough. Nervousness, I fancy. You see the dog did not like being handled
+by a stranger, and made it rather hot for him once or twice. I could
+not let him be worried, poor old man, and so Julius March, and Winter,
+and I, took turn and turn about with him."
+
+"Where did he die?"
+
+"In the Gun-Room, on the tiger-skin."--Honoria did not look round. Her
+voice grew perceptibly husky. "Chifney and I sat up with him that last
+night."
+
+"You and Chifney?" Lady Calmady exclaimed, almost in protest.
+
+"Yes. Of course the men would have been as kind as kind could be. Only
+I had a feeling you would be glad to know I was there, later, when we
+told you. You see Chifney's as good as any vet, and I had to have
+somebody. The dog was rather queer. I did not quite know how to manage
+him alone."
+
+Lady Calmady put out her hand. Honoria took it silently, and fell to
+stroking it once more. It was a declaration of peace, she felt, on the
+part of the obstinate well-beloved--possibly a declaration of something
+over and above peace.
+
+"Winter saw to our creature comforts," the young lady continued. "Oh,
+we weren't starved, I promise you! And Chifney was excellent company."
+
+She hesitated a moment.
+
+"He told me endless yarns about horses--about Doncaster and Newmarket,
+and Goodwood. I was greatly flattered at being regarded sufficiently of
+the equestrian order to hear all that.--And he told me stories about
+Richard, when he was quite a little boy--and about his father also."
+
+Honoria had a conviction the tears were running down Lady Calmady's
+cheeks, but she would not look round. She only stroked the hand she
+held softly, and talked on.
+
+"They were fine," she said, "some of those stories. I am glad to have
+heard them. They went home to me. When all is said and done, there is
+nothing like breeding and pluck, and the courtesy which goes along with
+them. But after midnight Camp grew very restless. He had his blanket in
+the big armchair--you know the one I mean--as usual. But he wouldn't
+stay there. We had to lift him down. You see his hindquarters were
+paralysed, and he couldn't help himself much. It was pathetic. I can't
+forget the asking look in his half-blind eyes. But we couldn't make out
+what he wanted. At last he dragged himself as far as the door, and we
+set it open and watched him, poor, dear beast. He got across the lobby
+to the bottom of the little staircase----"
+
+The speaker's breath caught.
+
+"Then we made out what it was. He wanted to get up here, to come to
+you.--Well, I could understand that! I should want just that myself,
+shall want it, when it comes to the last. He whimpered when Chifney
+carried him back into the Gun-Room."
+
+Honoria turned her head and looked Lady Calmady in the face. Her own
+was more than commonly white and very gentle in expression.
+
+"He died in the gray of the morning, with his great head on my lap. I
+fancy it eased him to have something human, and--rather pitiful--close
+against him. Julius had just come in to see how we were getting on, I
+won't declare he did not say a prayer--I think he did. But I wasn't
+quite as steady as I might have been just then."
+
+She turned her head, looking back at the figures upon the hearth. She
+was satisfied. Lady Calmady's long-sustained calm had given way, and
+she wept.
+
+"We buried him, in his blanket, under the big Portugal-laurel, where
+the nightingale sings, at the corner of the troco-ground, close to Camp
+the First and Old Camp. The upper servants came, and Chaplin and
+Hariburt from the house-stables, and Chifney and the head-lad--and some
+of the gardeners. Poor, old Wenham drove up in his donkey-chair from
+the west lodge. Julius was there, of course. We did all things decently
+and in order."
+
+Honoria's voice ceased. She sat stroking the dear hand she held and
+smiling to herself, notwithstanding a chokiness in her throat, for she
+had a comfortable belief the situation was saved.
+
+Then Clara entered, prepared to encounter remonstrance, bearing a tray.
+
+"It's all right, Clara," Miss St. Quentin said. "Lady Calmady is quite
+ready for something to eat. I've been telling her about Camp."
+
+And Katherine, sitting upright, with great docility and a certain
+gentle shame, accepted food and drink.
+
+"Since you wish it, dearest," she said, "and since Julius must not be
+left alone in a quite empty house."
+
+"Our kingdom of heaven stays with us then?" Honoria exclaimed joyously.
+
+"Such as it is--poor thing--it will do its best to stay. I thought I
+had cried my eyes dry forever, long ago. But it seems not. You and Camp
+have broken up the drought."
+
+"I have not hurt you?" Honoria said, in sudden penitence.
+
+"No, no--you have given me relief. I was ceasing to be human. The
+blessed Thomas was right--I grew very selfish."
+
+"But you're not displeased with me?" Honoria insisted. Lady Calmady's
+playfulness had returned, but with a new complexion.
+
+"Ah! it is a little soon to ask that!" she said. "Still I will go north
+with you a fortnight hence--go to Ormiston. And by then, perhaps, you
+may be forgiven. Open the casement, dearest, and let in the wind. The
+air of this room is curiously dead. Give my love to Julius and Ludovic.
+Tell them I will come into the Chapel-Room after dinner
+to-night.--What--my child, are you so very glad?--Kiss me.--God keep
+you.--Now I will rest."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+IN WHICH M. PAUL DESTOURNELLE HAS THE BAD TASTE TO THREATEN TO UPSET
+THE APPLE-CART
+
+
+Helen de Vallorbes rose from her knees and slipped out from under the
+greasy and frayed half-curtain of the confessional box. The atmosphere
+of that penitential spot had been such as to make her feel faint and
+dizzy. She needed to recover herself. And so she stood, for a minute or
+more, in the clear, cool brightness of the nave of the great basilica,
+her highly-civilised figure covered by a chequer-work of morning
+sunshine streaming down through the round-headed windows of the lofty
+clere-storey. As the sense of physical discomfort left her she
+instinctively arranged her veil, and adjusted her bracelets over the
+wrists of her long gloves. Yet, notwithstanding this trivial and
+mundane occupation, her countenance retained an expression of devout
+circumspection, of the relief of one who has accomplished a serious and
+somewhat distasteful duty. Her sensations were increasingly agreeable.
+She had rid herself of an oppressive burden. She was at peace with
+herself and with--almost--all man and womankind.
+
+Yet, it must be admitted, the measure had been mainly precautionary.
+Helen had gone to confession, on the present occasion, in much the same
+spirit as an experienced traveler visits his dentist before starting on
+a protracted journey. She regarded it as a disagreeable, but politic,
+insurance against possible accident. Her distaste had been increased by
+the fact that there really were some rather risky matters to be
+confessed. She had even feared a course of penance might have been
+enforced before the granting of absolution--this certainly would have
+been the case had she been dealing with that firm disciplinarian and
+very astute man of the world, the Jesuit father who acted as her
+spiritual adviser in Paris. But here in Naples, happily, it was
+different. The fat, sleepy, easy-going, old canon--whose person exuded
+so strong an odour of snuff that, at the solemnest moment of the
+_confiteor_, she had been unable to suppress a convulsive sneeze--asked
+her but few inconvenient questions. Pretty fine-ladies will get into
+little difficulties of this nature. He had listened to very much the
+same story not infrequently before, and took the position amiably,
+almost humorously, for granted. It was very wicked, a deadly sin, but
+the flesh--specially such delicately bred, delicately fed, feminine
+flesh--is admittedly weak, and the wiles of Satan are many. Is it not
+an historic fact that our first mother did not escape?--Was Helen's
+repentance sincere, that was the point? And of that Helen could
+honestly assure him there was no smallest doubt. Indeed, at this
+moment, she abhorred, not only her sin, but her co-sinner, in the
+liveliest and most comprehensive manner. Return to him? Sooner the dog
+return to its vomit! She recognised the iniquity, the shame, the
+detestable folly, of her late proceedings far too clearly. Temptation
+in that direction had ceased to be possible.
+
+Then followed the mysterious and merciful words of absolution. And
+Helen rose from her knees and slipped out from beneath the frayed and
+greasy curtain a free woman, the guilt of her adultery wiped off by
+those awful words, as, with a wet cloth, one would wipe writing off a
+slate leaving the surface of it clean in every part. Precisely how far
+she literally believed in the efficacy of that most solemn rite she
+would not have found it easy to declare. Scepticism warred with
+expediency. But that appeared to her beside the mark. It was really
+none of her business. Let her teachers look to all that. To her it was
+sufficient that she could regard it from the practical standpoint of an
+insurance against possible accident--the accident of sin proving
+actually sinful and actually punishable by a narrow-minded deity, the
+accident of the veritable existence of heaven and hell, and of Holy
+Church veritably having the keys of both these in her keeping, the
+accident--more immediately probable and consequently worth guarding
+against--that, during wakeful hours, some night, the half-forgotten
+lessons of the convent school would come back on her, and, as did
+sometimes happen, would prove too much for her usually victorious
+audacity.
+
+But, it should be added that another and more creditable instinct did
+much to dictate Madame de Vallorbes' action at this juncture. As the
+days went by the attraction exercised over her by Richard Calmady
+suffered increase rather than diminution. And this attraction affected
+her morally, producing in her modesties, reticencies of speech, even of
+thought, and prickings of unflattering self-criticism unknown to her
+heretofore. Her ultimate purpose might not be virtuous. But undeniably,
+such is the complexity--not to say hypocrisy--of the human heart, the
+prosecution of that purpose developed in her a surprising sensibility
+of conscience. Many episodes in her career, hitherto regarded as
+entertaining, she ceased to view with toleration, let alone
+complacency. The remembrance of them made her nervous. What if Richard
+came to hear of them? The effect might be disastrous. Not that he was
+any saint, but that she perceived that, with the fine inconsistency
+common to most well-bred Englishmen, he demanded from the women of his
+family quite other standards of conduct to those which he himself
+obeyed. Other women might do as they pleased. Their lapses from the
+stricter social code were no concern of his. He might, indeed, be not
+wholly averse to profiting by such lapses. But in respect of the women
+of his own rank and blood the case was quite otherwise. He was
+alarmingly capable of disgust. And, not a little to her own surprise,
+fear of provoking, however slightly, that disgust had become a reigning
+power with her. Never had she felt as she now felt. Her own sensations
+at once captivated and astonished her. This had ceased to be an
+adventure dictated by merry devilry, undertaken out of lightness of
+heart, inspired by a mischievous desire to see dust whirl and straws
+fly, or undertaken even out of necessity to support self-satisfaction
+by ranging herself with cynical audacity on the side of the Eternal
+Laughter. This was serious. It was desperate--the crisis, as she told
+herself, of her life and fate. The result was singular. Never had she
+been more vividly, more electrically, alive. Never had she been more
+diffident and self-distrustful.
+
+And this complexity of sensation served to press home on her the high
+desirability of insurance against accident, of washing clean, as far as
+might be possible, the surface of the slate. So it followed that now,
+standing in the chequer-work of sunshine within the great basilica,
+self-congratulation awoke in her. The lately concluded ceremony, some
+of the details of which had really been most distasteful, might or
+might not be of vital efficacy, but, in any case, she had courageously
+done her part. Therefore, if Holy Church spoke truly, her first
+innocence was restored. Helen hugged the idea with almost childish
+satisfaction. Now she could go back to the Villa Vallorbes in peace,
+and take what measure----
+
+She left the sentence unfinished. Even in thought it is often an error
+to define. Let the future and her intentions regarding it remain in the
+vague! She signed to Zelie Forestier--seated on the steps of a
+side-chapel, yellow-paper-covered novel in hand--to follow her. And,
+after making a genuflexion before the altar of Our Lady of the
+Immaculate Conception, gathered up her turquoise-coloured skirts--the
+yellow-tufa quarries were not superabundantly clean--and pursued her
+way towards the great main door. The benevolent priest, charmed by her
+grace of movement, watched her from his place in the confessional,
+although another penitent now kneeled within the greasy curtain. Verily
+the delinquencies of so delectable a piece of womanhood were easily
+comprehensible! Neither God nor man, in such a case, would be extreme
+to mark what was done amiss.--Moreover, had she not promised generous
+gifts alike to church and poor? The sin which in an ugly woman is
+clearly mortal, in a pretty one becomes little more than venial. Making
+which reflection a kindly, fat chuckle shook his big paunch, and,
+crossing himself, he turned his attention to the voice murmuring from
+behind the wooden lattice at his side.
+
+Yet it would appear that abstract justice judged less leniently of the
+position. For, passing out on to the portico--about the base of whose
+enormous columns half-naked beggars clustered, exposing sores and
+mutilations, shrilly clamouring for alms--the dazzling glare of the
+empty, sun-scorched piazza behind him, Helen came face to face with no
+less a personage than M. Paul Destournelle.
+
+It was as though some one had struck her. The scene reeled before her
+eyes. Then her temper rose as in resentment of insult. To avoid all
+chance of such a meeting she had selected this church in an
+unfashionable quarter of the town. Here, at least, she had reckoned
+herself safe from molestation. And, that precisely in the hour of
+peace, the hour of politic insurance against accident, this accident of
+all others should befall her, was maddening! But anger did not lessen
+her perspicacity. How to inflict the maximum of discomfort upon M.
+Destournelle with the minimum of risk to herself was the question. An
+interview was inevitable. She wanted, very certainly, to get her claws
+into him, but, for safety's sake, that should be done not in attack,
+but in defense. Therefore he should speak first, and in his words,
+whatever those words might be, she promised herself to discover
+legitimate cause of offense. So, leisurely, and with studied ignorance
+of his presence, she flung largesse of _centissimi_ to right and left,
+and, while the chorus of blessing and entreaty was yet loud, walked
+calmly past M. Destournelle down the wide, shallow steps, from the
+solid shadow of the portico to the burning sun-glare of the piazza.
+
+The young man's countenance went livid.
+
+"Do you dare to pretend not to recognise me?" he literally gasped.
+
+"On the contrary I recognise you perfectly."
+
+"I have written to you repeatedly."
+
+"You have--written to me with a ridiculous and odious persistence."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes picked her steps. The pavement was uneven, the heat
+great. Destournelle's hands twitched with agitation, yet he contrived
+not only to replace his Panama hat, but opened his white umbrella as a
+precaution against sunstroke. And this diverted, even while
+exasperating, Helen. Measures to ensure personal safety were so
+characteristic of Destournelle.
+
+"And with what fault, I ask you, can you reproach me, save that of a
+too absorbing, a too generous, adoration?"
+
+"That fault in itself is very sufficient."
+
+"Do you not reckon, then, in any degree, with the crime you are in
+process of committing? Have you no sense of gratitude, of obligation?
+Have you no regret for your own loss in leaving me?"
+
+Helen drew aside to let a herd of goats pass. They jostled one another
+impudently, carrying their inquisitive heads and short tails erect, at
+right angles to the horizontal line of their narrow backs. They
+bleated, as in impish mischief. Their little beards wagged. Their
+little hoofs pattered on the stone, and the musky odour of them hung in
+the burning air. Madame de Vallorbes put her handkerchief up to her
+face, and over the edge of it she contemplated Paul Destournelle. Every
+detail of his appearance was not only familiar, but associated in her
+mind with some incident of his and her common past. Now the said
+details asserted themselves, so it seemed to her, with an impertinence
+of premeditated provocation.--The high, domed skull, the smooth,
+prematurely-thin hair parted in the middle and waved over the ears. The
+slightly raised eyebrows, and fatigued, red-lidded, and vain, though
+handsome eyes. The straight, thin nose, and winged, open nostrils, so
+perpetually a-quiver. The soft, sparse, forked beard which closely
+followed the line of the lower jaw and pointed chin. The moustache,
+lightly shading the upper lip, while wholly exposing the fretful and
+rather sensuous mouth. The long, effeminate, and restless hands. The
+tall, slight figure. The clothes, of a material and pattern fondly
+supposed by their wearer to present the last word of English fashion in
+relation to foreign travel, the colour of them accurately matched to
+the pale, brown hair and beard.--So much for the detail of the young
+man's appearance. As a whole, that appearance was elegant as only
+French youth ventures to be elegant. Refinement enveloped Paul
+Destournelle--refinement, over-sensitised and under-vitalised, as that
+of a rare exotic forced into precocious blossoming by application of
+some artificial horticultural process. And all this--elaborately
+effective and seductive as long as one should happen to think so,
+elaborately nauseous when one had ceased so to think--had long been
+familiar to Helen to the point of satiety. She turned wicked, satiety
+transmuting itself into active vindictiveness. How gladly would she
+have torn this emasculated creature limb from limb, and flung the lot
+of it among the refuse of the Neapolitan gutter!
+
+But, from beneath the shade of his umbrella, the young man recommenced
+his plaint.
+
+"It is inconceivable that, knowing my cruel capacity for suffering, you
+should be indifferent to my present situation," he asserted, half
+violently, half fretfully. "The whole range of history would fail to
+offer a case of parallel callousness. You, whose personality has
+penetrated the recesses of my being! You, who are acquainted with the
+infinite intricacy of my mental and emotional organisation! A touch
+will endanger the harmony of that exquisite mechanism. The
+interpenetration of the component parts of my being is too complete. I
+exist, I receive sensations, I suffer, I rejoice, as a whole. And this
+lays me open to universal, to incalculable, pain. Now my nerves are
+shattered--intellectual, moral, physical anguish permeate in every
+part. I rally my self-reverence, my nobility of soul. I make efforts.
+By day I visit spots of natural beauty and objects of art. But these
+refuse to gratify me. My thought is too turgid to receive the impress
+of them. Concentration is impossible to me. Feverish agitation perverts
+my imagination. My ideas are fugitive. I endure a chronic delirium.
+This by day," he extended one hand with a despairing gesture, "but by
+night----"
+
+"Oh, I implore you," Helen interrupted, "spare me the description of
+your nights! The subject is a hardly modest one. And then, at various
+times, I have already heard so very much about them, those nights!"
+
+Calmly she resumed her walk. The amazing vanity of the young man's
+speech appeased her, in a measure, since it fed her contempt. Let him
+sink himself beyond all hope of recovery, that was best. Let him go
+down, down, in exposition of fatuous self-conceit. When he was low
+enough, then she would kick him! Meanwhile her eyes, ever greedy of
+incident and colour, registered the scene immediately submitted to
+them. In the centre of the piazza, women--saffron and poppy-coloured
+handkerchiefs tied round their dark heads--washed, with a fine
+impartiality, soiled linen and vegetables in an iron trough, grated for
+a third of its length, before a fountain of debased and flamboyant
+design. Their voices were alternately shrill and gutteral. It was
+perhaps as well not to understand too clearly all which they said. On
+the left came a break in the high, painted house-fronts, off which in
+places the plaster scaled, and from the windows of which protruded
+miscellaneous samples of wearing apparel and bedding soliciting
+much-needed purification by means of air and light. In the said break
+was a low wall where coarse plants rooted, and atop of which lay some
+half-dozen ragged youths, outstretched upon their stomachs, playing
+cards. The least decrepit of the beggars, armed with Helen's largesse
+of copper coin, had joined them from beneath the portico. Gambling,
+seasoned by shouts, imprecations, blows, grew fast and furious. In the
+steep roadway on the right a dray, loaded with barrels, creaked and
+jolted upward. The wheels of it were solid discs of wood. The great,
+mild-eyed, cream-coloured oxen strained, with slowly swinging heads,
+under the heavy yoke. Scarlet, woolen bands and tassels adorned their
+broad foreheads and wide-sweeping, black-tipped horns, and here and
+there a scarlet drop their flanks, where the goad had pricked them too
+shrewdly. And upon it all the unrelenting southern sun looked down, and
+Helen de Vallorbes' unrelenting eyes looked forth. One of those quick
+realisations of the inexhaustible excitement of living came to her. She
+looked at the elegant young man walking beside her, apprised, measured,
+him. She thought of Richard Calmady, self-imprisoned in the luxurious
+villa, and of the possibilities of her, so far platonic, relation to
+him. She glanced down at her own rustling skirts and daintily-shod feet
+traveling over the hot stones, then at the noisy gamblers, then at the
+women washing, with that consummate disregard of sanitation, food and
+raiment together in the rusty iron trough by the fountain. The violent
+contrasts, the violent lights and shadows, the violent diversities of
+purpose and emotion, of rank, of health, of fortune and misfortune,
+went to her head. Whatever the risks or dangers that excitement
+remained inexhaustible. Nay, those very dangers and risks ministered to
+its perpetual upflowing. It struck her she had been over-scrupulous,
+weakly conscientious, in making confession and seeking absolution. Such
+timid moralities do not really shape destiny, control or determine
+human fate. The shouting, fighting youths there, with their filthy pack
+of cards and few _centissimi_, sprawling in the unstinted sunshine,
+were nearer the essential truth. They were the profound, because the
+practical philosophers! Therefore let us gamble, gamble, gamble, be the
+stake small or great, as long as the merest flicker of life, or
+fraction of uttermost farthing, is left! And so, when Destournelle took
+up his lament again, she listened to him, for the moment, with
+remarkable lightness of heart.
+
+"I appeal to you in the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my
+masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of
+letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling
+chastisement!"
+
+"Delicious!" said Helen, under her breath.
+
+"Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediaevalism. The
+elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the
+too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence
+which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in
+me the hint of frivolity which is necessary to procure action. Our
+union was as that of high-noon and impenetrable night. I anticipated
+extraordinary consequences."
+
+"Marriage of a butterfly and a bat? Yes, the progeny should be
+surprising, little animals certainly," commented Madame de Vallorbes.
+
+"In deserting me you have rendered me impotent. That is a crime. It is
+an atrocity. You assassinate my genius."
+
+"Then, indeed, I have reason to congratulate myself on my ingenuity,"
+she returned, "since I succeeded in the assassination of the
+non-existent!"
+
+"You, who have praised it a thousand times--you deny the existence of
+my genius?" almost shrieked M. Destournelle. He was very much in
+earnest, and in a very sorry case. His limbs twitched. He appeared on
+the verge of an hysteric seizure. To plague him thus was a charmingly
+pretty sport, but one safest carried on with closed doors--not in so
+public a spot.
+
+"I do not deny the existence of anything, save your right to make a
+scene and render me ridiculous as you repeatedly did at Pisa."
+
+"Then you must return to me."
+
+"Oh! la, la!" cried Helen.
+
+"That you should leave me and live in your cousin's house constitutes
+an intolerable insult."
+
+"And where, pray, would you have me live?" she retorted, her temper
+rising, to the detriment of diplomacy. "In the street?"
+
+"It appears to me the two localities are synonymous--morally."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes drew up. Rage almost choked her. M. Destournelle's
+words stung the more fiercely because the insinuation they contained
+was not justified by fact. They brought home to her her non-success in
+a certain direction. They called up visions of that unknown rival, to
+whom--ah, how she hated the woman!--Richard Calmady's affections were,
+as she feared, still wholly given. That her relation to him was
+innocent, filled her with humiliation. First she turned to Zelie
+Forestier, who had followed at a discreet distance across the piazza.
+
+"Go on," she said, "down the street. Find a cab, a clean one. Wait in
+it for me at the bottom of the hill."
+
+Then she turned upon M. Destournelle.
+
+"Your mind is so corrupt that you cannot conceive of an honest
+friendship, even between near relations. You fill me with repulsion--I
+measured the depth of your degeneracy at Pisa. That is why I left you.
+I wanted to breathe in an uninfected atmosphere. My cousin is a person
+of remarkable intellectual powers, of chivalrous ideals, and of
+superior character. He has had great troubles. He is far from well. I
+am watching over and nursing him."
+
+The last statement trenched boldly on fiction. As she made it Madame de
+Vallorbes moved forward, intending to follow the retreating Zelie down
+the steep, narrow street. For a minute M. Destournelle paused to
+recollect his ideas. Then he went quickly after her.
+
+"Stay, I implore you," he said. "Yes, I own at Pisa I lost myself. The
+agitation of composition was too much for me. My mind seethed with
+ideas. I became irritable. I comprehend I was in fault. But it is so
+easy to recommence, and to range oneself. I accept your assurances
+regarding your cousin. It is all so simple. You shall not return to me.
+You shall continue your admirable work. But I will return to you. I
+will join you at the villa. My society cannot fail to be of pleasure to
+your cousin, if he is such a person as you describe. In a _milieu_
+removed from care and trivialities I will continue my poem. I may even
+dedicate it to your cousin. I may make his name immortal. If he is a
+person of taste and ideals, he cannot fail to appreciate so magnificent
+a compliment. You will place this before him. You will explain to him
+how necessary to me is your presence. He will be glad to cooperate in
+procuring it for me. He will understand that in making these
+propositions I offer him a unique opportunity, I behave towards him
+with signal generosity. And if, at first, the intrusion of a stranger
+into his household should appear inconvenient, let him but pause a
+little. He will find his reward in the development of my genius and in
+the spectacle of our mutual felicity."
+
+Destournelle spoke with great rapidity. The street which they had now
+entered, from the far end of the piazza, was narrow. It was encumbered
+by a string of laden mules, by a stream of foot passengers.
+Interruption of his monologue, short of raising her voice to screaming
+pitch, was impossible to Madame de Vallorbes. But when he ceased she
+addressed him, and her lips were drawn away from her pretty teeth
+viciously.
+
+"Oh! you unspeakable idiot!" she said. "Have you no remnant of
+decency?"
+
+"Do you mean to imply that Sir Richard Calmady would have the
+insolence, is so much the victim of insular prejudice as, to object to
+our intimacy?"
+
+Madame de Vallorbes clapped her hands together in a sort of frenzy.
+
+"Idiot, idiot," she repeated. "I wish I could kill you."
+
+Suddenly M. Paul Destournelle had all his wits about him.
+
+"Ah!" he said, with a short laugh, curiously resembling in its malice
+the bleating of the little goats, "I perceive that which constitutes
+the obstacle to our union. It shall be removed."
+
+He lifted his Panama hat with studied elegance, and turning down a
+break-neck, side alley, called, over his shoulder:--
+
+"_Abientot tres chere madame._"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SPLENDIDE MENDAX
+
+
+Unpunctuality could not be cited as among Madame de Vallorbes'
+offenses. Yet, on the morning in question, she was certainly very late
+for the twelve o'clock breakfast. Richard Calmady--awaiting her coming
+beneath the glistering dome of the airy pavilion, set in the angle of
+the terminal wall of the high-lying garden--had time to become
+conscious of slight irritation. It was not merely that he was
+constitutionally impatient of delay, but that his nerves were
+tiresomely on edge just now. Trifles had power to endanger his somewhat
+stoic equanimity. But when at length Helen emerged from the house
+irritation was forgotten. Moving through the vivid lights and shadows
+of the ilex and cypress grove, her appearance had a charm of unwonted
+simplicity. At first sight her graceful person had the effect of being
+clothed in a religious habit. Richard's youthful delight in seeing a
+woman walk beautifully remained to him. It received satisfaction now.
+Helen advanced without haste, a certain grandeur in her demeanour, a
+certain gloom, even as one who takes serious counsel of himself,
+indifferent to external things, at once actor in, and spectator of,
+some drama playing itself out in the theatre of his own soul. And this
+effect of dignity, of self-recollection, was curiously heightened by
+her dress--of a very soft and fine, woolen material, of spotless white,
+the lines of it at once flowing and statuesque. While as head-gear, in
+place of some startling construction of contemporary, Parisian
+millinery, she wore, after the modest Italian fashion, a black lace
+mantilla over her bright hair.
+
+Arrived, she greeted Richard curtly, and without apology for delay
+accepted the contents of the first dish offered to her by the waiting
+men-servants, ate as though determinedly and putting a force upon
+herself, and--that which was unusual with her before sundown--drank
+wine. And, watching her, involuntarily Richard's thought traveled back
+to a certain luncheon party at Brockhurst, graced by the presence of
+genial, puzzle-headed Lord Fallowfeild and members of his numerous
+family, when Helen had swept in, even as now, had been self-absorbed,
+even as now. Of the drive to Newlands, all in the sad November
+afternoon, following on that luncheon, he also thought, of
+communications made by Helen during that drive, and of the long course
+of event and action directly or indirectly consequent on those
+communications. He thought of the fog, too, enveloping and almost
+choking him, when in the early morning driven by furies, still virgin
+in body as in heart, he had ridden out into a blank and sightless world
+hoping the chill of it would allay the fever in his blood,--and of the
+fog again, in the afternoon, from out which the branches of the great
+trees, like famine-stricken arms in tattered draperies, seemed to pluck
+evilly at the carriage, as he walked the smoking horses up and down the
+Newlands' drive, waiting for Helen to rejoin him. And now, somehow,
+that fog seemed to come up between him and the well-furnished
+breakfast-table, between him and the radiant expanse of the vivacious,
+capricious, half-classic, half-modern, mercantile city outstretched
+there, teeming, breeding, fermenting, in the fecundating heat of the
+noonday sun. The chill of the fog struck cold into his vitals now,
+giving him the strangest physical sensation. Richard straightened
+himself in his chair, passed his hands across his eyes impatiently.
+Brockhurst, and all the old life of it, was a subject of which he
+forbade himself remembrance. He had divorced himself from all that, cut
+himself adrift from it long ago. By an act of will, he tried to put it
+out of his mind now. But the fog remained--an actual clouding of his
+physical vision, blurring all he looked upon. It was horribly
+uncomfortable. He wished he was alone. Then he might have slipped down
+from his chair and, according to his poor capacity of locomotion,
+sought relief in movement.
+
+Meanwhile, silently, mechanically, Helen de Vallorbes continued her
+breakfast. And as she so continued, in addition to his singular
+physical sensations of blurred vision and clinging chill, he became
+aware of a growing embarrassment and constraint between himself and his
+companion. So far, his and her intercourse had been easy and
+spontaneous, because superficial. Since that first interview on the
+terrace a tacit agreement had existed to avoid the personal note. Now,
+for cause unknown, that intercourse threatened entering upon a new
+phase. It was as though the concentration, the tension, which he
+observed in her, and of which he was sensible in himself, must of
+necessity eventuate in some unbosoming, some act--almost
+involuntary--of self-revelation. This unaccustomed silence and
+restraint seemed to Richard charged with consequences which, in his
+present condition of defective volition, he was powerless to prevent.
+And this displeased him, mastery of surrounding influences being very
+dear to him.
+
+At last, coffee having been served, the men-servants withdrew to the
+house, but the constraint was not thereby lessened. Helen sat upright,
+her chin resting upon the back of her left hand, her eyes, under their
+drooping lids, looking out with a veiled fierceness upon the fair and
+glittering prospect. Richard saw her face in profile. The black
+mantilla draped her shoulders and bust with a certain austerity of
+effect. It was evident that--by something--she had been stirred to the
+extinction of her habitual vivacity and desire to shine. And Richard,
+for all his coolness of head and rather cynical maturity of outlook,
+had a restless suspicion of going forth--even as on that foggy morning
+at Brockhurst--into a blank and sightless world, full of hazardous
+possibility, where the safe way was difficult of discovery and where
+masked dangers might lurk. Solicitous to dissipate his discomfort he
+spoke a little at random.
+
+"You must forgive me for being such an abominably bad host," he said
+courteously. "I am not quite the thing this morning, somehow. I had a
+little go of fever last night. My brain is like so much pulp."
+
+Helen dropped her hand upon the table as though putting a term to an
+importunate train of thought.
+
+"I have always understood the villa to be remarkably free from
+malaria," she remarked abstractedly.
+
+"So it is. I quite believe that. The servants certainly keep well
+enough. But so, unfortunately, is not the port."
+
+Helen turned her head. A vertical line was observable between her
+arched eyebrows.
+
+"The port?" she repeated.
+
+Richard swallowed his black coffee. Perhaps it might steady him and
+clear his head. The numbness of his faculties and senses alike
+exasperated him, filling him with a persuasion he would say precisely
+those things wisdom would counsel to leave unsaid.
+
+"Yes--you know I generally go down and sleep on board the yacht."
+
+There was a momentary pause. Madame de Vallorbes' lips parted in a
+soundless exclamation. Then she pushed back the modest folds of the
+mantilla, leaving her neck free. The action of her hands was very
+graceful as she did this, and she looked fixedly at Richard Calmady.
+
+"I did not know that," she said slowly. Then added, as though reasoning
+out her own thought:--"And Naples harbour is admittedly one of the most
+pestilential holes on the face of the earth. Are you not tempting
+providence in the matter of disease, Richard? Are you not rather
+wantonly indiscreet?"
+
+"On the contrary," he answered, and something of mockery touched his
+expression, "I see it quite otherwise. I have been congratulating
+myself on the praiseworthy abundance of my discretion."
+
+And the words were no sooner out of his mouth than Richard cursed
+himself for a bungler, and a slightly vulgar one at that. But upon his
+hearer those same words worked a remarkable change. Her gloom, her
+abstraction, departed, leaving only a pretty pensiveness. She smiled
+with chastened sweetness upon Richard Calmady--a smile nicely attuned
+to the semi-religious simplicity of her dress.
+
+"Ah! perhaps we are both a trifle out of sorts this morning!" she said.
+"I, too, have had my little turn of sickness--sickness of heart. And
+that seems unfair, since I rose in the best disposition of spirit.
+Quite early I went to confession."
+
+"Confession?" Richard repeated. "I did not know your submission to the
+Church carried you to such practical lengths."
+
+"Evidently we are each fated to make small discoveries regarding the
+habits of the other, to-day," she rejoined. "Possibly confession is to
+me just what those nights spent on board the yacht, lying in that
+malodorous harbour, are to you!"
+
+Helen's smile broadened to a dainty naughtiness, infinitely provoking.
+But pensiveness speedily supervened. She folded her hands upon the edge
+of the table and looked down at them meditatively.
+
+"I relieved my conscience. Not that there was much to relieve it of,
+thank heaven! We have lived austerely enough most of us, this winter in
+France. Only it becomes a matter of moral, personal cleanliness, after
+a time, all that--exaggerated, but very comfortable. Just as one takes
+one's bath twice daily, not that it is necessary but that it is a
+luxury of physical purity and self-respect, so one comes to go to
+confession. That is a luxury of moral purification. It is as a bath to
+the soul, ministering to the perfection of its cleanliness and health."
+
+She looked up at Richard smiling, that same dainty naughtiness very
+present.
+
+"You observe I am eminently candid. I tell you exactly how my religion
+affects me. I can only reach high-thinking through acts which are
+external and concrete. In short, I am a born sacramentalist."
+
+And Richard listened, interested and entertained. Yet, since that
+strange blurring of fog still confused his vision and his judgment,
+vaguely suspicious that he missed the main intent of her speech.
+Suspicious as one who, listening to the clever patter of a conjurer,
+detects in it the effort to distract attention from some difficult feat
+of legerdemain, until that feat has passed from attempt merely into
+accomplished fact.
+
+"And, indirectly, that is where my heart-sickness comes in," she
+continued, with a return to something of her former abstraction and
+gloom. "I was coming away, coming back here--and I was very happy. It
+is not often one can say that. And then--_pouf_---like that," she
+brought her hands smartly together, "the charming bubble burst! For,
+upon the very church steps, I met a man whom I have every cause to
+hate."
+
+As she spoke, the fog seemed to draw away, burnt up by the great,
+flaming sun-god there. Richard's brain grew clear--clearer, indeed,
+than in perfect health--and his still face grew more still than was,
+even to it, quite natural.
+
+"Well?" he asked, almost harshly.
+
+And Helen, whose faith in her own diplomacy had momentarily suffered
+eclipse, rejoiced. For the tone of his voice betrayed not disgust, but
+anxiety. It stirred her as a foretaste of victory. And victory had
+become a maddening necessity to her. Destournelle had forced her hand.
+His natural infirmity of purpose relieved her of the fear he could work
+her any great mischief. Yet his ingenuity, inspired by wounded vanity,
+might prove beyond her calculations. It is not always safe to forecast
+the future by experience of the past in relation to such a being as
+Destournelle! Therefore it became of supreme importance, before that
+gentleman had time further to obtrude himself, to bind Richard Calmady
+by some speech, some act, from which there was no going back. And more
+than just that. The sight of her ex-lover, though she now loathed
+him--possibly just because she so loathed him--provoked passion in her.
+It was as though only in a new intrigue could she rid herself of the
+remembrance of the old intrigue which was now so detestable to her. She
+craved to do him that deepest, most ultimate, despite. And passion
+cried out in her. The sight of him, though she loathed him, had made
+her utterly weary of chastity. All of which emotions--but held as
+hounds in a leash, ready to be slipped when the psychological moment
+arrived, and by no means to be slipped until the arrival of
+it--dictated the tenor of her next speech.
+
+"Well," she answered, with an air of half-angry sincerity altogether
+convincing, "I really don't know that I am particularly proud of the
+episode. I know I was careless, that I laid myself open to the
+invidious comment, which is usually the reward of all disinterested
+action. One learns to accept it as a matter of course. And you see Paul
+Destournelle----"
+
+"Oh, Destournelle!" Richard exclaimed.
+
+"You have read him?"
+
+"Every one has read him."
+
+"And what do you think of him?"
+
+"That his technique is as amazingly clever as his thought is amazingly
+rotten."
+
+"I know--I know," she said eagerly. "And that is just what induced me
+to do all I could for him. If one could cut the canker away, give him
+backbone and decency, while retaining that wonderful technique, one
+would have a second and a greater Theophile Gautier."
+
+Richard was looking full at her. His face had more colour, more
+animation, than usual.
+
+"If--yes--if," he returned. "But that same _if_ bulks mighty big to my
+mind."
+
+"I know," she repeated. "Yet it seemed to me worth the attempt. And
+then, you understand,--who better?--that if one's own affairs are not
+conspicuously happy, one has all the more longing the affairs of others
+should be crowned with success. And this winter specially, among the
+sordid miseries, disgraces, deprivations, of the siege, one was liable
+to take refuge in an over-exalted altruism. It was difficult in so mad
+a world not to indulge in personal eccentricity--to the neglect of due
+worship of the great goddess Conventionality. With death in visible
+form at every street corner, one's sense of humour, let alone one's
+higher faculties, rebelled against the futility of such worship. So
+many detestable sights and sounds were perpetually presented to
+one--not to mention broth of abominable things daily for dinner--that
+one turned, with thanksgiving, to beautiful form in art, to perfectly
+felicitous words and phrases. The meaning of them mattered but little
+just then. They freed one from the tyranny of more or less disgusting
+fact. They satisfied eye and ear. One asked nothing more just
+then--luckily, you will say, since the animal Destournelle has very
+surely nothing more to give."
+
+In speaking, Helen pushed her chair back, turning it sideways to the
+table. Her speech was alive with varied and telling inflections. Her
+smallest gesture had in it something descriptive and eloquent.
+
+"And so I fell to encouraging the animal," she continued, almost
+plaintively, yet with a note of veiled laughter in her voice.
+"Reversing the order of Circe--Naples inclines one to classic
+illustration, sometimes a little hackneyed--by the way, speaking of
+Naples, look at the glory of it all just now, Richard!--I tried to
+turn, not men to swine, but swine to men. And I failed, of course. The
+gods know best. They never attempt metamorphosis on the ascending
+scale! I let Destournelle come to see me frequently. The world advised
+itself to talk. But, being rather bitterly secure of myself, I
+disregarded that. If one is aware that one's heart was finally and long
+ago disposed of, one ceases to think seriously of that side of things.
+You must know all that well enough--witness the sea-born furnishings of
+my bedroom up-stairs!"
+
+For half a minute she paused. Richard made no comment.
+
+"Hard words break no bones," she added lightly. "And so, to show how
+much I despised all such censorious cackle, I allowed Destournelle to
+travel south with me when I left Paris."
+
+"You pushed neglect of the worship of conventionality rather far,"
+Richard said.
+
+Helen rose to her feet. Excitement gained on her, as always during one
+of her delightful improvisations, her talented _viva voce_ improvements
+on dry-as-dust fact. She laughed softly, biting her lip. More than one
+hound had been slipped by now. They made good running. She stood by
+Richard Calmady, looking down at him, covering him, so to speak, with
+her eyes. The black mantilla no longer veiled her bright head. It had
+fallen to the ground, and lay a dark blot upon the mellow fairness of
+the tesselated pavement. White-robed, statuesque--yet not with the
+severe grace of marble, but with that softer, more humanly seductive
+grace of some figure of cunningly tinted ivory--she appeared, just
+then, to gather up in herself all the poetry, the intense and vivid
+light, the victorious vitality, of the clear, burning, southern noon.
+
+"Ah, well, conventionality proved perfectly competent to avenge
+herself!" she exclaimed. "The animal Destournelle took the average, the
+banal view, as might have been anticipated. He had the insane
+presumption to suppose it was himself, not his art, in which I was
+interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my
+equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I
+meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming recognition. I repeated my
+explanation with uncompromising lucidity----"
+
+Richard moved restlessly in his chair, looking up almost sharply at
+her.
+
+"Waste of breath," he said. "No explanation is lucid if the hearer is
+unwilling to accept it."
+
+And then the two cousins, as though they had reached unexpectedly some
+parting of the ways, calling for instant decision in respect of the
+future direction of their journey, gazed upon one another
+strangely--each half defiant of the other, each diligent to hide his
+own and read the other's thought, each sensible of a crisis, each at
+once hurried and arrested by suspicion of impending catastrophe, unless
+this way be chosen that declined--though it seemed, in good truth, not
+in their keeping, but in that of blind chance only that both selection
+and rejection actually resided. And, in this strait, neither habit of
+society, fine sword-play of diplomacy and tact, availed to help them.
+For suddenly they had outpaced all that, and brought up amongst ancient
+and secular springs of action and emotion before which civilisation is
+powerless and the ready tongue of fashion dumb.
+
+But even while he so gazed, in fateful suspense and indecision, the fog
+came up again, chilling Richard Calmady's blood, oppressing his brain
+as with an uprising of foul miasma, blurring his vision, so that
+Helen's fair, downward-gazing face was distorted, rendered illusive and
+vague. And, along with this, distressing restlessness took him,
+compelling him to seek relief in change of posture and of place. He
+could not stop to reckon with how that which he proposed to do might
+strike an onlooker. His immediate sensations filled his whole horizon.
+Silently he slipped down from his chair, stood a moment, supporting
+himself with one hand on the edge of the table, and then moved forward
+to that side of the pavilion which gave upon the garden. Here the
+sunshine was hot upon the pavement, and upon the outer half of each
+pale, slender column. Richard leant his shoulder against one of these,
+grateful for the genial heat.
+
+Since her first and somewhat inauspicious meeting with him in
+childhood, Helen had never, close at hand, seen Richard Calmady walk
+thus far. She stared, fascinated by that cruel spectacle. For the
+instant transformation of the apparently tall, and conspicuously
+well-favoured, courtly gentleman, just now sitting at table with her,
+into the shuffling, long-armed, dwarfed and crippled creature was, at
+first utterly incredible, then portentous, then, by virtue of its very
+monstrosity, absorbing and, to her, adorable, whetting appetite as
+veritable famine might. Chastity became to her more than ever absurd, a
+culpable waste of her own loveliness, of sensation, of emotion, a sin
+against those vernal influences working in this generous nature
+surrounding her and working in her own blood. All the primitive
+instinct of her womanhood called aloud in her that she must wed--must
+wed. And the strident voice of the great, painted city coming up to
+her, urgent, incessant, carried the same message, as did the radiant
+sea, whose white lips kissed the indented coast-line as though pale and
+hungry with love. While the man before her, by his very abnormality and
+a certain secretness inevitable in that, heightened her passion. He was
+to her of all living men most desirable, so that she must win him and
+hold him, must see and know.
+
+In a few steps, light as those of the little, rose-crowned dancer of
+long ago, she followed him across the shining floor. There was a point
+of north in the wind, adding exhilaration to the firm sunshine as ice
+to rare wine. The scent of narcissus, magnolia, and lemon blossom was
+everywhere. The cypresses yielded an aromatic, myrrh-like sweetness.
+The uprising waters of the fountain, set in the central alley, swerved
+southward, falling in a jeweled rain. Helen, in her spotless raiment,
+came close and Richard Calmady turned to her. But his eyes no longer
+questioned hers. They were as windows opening back on to empty space,
+seeing all, yet telling nothing. His face had become still again and
+inscrutable, lightened only by that flickering, mocking smile. It
+seemed as though the psychological moment were passed and social sense,
+ordinary fashions of civilised intercourse, had not only come back but
+come to stay.
+
+"I think we will omit Destournelle from our talk in future," he said.
+"As a subject of conversation I find he disagrees with me,
+notwithstanding his felicity of style and his admirable technique. I
+will give orders which, I hope, may help to protect you from annoyance
+in future. In this delightful land, by wise exercise of just a little
+bribery and corruption, it is still possible to make the unwelcome
+alien prefer to seek health and entertainment elsewhere. Now, will you
+like to go back to the house?"
+
+The approach to the pavilion from the lower level of the garden was by
+a carefully graded slope of Roman brick, set edgewise. At regular
+intervals of about eighteen inches this was crossed--on the principle
+of a gang-plank--by raised marble treads. Without waiting for his
+cousin's reply, Richard started slowly down the slope. At the best of
+times this descent for him demanded caution. Now his vision was again
+so queerly blurred that he miscalculated the distance between the two
+lowest treads, slipped and stumbled, lunging forward. Quick as a cat,
+Madame de Vallorbes was behind him, her right hand grasping his right
+elbow, her left hand under his left armpit.
+
+"Ah! Dickie, Dickie, don't fall!" she cried, a sudden terror in her
+voice.
+
+Her muscles hardened like steel. It needed all her strength to support
+him, for he was heavy, his body inert as that of one fainting. For a
+moment his head rested against her bosom; and her breath came short,
+sighing against his neck and cheek.
+
+By sheer force of will Richard recovered his footing, disengaging
+himself from her support, shuffling aside from her.
+
+"A thousand thanks, Helen," he said.
+
+Then he looked full at her, and she--untender though she was--perceived
+that the perspective of space on which, as windows might, his eyes
+seemed to open back, was not empty. It was peopled, crowded--even as
+those steep, teeming byways of Naples--by undying, unforgetable misery,
+humiliation, revolt.
+
+"Yes, it is rather unpardonable to be--as I am--isn't it?" he said.
+Adding hastily, yet with a certain courteous dignity:--"I am ashamed to
+trouble you, to ask you--of all people--to run messages for me--but
+would you go on to the house----"
+
+"Dickie, why may not I help you?" she interrupted.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "the answer to that lies away back in the beginning of
+things. Even unlucky devils, such as myself, are not without a certain
+respect for that which is fitting, for seemliness and etiquette. Send
+one of my men please. I shall be very grateful to you--thanks."
+
+And Helen de Vallorbes, her passion baulked and therefore more than
+ever at white heat, swept up the paved alley, amid the sweet scents of
+the garden, beneath the jeweled rain of the fountain, that point of
+north in the wind dallying with her as in laughing challenge, making
+her the more mad to have her way with Richard Calmady, yet knowing that
+of the two--he and she--he was the stronger as yet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+IN WHICH HELEN DE VALLORBES LEARNS HER RIVAL'S NAME
+
+
+"I hear Morabita sings, in _Ernani_, at the San Carlo on Friday night.
+Do you care to go, Helen?"
+
+The question, though asked casually, had, to the listener, the effect
+of falling with a splash, as of a stone into a well, awakening
+unexpected echoes, disturbing, rather harshly, the constrained silence
+which had reigned during the earlier part of dinner.
+
+All the long, hot afternoon, Madame de Vallorbes had been
+alone--Richard invisible, shut persistently away in those rooms of the
+_entresol_ into which, as yet, she had never succeeded in penetrating.
+Richard had not proposed to her to do so. And it was part of that
+praiseworthy discretion which she had agreed with herself to
+practise--in her character of scrupulously unexacting guest--only to
+accept invitations, never to issue them. How her cousin might occupy
+himself, whom even he might receive, during the time spent in those
+rooms, she did not know. And it was idle to inquire. Neither of her
+servants, though skilful enough, as a rule, in the acquisition of
+information, could, in this case, acquire any. And so it came about
+that during those many still bright hours, following on her rather
+agitated parting with Richard at midday, while she paced the noble
+rooms of the first floor--once more taking note of their costly
+furnishings and fine pictures, meeting her own restless image again and
+again in their many mirrors--and later, near sundown, when she walked
+the dry, brown pathways of the ilex and cypress grove, the wildest
+suspicions of his possible doings assailed her. For she was constrained
+to admit that, though she had spent a full week now under his roof, it
+was but the veriest fringe, after all, of the young man's habits and
+thought with which she was actually acquainted. And this not only
+desperately intrigued her curiosity, but the apartness, behind which he
+entrenched himself and his doings, was as a slight put upon her and
+consequent source of sharp mortification. So to-day she ranged all
+permitted spaces of the villa and its grounds softly, yet lithe,
+watchful, fierce as a she-panther--her ears strained to hear, her eyes
+to see, driven the while by jealousy of that nameless rival, to
+remembrance of whom all the whole place was dedicated, and by baffled
+passion, as with whips.
+
+Nor did superstition fail to add its word of ill-omen at this juncture.
+A carrion crow, long-legged, heavy of beak, alighting on the clustered
+curls of the marble bust of Homer, startled her with vociferous
+croakings. A long, narrow, many-jointed, blue-black, evil-looking
+beetle crawled from among the rusty, fibrous, cypress roots across her
+path. A funeral procession, priest and acolytes, with lighted tapers,
+sitting within the glass-sided hearse at head and foot of the
+flower-strewn coffin, wound slowly along the dusty, white
+road--bordered by queer growth of prickly-pear and ragged, stunted
+palm-trees--far below. She crossed herself, turning hurriedly away.
+Yet, for an instant, Death, triumphant, hideous, inevitable, and all
+the spiritual terror and physical disgust of it, grinned at her, its
+fleshless face, as it seemed, close against her own. And alongside
+Death--by some malign association of ideas and ugly antic of
+profanity--she saw the _bel tete de Jesu_ of M. Paul Destournelle as
+she had seen it this morning, he looking back, hat in hand, as he
+plunged down the break-neck, Neapolitan side-street, with that impish,
+bleating, goatlike laugh.
+
+By the time the dinner-hour drew near she found her outlook in radical
+need of reconstruction, and to that end bade Zelie dress her in the
+crocus-yellow brocade, reserved for some emergency such as the present.
+It was a gown, surely, to restore self-confidence and induce
+self-respect! Fashioned fancifully, according to a picturesque,
+seventeenth-century, Venetian model, the full sleeves and the
+long-waisted bodice of it--this cut low, generously displaying her
+shoulders and swell of her bosom--were draped with superb _guipure de
+Flandres a brides frisees_ and strings of seed pearls. All trace of
+ascetic simplicity had very certainly departed. Helen was
+resplendent--strings of seed pearls twisted in her honey-coloured hair,
+a clear red in her cheeks and hard brilliance in her eyes, bred of
+eager jealous excitement. She had, indeed, reached a stage of feeling
+in which the sight of Richard Calmady, the fact of his presence, worked
+upon her to the extent of dangerous emotion. And now this statement of
+his, and the question following it, caused the flame of the inward
+fires tormenting her to leap high.
+
+"Ah! Morabita!" she exclaimed. "What an age it is since I have heard
+her sing, or thought about her! How is her voice lasting, Richard?"
+
+"I really don't know," he answered, "and that is why I am rather
+curious to hear her. There was literally nothing but a voice in her
+case--no dramatic sense, nothing in the way of intelligence to fall
+back on. On that account it interested me to watch her. She and her
+voice had no essential relation to one another. Her talent was stuck
+into her, as you might stick a pin into a cushion. She produced
+glorious effects without a notion how she produced them, and gave
+expression--and perfectly just expression--to emotions she had never
+dreamed of. At the best of times singers are a feeble folk
+intellectually, but, of all singers I have known, she was mentally the
+very feeblest."
+
+"No, perhaps she was not very wise," Helen put in, but quite mildly,
+quite kindly.
+
+"And so if the voice went, everything went. And that made one reflect
+agreeably upon the remarkably haphazard methods employed by that which
+we politely call Almighty God in His construction of our unhappy
+selves. Design?--There's not a trace of design in the whole show.
+Bodies, souls, gifts, superfluities, deficiencies, just pitched
+together anyhow. The most bungling of human artists would blush to turn
+out such work."
+
+Richard spoke rapidly. He had refused course after course. And now the
+food on his plate remained untasted. Seen in the soft light of the
+shaded candles his face had a strange look of distraction upon it, as
+though he too was restless with an intimate, deep-seated restlessness.
+His skin was less colourless than usual, his manner less colourless
+also. And this conferred a certain youthfulness on him, making him seem
+nearer--so Helen thought--to the boy she had known at Brockhurst, than
+to the man, whom lately, she had been so signally conscious that she
+failed to know.
+
+"No, I hope Morabita's voice remains to her," he continued. "Her
+absolute nullity minus it is disagreeable to think of. And much as I
+relish collecting telling examples of the fatuity of the Creator--she,
+voiceless, would offer a supreme one--I would spare her that, poor
+dear. For she was really rather charming to me at one time."
+
+"So it was commonly reported," Helen remarked.
+
+"Was it?" Richard said absently.
+
+Though as a rule conspicuously abstemious, he had drunk rather freely
+to-night, and that with an odd haste of thirst. Now he touched his
+champagne tumbler, intimating to Bates, the house-steward--sometime the
+Brockhurst under butler--that it should be refilled.
+
+"I can't have seen Morabita for nearly three years," he went on. "And
+my last recollections of her are unfortunate. She had sent me a box, in
+Vienna it was I think, for the _Traviata_. She was fat then, or rather,
+fatter. Stage furniture leaves something to desire in the way of
+solidity. In the death scene the middle of the bed collapsed. Her
+swan-song ceased abruptly. Her head and heels were in the air, and the
+very largest rest of her upon the floor, bed and bedclothes standing
+out in a frill all around. It was a sight discouraging to sentiment. I
+judged it kinder not to go to supper with her after the performance
+that night."
+
+Richard paused, again drained his glass.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "what atrocious nonsense I am talking!"
+
+"I think I rather enjoy it," Madame de Vallorbes answered. She looked
+at the young man sideways, from under her delicate eyelids. He was
+perfectly sober--of that there was no question. Yet he was less
+inaccessible, somehow, than usual. She inclined to experiment.--"Only I
+am sorry for Morabita in more ways than one, poor wretch. But then
+perhaps I am just a little sorry for all those women whom you reject,
+Richard."
+
+"The women whom I reject?" he said harshly.
+
+"Yes, whom you reject," Helen repeated.--Then she busied herself with a
+small black fig, splitting it deftly open, disclosing the purple, and
+rose, and clear living greens of the flesh and innumerable seeds of it,
+colours rich as those of a tropic sky at sunset.--"And there are so
+many of those women it seems to me! I am coming to have a quite
+pathetic fellowship for them." She buried her white teeth in the
+softness of the fig.--"Not without reason, perhaps. It is idle to deny
+that you are a pastmaster in the ungentle art of rejection. What have
+you to say in self-defense, Dickie?"
+
+"That talking nonsense appears to be highly infectious--and that it is
+a disagreeably oppressive evening."
+
+Helen de Vallorbes smiled upon him, glanced quickly over her shoulder
+to assure herself the servants were no longer present--then spoke,
+leaning across the corner of the table towards him, while her eyes
+searched his with a certain daring provocation.
+
+"Yes, I admit I have finished my fig. Dinner is over. And it is my
+place to disappear according to custom."--She laid her rosy finger-tips
+together, her elbows resting on the table. "But I am disinclined to
+disappear. I have a number of things to say. Take that question of
+going to the opera, for instance. Half Naples will be there, and I know
+more than half Naples, and more than half Naples knows me. I do not
+crave to run incontinently into the arms of any of de Vallorbes' many
+relations. They were not conspicuously kind to me when I was here as a
+girl and stood very much in need of kindness. So the question of going
+to the San Carlo, you see, requires reflection. And then,"--her tone
+softened to a most persuasive gentleness,--"then, the evenings are a
+trifle long when one is alone and has nothing very satisfactory to
+think about. And I have been worried to-day, detestably worried."--She
+looked down at her finger-tips. Her expression became almost sombre.
+"In any case I shall not plague you very much longer, Richard," she
+said rather grandly. "I have determined to remove myself bag and
+baggage. It is best, more dignified to do so. Reluctantly I own that.
+Here have I no abiding city. I wish I had, perhaps, but I haven't.
+Therefore it is useless, and worse than useless, to play at having one.
+One must just face the truth."
+
+She looked full at the young man, smiling at him, as though somehow
+forgiving him a slight, an unkindness, a neglect.
+
+"And so, just because to you it all matters so uncommonly little, let
+us talk rather longer this evening."
+
+She rose.
+
+"I'll go on into the long drawing-room," she said. "The windows were
+still open there when I came in to dinner. The room will be pleasantly
+cool. You will come?"
+
+And she moved away quietly, thoughtfully, opened the high double-doors,
+left them open, and that without once looking back. Yet her hearing was
+strained to catch the smallest sound above that which accompanied her,
+namely, the rustling of her dress. Then a queer shiver ran all down her
+spine and she set her teeth, for she perceived that halting, shuffling
+footsteps had begun to follow those light and graceful footsteps of her
+own.
+
+"_Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_," she said to herself. "I have
+no fear for the rest."
+
+Yet, crossing the near half of the great room, she sank down on a sofa,
+thankful there was no farther to go. In the last few minutes she had
+put forth more will-power, felt more deeply, than she had supposed. Her
+knees gave under her. It was a relief to sit down.
+
+The many candles in the cut-glass chandeliers, hanging from along the
+centre of the painted ceiling, were lighted, filling the length and
+breadth of the room with a bland, diffused radiance. It touched picture
+and statue, tall mirror, rich curtain, polished woodwork of chair and
+table, gleaming ebony and ivory cabinet. It touched Helen de Vallorbes'
+bright head and the strings of pearls twisted in her hair, her white
+neck, the swell of her bosom, and all that delicate wonder of
+needlework--the Flanders' lace--trimming her bodice. It lay on her lap,
+too, as she leaned back in the corner of the sofa, her hands pressed
+down on either side her thighs--lay there bringing the pattern of her
+brocaded dress into high relief. This was a design of pomegranates--leaves,
+flowers, and fruit--and of trailing, peacock feathers, a couple of
+shades lighter than the crocus-yellow ground. The light took the
+over-threads and stayed in them.
+
+The window stood wide open on to the balcony, the elaborately
+wrought-ironwork of which--scroll and vase, plunging dolphin and
+rampant sea-horse--detached itself from the opaque background of the
+night. And in at the window came luscious scents from the garden below,
+a chime of falling water, the music, faint and distant, in rising and
+falling cadence of a marching military band. In at it also, and rising
+superior to all these in imperativeness and purpose, came the voice of
+Naples itself--no longer that of a city of toil and commerce, but that
+of a city of pleasure, a city of licence, until such time as the dawn
+should once again break, and the sun arise, driving back man and beast
+alike to labour, the one from merry sinning, the other from hard-earned
+sleep. And once again, but in clearer, more urgent, accents, the voice
+of the city repeated its message to Helen de Vallorbes, calling aloud
+to her to do even as it was doing, namely, to wed--to wed. And, hearing
+it, understanding that message, for a little space shame took her, in
+face both of its and her own shamelessness, so that she closed her
+eyes, unable for the moment to look at Richard Calmady as he crossed
+the great room in that bland and yet generous light. But, almost
+immediately, his voice, cold and measured in tone, there close beside
+her, claimed her attention.
+
+"That which you said at dinner rather distresses me, Helen."
+
+Then, shame or no shame, Madame de Vallorbes, of necessity, opened her
+eyes. And, so doing, it needed all her self-control to repress a cry.
+She forced her open hands down very hard on the mattress of the sofa.
+For Richard leaned his back against the jamb of the open window, and
+she saw his face and all his poor figure in profile. His left hand hung
+straight at his side, the tips of his fingers only just not touching
+the floor. And again, as at midday the spectacle of his deformity
+worked upon her strangely.
+
+"What of all that which I said at dinner distresses you?" she asked
+gently, with sudden solicitude.
+
+"You showed me that I have been a wretchedly negligent host."--In
+speaking, the young man turned his head and looked at her, paused a
+moment, almost startled by her resplendent aspect. Then he looked down
+at his own stunted and defective limbs. His expression became very
+grim. He raised his shoulders just perceptibly. "I reproach myself with
+having allowed you to be so much alone. It must have been awfully dull
+for you."
+
+"It was a little dull," Helen said, still gently.
+
+"I ought to have begged you to ask some of the people you know in
+Naples to come here. It was stupid of me not to think of it. I need not
+have seen them, neither need they have seen me."
+
+He looked at her steadily again, as though trying to fix her image in
+his memory.
+
+"Yes, it was stupid of me," he repeated absently. "But I have got into
+churlish, bachelor habits--that can hardly be helped, living alone, or
+on board ship, as I do--and I have pretty well forgotten how to provide
+adequately for the entertainment of a guest."
+
+"Oh! I have had that which I wanted, that which I came for," Helen
+answered, very charmingly,--"had it in part, at all events. Though I
+could have put up with just a little more of it, Dickie, perhaps."
+
+"I warned you, if you remember, that opportunities of amusement--as
+that word is generally understood--would be limited."
+
+"Amusement?" she exclaimed, with an almost tragic inflection of
+contempt.
+
+"Oh yes!" he said, "amusement is not to be despised. I'd give all I am
+worth, half my time, to be amused--but that again, like hospitality, is
+rather a lost art with me. You remember, I warned you life at the villa
+in these days was not precisely hilarious."
+
+Helen clapped her hands together.
+
+"Ah! you are wilfully obtuse, you are wilfully, cruelly pigheaded!" she
+cried. "Pardon me, dear Richard, but your attitude is enough to
+exasperate a saint. And I am no saint as yet. I am still
+human--radically, for my own peace of mind lamentably, human. I am only
+too capable of being grieved, humiliated, hurt. But there, it is folly
+to say such things to you! You are hopelessly insensible to all that.
+So I take refuge in quoting your own words of this morning against
+you--that no explanation is lucid if the hearer refuses to accept it."
+
+"I am dull, no doubt, but honestly I fail to see how that remark of
+mine can be held to apply in the present case."
+
+"It applies quite desolatingly well!" Helen declared, with spirit. Then
+her manner softened into a seductiveness of forgiveness once
+again.--"And so, dear Richard, I am glad that I had already determined
+to leave here to-morrow. It would have been a little too wretched to
+arrive at that determination after this conversation. You must go alone
+to hear your old flame, Morabita, sing. Only, if her voice is still as
+sympathetic as of old, if it moves you from your present insensibility,
+you may read remembrance of some aspects of my visit into the witchery
+of it if you like. It may occur to you what those aspects really
+meant."
+
+Helen smiled upon him, leaning a little forward. Her eyes shone, as
+though looking out through unshed tears.
+
+"It's not exactly flattering to one's vanity to be compelled to depute
+to another woman the making of such things clear. But it is too evident
+I waste my time in attempting to make them clear myself. No explanation
+is lucid, _et caetera_----"
+
+Helen shook back her head with an extraordinary charm of half-defiant,
+half-tearful laughter. She was playing a game, her whole intelligence
+bent on the playing of it skilfully. Yet she was genuinely touched. She
+was swayed by her very real emotion. She spoke from her heart, though
+every word, every passing action, subserved her ultimate purpose in
+regard to Richard Calmady.
+
+"And, after all, one must retain some remnant of self-respect with
+which to cover the nakedness of one's---- Oh yes! decidedly, Morabita's
+voice had best do the rest."
+
+Richard had moved from his station in the window. He stood at the far
+end of the sofa, resting his hands on the gilded and carven arm of it.
+Now the ungainliness of his deformity was hidden, and his height was
+greater than that of his companion, obliging her to look up at him.
+
+"I gave you my word, Helen," he said, "I have no notion what you are
+driving at."
+
+"Driving at, driving at?" she cried. "Why, the self-evident truth that
+you are forcing me rather brutally to pay the full price of my weakness
+in coming here, in permitting myself the indulgence of seeing you
+again. You told me directly I arrived, with rather cynical frankness,
+that I had not changed. That is quite true. What I was at Brockhurst,
+four years ago, what I then felt, that I am and that I feel still. Oh!
+you have nothing to reproach yourself with in defect of plain speaking,
+or excess of amiable subterfuge! You hit out very straight from the
+shoulder! Directly I arrived you also told me how you had devoted this
+place--with which, after all, I am not wholly unconnected--to the cult,
+to the ideal worship, of a woman whom you loved."
+
+"So I have devoted it," Richard said.
+
+"And yet I was weak enough to remain!"
+
+The young man's face relaxed, but its expression remained enigmatic.
+
+"And why not?" he asked.
+
+"Because, in remaining, I have laid myself open to misconstruction, to
+all manner of pains and penalties, not easy to be endured, to the
+odious certainty of appearing contemptible in your estimation as well
+as in my own."
+
+Helen patted her pretty foot upon the floor in a small frenzy of
+irritation.
+
+"How can I hope to escape, since even the precious being whom you
+affect to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the
+other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my
+arrival--lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your
+requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are
+frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others
+by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or
+whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and
+affection so lavishly offered you----"
+
+"Is it offered lavishly? That comes as news to me," he put in.
+
+"Ah! but it is. And I leave you to picture the pleasing entertainment
+afforded the offerer in seeing you ignore the offering, or, worse
+still, take it, examine it, and throw it aside like a dirty rag! In one
+case you underline your rejection almost to the point of insult."
+
+"This is very instructive. I am learning a whole lot about myself,"
+Richard said coolly.
+
+"But look," Madame de Vallorbes cried, "do you not prefer exposing
+yourself to the probability of serious illness rather than remain under
+the same roof with me? The inference hits one in the face. To you the
+pestilential exhalations, the unspeakable abominations, of Naples
+harbour appear less dangerous than my near neighbourhood."
+
+"You put it more strongly than I should," he answered, smiling. "Yet,
+from a certain standpoint, that may very well be true."
+
+For an instant Helen hesitated. Her intelligence, for all its
+alertness, was strained exactly to appraise the value of his words,
+neither over, nor under, rating it. And her eyes searched his with a
+certain boldness and imperiousness of gaze. Richard, meanwhile, folding
+his arms upon the carven and gilt frame of the sofa, looked back at
+her, smiling still, at once ironically and very sadly. Then swift
+assurance came to her of the brazen card she had best play. But,
+playing it, she was constrained to avert her eyes and set her glance
+pensively upon the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken
+lap.
+
+"I will do my best possible to accept your nightly journeys as a
+compliment in disguise, then," she said, quite softly. "For truly, when
+I come to think of it, were she, herself, here--she, the woman you so
+religiously admire that you take elaborate pains to avoid having
+anything on earth to do with her--were she herself here you could
+hardly take more extensive measures to secure yourself against risk of
+disappointment, hardly exercise a greater rage of caution!"
+
+"Perhaps that's just it. Perhaps you have arrived at it all at last.
+Perhaps she is here," he said.
+
+And he turned away, steadying himself with one hand against the jamb of
+the window, and shuffled out slowly, laboriously, onto the balcony into
+the night.
+
+For a quite perceptible length of time Helen de Vallorbes continued to
+contemplate the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap.
+She followed the lines of the rich pattern--pomegranate, fruit and
+blossom, trailing peacock's feather. For by such mechanical employment
+alone could she keep the immensity of her excitement and of her triumph
+in check. To shout aloud, to dance, to run wildly to and fro, would
+have been only too possible to her just then. All that for which she
+had schemed, had ruled herself discreetly, had ridden a waiting race,
+had been hers, in fact, from the first--the prize adjudged before ever
+she left the starting-post. She held this man in the hollow of her
+hand, and that by no result of cunning artifice, but by right divine of
+beauty and wit and the manifold seductions of her richly-endowed
+personality. And, thinking of that, she clenched her dainty fists,
+opened them again, and again clenched them, upon the yielding mattress
+of the sofa, given over to an ecstasy of physical enjoyment, weaving
+even as, with clawed and padded paws, her prototype the she-panther
+might. Slowly she raised her downcast eyes and looked after Richard
+Calmady, his figure a blackness, as of vacancy, against the elaborate
+wrought-ironwork of the balcony. And so doing, an adorable sensation
+moved her, at once of hungry tenderness and of fear--fear of something
+unknown, in a way fundamental, incalculable, the like of which she had
+never experienced before. Ah! indeed, of all her many loves, here was
+the crown and climax! Yet, in the midst of her very vital rapture, she
+could still find time for remembrance of the little, crescent-shaped
+scar upon her temple, and for remembrance of Katherine Calmady, who
+had, unwittingly, fixed that blemish upon her and had also more than
+once frustrated her designs. This time frustration was not possible.
+She was about to revenge the infliction of that little scar! And, at
+the same time the intellectual part of her was agreeably intrigued,
+trying to disentangle the why and wherefore of Richard's late action
+and utterances. While self-love was gratified to the highest height of
+its ambition by the knowledge that not only in his heart had she long
+reigned, but that he had dedicated time and wealth and refined
+ingenuity to the idea of her, to her worship, to the making of this,
+her former dwelling-place, into a temple for her honour, a splendid
+witness to her victorious charm, a shrine not unfitting to contain the
+idol of his imagination.
+
+For a little space she rested in all this, savouring the sweetness of
+it as some odour of costly sacrifice. For whatever her sins and lapses,
+Helen de Vallorbes had the fine aesthetic appreciations, as well as the
+inevitable animality, of the great courtesan. The artist was at least
+as present in her as the whore. And it was not, therefore, until
+realisation of her present felicity was complete, until it had soaked
+into her, so to speak, to the extent of a delicious familiarity, that
+she was disposed to seek change of posture or of place. Then, at last,
+softly, languidly, for indeed she was somewhat spent by the manifold
+emotions of the day, she rose and followed Richard into the starless,
+low-lying night. Her first words were very simple, yet to herself
+charged with far-reaching meaning--as a little key may give access to a
+treasure-chest containing riches of fabulous worth.
+
+"Richard, is it really true, that which you have told me?"
+
+"What conceivable object could I have in lying?"
+
+"Then why have you delayed?--why wasted the precious days--the precious
+months and years, if it comes to that?"
+
+"How in honour and decency could I do otherwise--circumstances being
+such as they are, I being that which I am?"
+
+The two voices were in notable contrast. Both were low, both were
+penetrated by feeling. But the man's was hoarse and rasping, the
+woman's smooth and soft as milk.
+
+"Ah! it is the old story!" she said. "Will you never comprehend,
+Dickie, that what is to you hateful in yourself, may to some one else
+be the last word of attraction, of seduction, even?"
+
+"God forbid I should ever comprehend that!" he answered. "When I take
+to glorying in my shame, pluming myself upon my abnormality, then,
+indeed, I become beyond all example loathsome. The most deplorable
+moment of my very inglorious career will be precisely that in which I
+cease to look at myself with dispassionate contempt."
+
+Helen knelt down, resting her beautiful arms upon the dark hand-rail of
+the balcony, letting her wrists droop over it into the outer dimness.
+The bland light from the open window dwelt on her kneeling figure and
+bowed head. But it was as well, perhaps, that the night dropped a veil
+upon her face.
+
+"And yet so it is," she said. "You may repudiate the idea, but the fact
+remains. I do not say it would affect all women alike--affect those,
+for instance, whose conception of love, and of the relation between man
+and woman, is dependent upon the slightly improper and very tedious
+marriage service as authorised by the English Church. Let the
+conventional be conventional still! So much the better if you don't
+appeal to them--meagre, timid, inadequate, respectable--a generation of
+fashion-plates with a sixpenny book of etiquette, moral and social,
+stuck inside them to serve for a soul."
+
+Helen's voice broke in a little spasm of laughter, and her hands began,
+unconsciously, to open and close, open and close, weaving in soft,
+outer darkness.
+
+"We may leave them out of the argument.--But there remain the elect,
+Richard, among whom I dare count myself. And over them, never doubt it,
+just that which you hate and which appears at first sight to separate
+you so cruelly from other men, gives you a strange empire. You
+stimulate, you arrest, you satisfy one's imagination, as does the
+spectacle of some great drama. You are at once enslaved and emancipated
+by this thing--to you hateful, to me adorable--beyond all measure of
+bondage or freedom inflicted upon, or enjoyed by, other men. And in
+this, just this, lies magnificent compensation if you would but see it.
+I have always known that--known that if you would put aside your
+arrogance and pride, and yield yourself a little, it was possible to
+love you, and give you such joy in loving as one could give to no-one
+else on earth."
+
+Her voice sweetened yet more. She leaned forward, pressing her bosom
+against the rough ironwork of the balcony.
+
+"I knew that, from the first hour we met, in the variegated, autumn
+sunshine, upon the greensward, before the white summer-house
+overlooking that noble, English, woodland view. I saw you, and so doing
+I saw mysteries of joy in myself unimagined by me before. It went very
+hard with me then, Richard. It has gone very hard with me ever since."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes' words died away in a grave and delicate whisper.
+But she did not turn her head, nor did Richard speak. Only, close there
+beside her, she heard him breathe, panting short and quick even as a
+dog pants, while a certain vibration seemed to run along the rough
+ironwork against which she leaned. And by these signs Helen judged her
+speech, though unanswered, had not been wholly in vain. From below, the
+luscious fragrance of the garden, the chime of falling water, and the
+urgent voice of the painted pleasure-city came up about her. Night had
+veiled the face of Naples, even as Helen's own. Yet lines of
+innumerable lights described the suave curve of the bay, climbed the
+heights of Posilipo, were doubled in the oily waters of the harbour,
+spread abroad alluring gaiety in the wide piazzas, and shone like
+watchful and soliciting eyes from out the darkness of narrow street,
+steep lane, and cutthroat alley. While, above all that, high uplifted
+against the opacity of the starless sky, a blood-red beacon burned on
+the summit of Vesuvius, the sombre glow of it reflected upon the
+underside of the masses of downward-rolling smoke as upon the belly of
+some slow-crawling, monstrous serpent.
+
+Suddenly Helen spoke once again, and with apparent inconsequence.
+
+"Richard, you must have known she could never satisfy you--why did you
+try to marry Constance Quayle?"
+
+"To escape."
+
+"From whom--from me?"
+
+"From myself, which is much the same thing as saying from you, I
+suppose."
+
+"And you could not escape?"
+
+"So it seems."
+
+"But--but, dear Richard," she said plaintively, yet with very winning
+sweetness, "why, after all, should you want so desperately to escape?"
+
+Richard moved a little farther from her.
+
+"I have already explained that to you, to the point of insult, so you
+tell me," he said. "Surely it is unnecessary to go over the ground
+again?"
+
+"You carry your idealism to the verge of slight absurdity," she
+answered. "Oh! you of altogether too little faith, how should you gauge
+the full flavour of the fruit till you have set your teeth in it?
+Better, far better, be a sacramentalist like me and embrace the idea
+through the act, than refuse the act in dread of imperiling the
+dominion of the idea. You put the cart before the horse with a
+vengeance, Dickie! There's such a thing as being so reverently-minded
+towards your god that he ceases to be the very least profit or use to
+you."
+
+And again she heard that panting breath beside her. Again laughter
+bubbled up in her fair throat, and her hands fell to weaving the soft,
+outer darkness.
+
+"You must perceive that it cannot end here and thus," she said
+presently.
+
+"Of course not," he answered. Then, after a moment's pause, he added
+coldly enough:--"I foresaw that, so I gave orders yesterday that the
+yacht was not to be laid up, but only to coal and provision, and
+undergo some imperatively necessary repairs. She should be ready for
+sea by the end of the week."
+
+Helen turned sideways, and the bland light, from the room within,
+touched her face now as well as her kneeling figure.
+
+"And then, and then?" she demanded, almost violently.
+
+"Then I shall go," Richard replied. "Where, I do not yet know, but as
+far, anyhow, as the coal in the yacht's bunkers will drive her.
+Distance is more important than locality just now. And I leave you here
+at the villa, Helen. Do not regret that you came. I don't."
+
+He too had turned to the light, which revealed his face ravaged and
+aged by stress of emotion, revealed too the homelessness, as of empty
+space, resident in his eyes.
+
+"I shall be glad to remember the place pleases and speaks to you. It
+has been rather a haven of rest to me during these last two years. You
+would have had it at my death, in any case. You have it a little
+sooner--that's all."
+
+But Helen held out her arms.
+
+"The villa, the villa," she cried, "what do I want with that! God in
+heaven, are you utterly devoid of all sensibility, all heart? Or are
+you afraid--afraid even yet, oh, very chicken-livered lover--that
+behind the beauty of Naples you may find the filth? It is not so,
+Dickie. It is not so, I tell you.--Look at me. What would you have
+more? Surely, for any man, my love is good enough!"
+
+And then hurriedly, with a rustling of silken skirts, hot with anger
+from head to heel, she sprang to her feet.
+
+Across the room one of the men-servants advanced.
+
+"The carriage is at the door, sir," he said.
+
+And Madame de Vallorbes' voice broke in with a singular lightness and
+nonchalance:--
+
+"Surely it is rather imprudent to go out again to-night? You told me,
+at dinner, you were not well, that you had had a touch of fever."
+
+She held out her hand, smiling serenely.
+
+"Be advised," she said--"avoid malaria. I shall see you before I go
+to-morrow? Yes--an afternoon train, I think. Good-night, we meet at
+breakfast as usual."
+
+She stepped in at the window, gathered up certain small properties--a
+gold scent-bottle, one or two books, a blotting-case, as with a view to
+final packing and departure. Just as she reached the door she heard
+Richard say curtly:--
+
+"Send the carriage round. I shall not want it to-night."
+
+But even so Helen did not turn back. On the contrary, she ran, light of
+foot as the little dancer, of long ago, with blush-roses in her hat,
+through all the suite of rooms to her own sea-blue, sea-green
+bedchamber, and there, sitting down before the toilet-table, greeted
+her own radiant image in the glass. Her lips were very red. Her eyes
+shone like pale stars on a windy night.
+
+"Quick, quick, undress me, Zelie! Put me to bed. I am simply expiring
+of fatigue," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+CONCERNING THAT DAUGHTER OF CUPID AND PSYCHE WHOM MEN CALL VOLUPTAS
+
+
+The furniture, though otherwise of the customary proportions, had all
+been dwarfed. This had been achieved in some cases by ingenious design
+in its construction, in others by the simple process of cutting down,
+thus reducing table and chair, couch and bureau, in itself of whatever
+grace of style, dignity of age, or fineness of workmanship, to an
+equality of uncomely degradation in respect of height. The resultant
+effect was of false perspective. Nor was this unpleasing effect
+lessened by the proportions of the room itself. In common with all
+those of the _entresol_, it was noticeably low in relation to its
+length and width, while the stunted vaultings of its darkly-frescoed
+ceiling produced an impression of heaviness rather than of space.
+Bookcases, dwarfed as were all the other furnishings, lined the walls
+to within about two feet of the spring of the said vaulting. Made of
+red cedar and unpolished, the cornices and uprights of them were carved
+with arabesques in high relief. An antique, Persian carpet, sombre in
+colouring and of great value, covered the greater portion of the pale
+pink and gray mosaic pavement of the floor. Thick, rusty-red,
+Genoa-velvet curtains were drawn over each low, square window. A fire
+of logs burned on the open hearth. And this notwithstanding the
+unaccustomed warmth of the outside air, did but temper the chill
+atmosphere of the room and serve to draw a faint aroma from the carven
+cedar wood.
+
+It was here, to his library,--carried down-stairs by his men-servants
+as a helpless baby-child might be,--that Richard Calmady had come when
+Helen de Vallorbes departed so blithely to her bedchamber. And it was
+here he remained, though nearly two hours had elapsed since then,
+finding sleep impossible.
+
+For the wakefulness and unrest of rapidly breeding illness were upon
+him. His senses and his will had been in very active conflict. Desire
+had licked him, as with fiery tongues, driving him onward. Honour,
+self-contempt in face of temptation to sensual indulgence, an
+aspiration after somewhat stoic asceticism which had come to influence
+his action of late, held him back. But now, here and alone, the
+immediately provoking cause of passion removed, reaction against the
+strain of all that had very sensibly set in. He felt strangely astray,
+as though drifting at hazard upon the waters of an unquiet,
+mist-blinded sea. He was conscious of a deep-seated preoccupation
+regarding some matter, which he was alike unable to forget or to
+define. Formless images perplexed his vision. Formless thoughts pursued
+one another, as with the hurry of rumoured calamity, through his mind.
+A desolating apprehension of things insufficiently developed, of the
+inconclusive, the immature, the unattained, of things mutilated, things
+unfinished, born out of due time and incomplete, oppressed his fancy.
+Even the events of the last few hours, in which he had played so
+considerable a part, took on a shadowy semblance, ceased to appeal to
+him as realities, began to merge themselves in that all-pervading
+apprehension of defectiveness, of that which is wanting, lopped off, so
+to speak, and docked. It was to him as though all natural, common-sense
+relations were in abeyance, as though his own, usually precise, mental
+processes were divorced from reason and experience, had got out of
+perspective, in short--even as this low, wide, cedar-scented library,
+of which the vaulted ceiling seemed to approach unduly close to the
+mosaic, marble floor, and all its dwarfed furnishings, its squat tables
+and almost legless chairs, had got out of perspective.
+
+The alternate purposeless energy and weariful weakness of fever, just
+as the alternate dry flush and trembling chill of it, distressed him.
+He had slipped on a smoking-coat, but even the weight of this thin,
+silk garment seemed oppressive, although, now and again, he felt as
+though around his middle he wore a belt of ice. Not without
+considerable exertion he rolled forward a couch--wide, high-backed,
+legless, mounted upon little wheels--to the vicinity of the fire. He
+drew himself up on to it and rested among the piled-up cushions.
+Perhaps, if he waited, exercising patience, sleep might mercifully
+visit him and deliver him from this intolerable confusion of mind.
+Deliver him, too, from that hideous apprehension of universal
+mutilation, of maimed purposes, maimed happenings, of a world peopled
+by beings maimed as he was himself, but after a more subtle and
+intimate fashion, a fashion intellectual or moral rather than merely
+physical, so that they had to him, just now, an added hatefulness of
+specious lying, since to ordinary seeing they appeared whole, while
+whole they truly and actually were not.
+
+Sternly he tried to shake himself free of these morbid fancies, to
+bring his imagination under control and force himself once again to
+join hands with reality and common sense. And, to this end, he turned
+his attention to the consideration of practical matters. He dwelt on
+the details of the coaling and revictualing of his yacht, upon the
+objective of the voyage upon which he proposed to start a few days
+hence. He reviewed the letters which must be written and the
+arrangements which must be made with a view to putting his cousin
+legally in possession of the villa, the rent of which he proposed still
+to pay to her husband. This suite of rooms he would retain for his own
+use. That was necessary, obligatory. Yet, why must he retain it? He did
+not propose to return and live here at any future time. This episode
+was over--or rather, had it not simply failed of completion? Was it
+not, like all the rest, maimed, lopped off ungainly, docked? Then,
+where came in the obligation to reserve these rooms? He could not
+remember. Yet he knew that he was compelled to do so, because--because----
+
+And, once again, Richard's power of concentration broke down. Once
+again his thought eluded him, becoming tangled, fugitive, not to be
+grasped. While, like swarms of shrill squeaking bats disturbed in the
+recesses of some age-old cavern by sudden intrusion of voices and of
+lights, half-formed visions, half-formed ideas, once again, flapped
+duskily about him, torturing in their multiplicity alike to his senses
+and his brain. He fought with them, striving to beat them off in a
+madness of disgust, half suffocated by the fanning of their foul and
+stifling wings. Then, exhausted by the conflict, he stumbled and fell,
+while they closed down on him. And he, losing consciousness, slept.
+
+That unconsciousness lasted in point of fact but for a few minutes. Yet
+to Richard those minutes were as years, as centuries. At length, still
+heavy with dreamless slumber, he was aware of the stealthy turning of a
+key in a lock. Little padding foot-falls, soft as those of some strong,
+yet dainty, cat-creature crossed the carpet. A whisper of silk came
+along with them, like the murmur of the breeze in an oak grove on a
+clear, hot, summer noon, or the sibilant ripple of the sea upon spaces
+of fine-ribbed, yellow sand. And the impression produced upon Richard
+was delicious, as of one passing from a close room into the open air.
+Confusion and exhaustion left him. Energy returned. The energy of
+breeding fever merely, yet to him it appeared that of refreshment, of
+renewed and abounding health. He was conscious, too, of a will outside
+himself, acting upon his will--a will self-secure, impregnable, working
+with triumphant daring towards a single end. It certainly was
+unmaimed--in its present manifestation in any case. It told, and with
+assurance, of completion, of attainment. Yielding himself to it, with
+something of the recklessness a man yields himself to the poison which
+yet promises relief, Richard opened his eyes.
+
+Before him stood Helen de Vallorbes. In one hand she carried a little
+lamp. In the other her high-heeled, cloth-of-gold slippers. Her feet
+were bare. In the haste of the journey, from her bedchamber up-stairs
+through the great rooms and down the marble stairs, the fronts of the
+sea-blue, sea-green dressing-gown she wore had flown apart, thus
+disclosing not only her delicate night-dress, but--since this last was
+fine to the point of transparency--all the secret loveliness of her
+body and her limbs. Her shining hair curled low upon her forehead, half
+concealed her pretty ears, and lay upon her shoulders like a little,
+golden cape. And, from out this brightness of her hair, the exultant
+laughter bubbling in her throat, the small lamp carried high in one
+hand, she looked down at Richard Calmady.
+
+"I waited till the hours grew old and you did not come to me, so I have
+come to you, Dickie," she said. "Let what will happen to-morrow, this
+very certainly shall happen to-night--that with you and me Love shall
+have his own way, speak his own language, be worshipped with the rites,
+be found in the sacraments, ordained by himself, and to which all
+nature is, and has been, obedient since life on earth first began!"
+
+Not till the gray of a rain-washed, windy morning had come, and Naples
+had put off its merry sinning, changing from a city of pleasure to a
+city of labour and, too often, of callously inflicted pain, did Helen
+de Vallorbes leave the cedar-scented library. The fire of logs had
+burnt itself out upon the hearth, and other fires, perhaps, had pretty
+thoroughly burnt themselves out likewise. Then, with the extinguished
+lamp in one hand and her high-heeled, cloth-of-gold slippers in the
+other, she had run swiftly, barefoot, up the cold, marble stairs,
+through the suite of lofty rooms, her image, in the bleak dimness of
+the wet morning, given back by their tall mirrors as that of no mortal
+woman but some fear-driven, hurrying ghost. Carefully closing the door
+of the bedchamber behind her, she threw her dressing-gown aside and
+buried herself in the luxurious softness of the unslept-in bed. And she
+was only just in time. Servants began to move to and fro. The house was
+awake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION
+
+
+Sullenly, persistently, the rain came down. In the harbour the wash was
+just sufficient to make the raveled fruit-baskets, the shredded
+vegetables, the crusts and offal thrown out from the galleys, heave and
+sway upon the oily surface of the water, while screaming gulls dropped
+greedily upon the floating refuse, and rising, circled over the black,
+liquid lanes and open spaces between the hulls of the many ships. But
+it was insufficient to lift the yacht, tied up to the southern quay of
+the Porto Grande. She lay there inert and in somewhat sorry plight
+under the steady downpour. For the moment all the winsome devilry of a
+smart, sea-going craft was dead in her, and she sulked, ashamed through
+all her eight hundred tons of wood and iron, copper, brass, and steel.
+For she was coaling, over-deck, and was grimy from stem to stern.
+While, arrayed in the cast clothes of all Europe, tattered, undersized,
+gesticulating, the human scum of Naples swarmed up the steep, narrow
+planks from the inky lighters and in over her side.
+
+"Beastly dirty job this. Shan't get her paint clean under a week!" the
+first mate grumbled to his companion, the second mate--a dark-haired,
+dreamy-eyed, West-country lad, but just out of his teens.
+
+The two officers, in dripping oilskins, stood at the gangway checking
+the tally of coal-baskets as they came on board. Just now there was a
+pause in the black procession, as an empty lighter sheered off, making
+room for a full one to come alongside, thus rendering conversation
+momentarily possible.
+
+"Pity the boss couldn't have stayed on shore till we were through with
+it and cleaned up a bit," the speaker continued. "Makes the old man no
+end waxy to have any one on board when the yacht's like she is. I don't
+blame him. She's as neat and pretty as a white daisy in a green pasture
+when she's away to sea. And now, poor little soul, she's a regular
+slut."
+
+"I know I'd 'ave stayed ashore fast enough if I was the boss," the boy
+said, half wistfully. "That villa of his is like a piece of poetry. I
+keep on saying over to myself how it looks."
+
+"Oh! it's not so bad for foreign parts," the senior officer replied.
+"And you're young yet and soft, Penberthy. You'll come of that
+presently. England's best for houses, town and country, and most other
+things--women, and fights, and even sunshine, for when you do get
+sunshine at home there's no spite in it.--Hi! there you ganger," he
+shouted suddenly, and resentfully, leaning out over the bulwarks,
+"hurry 'em up a bit, can't you? You don't suppose I mean to stand here
+till the second anniversary of the Day of Judgment, watching your
+blithering, chicken-shanked macaronies suck rotten oranges, do you?
+Start 'em up again. Whatever are you waiting for, man? Start 'em up, I
+say."
+
+The boy's dreamy eyes, full of unwritten verse, dwelt with a curious
+indifference upon the broken procession of ascending, black figures. He
+had but lately joined, and to him both the fine vessel and her owner
+were invested with a certain romance.
+
+"What was the fancy for calling the yacht the _Reprieve_?" he asked
+presently.
+
+"Wait till you've had the chance to take a good look at Sir Richard,
+and you'll answer your question yourself," the other man answered
+oracularly. Then he broke out again into sustained invective:--"Hold up
+there, you little fool of a tight-rope-dancing, _bella Napoli_ gorilla,
+and don't go dropping good, honest, Welsh steam-coal overboard into
+your confounded, stinking local sewer! I don't care to see any of your
+blamed posturings, don't flatter yourself. Hold up you grimacing, great
+grandson of a lousy she-ape, can't you, and walk straight.--Take him
+all round Sir Richard Calmady's the best boss I ever sailed with--one
+of the sternest, but the civilest too.--Shove 'em along, ganger, will
+you. Shove 'em along, I say.--He's one of the few men I've loved, I'm
+not ashamed to say it, Mr. Penberthy, and about the only one I ever
+remember to have feared, in my life."
+
+Meanwhile, if the scene to seaward was cheerless, that to landward
+offered but small improvement. For the murk of low-brooding cloud and
+falling rain blotted out the Castel S. Elmo, and the Capo di Monte and
+Pizzafalcone heights. Even the Castello del'Ovo down on the shore line,
+comparatively near at hand, loomed up but a denser mass of indigo-gray
+amid the all obtaining grayness. The tall multi-coloured,
+many-shuttered houses fronting the quays--restaurants, _cafes_,
+money-changers' bureaux, ships' chandlers, and slopshops--looked tawdry
+and degraded as a clown's painted face seen by daylight. Thick,
+malodorous vapours arose from the squalid streets, lying back on the
+level, and from the crowded shipping of the port. These hung in the
+stagnant air, about the forest of masts and the funnels of steamers.
+And the noise of the place was as that of Bedlam let loose.--The
+long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal pitched from the baskets down
+the echoing, iron shoots. The grate and scream of saws cutting through
+blocks of stone and marble. The grind of heavy wheels upon the broken,
+irregular flags. The struggling clatter of hoofs, lashing of whips,
+squeal of mules, savage voices raised in cries and imprecations. The
+clank and roar of machinery. The repeated bellowing of a great liner,
+blowing off steam as she took up her berth in the outer harbour. The
+shattering rattle of the chains of a steam crane, when the monster
+iron-arm swung round seeking or depositing its burden and the crank ran
+out in harsh anger, as it seemed, and defiance. And through all this,
+as under-current, the confused clamour of the ever-shifting,
+ever-present crowd, and the small, steady drip of the rain. Squalid,
+sordid, brutal even, the coarse actualities of her trade and her
+poverty alike disclosed, her fictions and her foulness uncondoned by
+reconciling sunshine, Naples had declined from radiant goddess to
+common drab.
+
+It was in this character that Richard Calmady, driving yesterday, and
+for the first time, through the streets at noon, had been fated to see
+his so fondly-idealised city. It was in this character that he
+apprehended it again to-day, waiting in his deck-cabin until cessation
+of the rain and on-coming of the friendly dusk should render it not
+wholly odious to sit out on deck. The hours lagged, and even this
+bright and usually spotless apartment--with its shining, white walls,
+its dark, blue leather and polished, mahogany fittings--the coal dust
+penetrated. It rimmed the edge of the books neatly ranged on the racks.
+It smirched the charts laid out on the square locker-table below. It
+drifted in at the cabin windows, along with the babel of sound and the
+all-pervading stench of the port. This was, in itself, sufficiently
+distasteful, sufficiently depressing. And to Richard, just now, the
+disgust of it came with the heightened sensibility of physical illness,
+and as accompaniment to an immense private shame and immense
+self-condemnation, a conviction of outlawry and a desolation passing
+speech. He looked for comfort, for promise of restoration, and found
+none, in things material or things intellectual, in others or in
+himself. For his mind, always prone to apprehend by images rather than
+by words, and to advance by analogy rather than by argument,
+discovered, in surrounding aspects and surrounding circumstance, a
+rather hideously apt parable and illustration of its present state.
+Just as this seemingly fair city was proven, on intimate acquaintance,
+repulsive beyond the worst he had ever feared and earnestly refused to
+know of it, so a certain fair woman, upon whom, since boyhood, his
+best, most chivalrous, most unselfish, affections had centred, was
+proven--herself, moreover, flagrantly contributing to that
+proving--vile beyond all that rumor, heard and passionately denied by
+him, had ever ventured to whisper concerning her. Nor was the misery of
+this revelation lessened by the knowledge that his own part in it all
+had been very base. He had sinned before. He would sin again probably.
+Richard had long ceased to regard these matters from a strictly
+puritanic standpoint. But this particular sinning was different to any
+that had gone before, or which could come after it. For it partook--so
+at least, it now appeared to him--of the nature of sacrilege, since he
+had sinned against his ideal, degrading that to gross uses which he had
+agreed with himself to hold sacred, defiling it and, thereby, very
+horribly defiling himself.
+
+And this disgrace of their relation, his own and hers, the inherent
+abomination of it all and its inherent falsity, had been forced home on
+him with a certain violence of directness just in the common course of
+daily happenings. For among the letters, brought to him along with his
+first breakfast, yesterday, after that night of secret licence, had
+been three of serious import. One was from Lady Calmady, and that he
+put aside with a certain anger, calling himself unwilling, knowing
+himself unfit, to read it. Another he tore open. The handwriting was
+unknown to him. He began reading it in bewilderment. Then he
+understood.
+
+
+"MONSIEUR,"--it ran,--"You are in process of exterminating me. But,
+since I have reason to believe that no sufficient opportunity has been
+afforded you of realising the enormity of your conduct, I rally the
+profoundness of nobility which I discover within me--I calm myself. I
+go further, I explain. Living in retirement, you may not have learned
+that I am in Naples. I followed your cousin here--Madame de Vallorbes.
+My connection with her represents the supreme passion of my passionate
+youth. At once a frenzy and an anodyne, I have found in it the
+inspiration of my genius in its later development. This work must not
+be put a stop to. It is too majestic, it is weighted with too serious
+consequences to the whole of thinking France, of thinking Europe. A
+less experienced woman cannot satisfy the extravagance of my desires,
+the demands of my all-consuming imagination. The reverence with which a
+person, such as yourself, must regard commanding talent, the
+concessions he must be willing to make to its necessities, are without
+limit. This I cannot doubt that you will admit. The corollary is
+obvious. Either, _monsieur_, you will immediately invite me to reside
+with you at your villa--thereby securing for yourself daily intercourse
+with a nature of distinguished merit--or you will restore Madame de
+Vallorbes to me without hesitation or delay. Her devotion to me is
+absolute. How could it fail to be so, since I have lavished upon her
+the treasures of my extraordinary personality? But a fear of insular
+prejudice on your part withholds her at this moment from full
+expression of that devotion. She suffers as well as myself. It will be
+your privilege to put a term to this suffering by requesting me to join
+her, or by restoring her to me. To do otherwise will be to prolong the
+eclipse of my genius, and thereby outrage the conscience of civilised
+humanity which breathlessly awaits the next utterance of its chosen
+poet. If you require the consolation of feminine society, marry--it
+would be very simple--some white-souled, English miss. But restore to
+me, to whom her presence is indispensable, this woman of regal
+passions. I shall present myself at your house to-day to receive your
+answer in person. The result of a refusal on your part to receive me
+will be attended by calamitous consequences to yourself.--Accept,
+_monsieur_, the expression of my highest consideration,
+
+"PAUL AUGUSTE DESTOURNELLE."
+
+
+For the moment Richard saw red, mad with rage at the insolence of the
+writer. And then came the question, was it true, this which the letter
+implied? Had Helen, indeed, lied to him? And, notwithstanding its
+insane vanity, did this precious epistle give a more veracious account
+of her relation to the young poet than that which she had herself
+volunteered? He tried to put the thought from him. Who was he--to-day
+of all days--to be nice about the conduct of another? Who was he to sit
+in judgment? So he turned to his correspondence again, taking another
+letter, at random, from the pile. And then, looking at the
+superscription, he turned somewhat sick.
+
+
+"MON CHER,"--wrote M. de Vallorbes,--"My steward informs me that he has
+just received your draft for a quarter's rent of the villa. I thank you
+a thousand times for your admirable punctuality. Decidedly you are of
+those with whom it is a consolation to do business. Need I assure you
+that the advent of this money is far from inopportune, since a grateful
+country, while showering distinctions upon me with one hand, with the
+other picks my pocket. I find it not a little expensive this famous
+military service! But then, ever since I can remember, I have found all
+that afforded me the slightest, active pleasure equally that! And this
+sport of war, I promise you, is the most excellent sport in which I
+have as yet participated. It satisfies the primitive instincts more
+thoroughly than even your English fox-hunting. A _battue_ of
+_Communards_ is obviously superior to a _battue_ of pheasants. To the
+dignity of killing one's fellow-men is added the satisfaction of
+ridding oneself of vermin. It becomes a matter of sanitation and
+self-respect. And this, indirectly, recalls to me, that report declares
+my wife to be with you at Naples. _Mon cher je vous en fais cadeau_.
+With you, at least, I know that my honour is safe. You may even instil
+into her mind some faint conception of the rudiments of morality. To be
+frank with you, she needs that. A couple of months ago she did me the
+honour to elope--temporarily, of course--with M. Paul Destournelle. You
+may have glanced, one day, at his crapulous verses. I suppose honour
+demanded that I should pursue the guilty pair and account for one, if
+not both, of them. But I was too busily engaged with my little
+_Communards_. We set these gentry up against a wall and dispose of them
+in batches. I have had a good deal of this, but, as I say, it has not
+yet become monotonous. Traits of individual character lend it vivacity.
+And then, putting aside the exigencies of my profession, I do not know
+that anything is to be gained by inviting public scandal. You have an
+English proverb to the effect that one should wash one's dirty linen at
+home. This I have tried to do, as you cannot but be aware, all along.
+If one has had the misfortune to marry Messalina, one learns to be
+philosophic. A few lovers more or less, in that connection, what, after
+all, does it matter? Indeed, I begin to derive ironical consolation
+from the fact of their multiplicity. The existence of one would have
+constituted a reflection upon my charms. But a matter of ten, fifteen,
+twenty, ceases to be in any degree personal to myself. Only I object to
+Destournelle. He is too young, too _rococco_. He represents a descent
+in the scale. I prefer _des hommes mures_, generals, ministers,
+princes. The devil knows we have had our share of such! Your generosity
+to her has saved us from Jews so far, and from _nouveaux riches_, by
+relieving the business of commercial aspects. Give her some salutary
+advice, therefore, _mon cher_, and if she becomes inconvenient forward
+her to Paris. I forgive to seventy-times-seven, being still proud
+enough to struggle after an appearance of social and conjugal decency.
+_Enfin_ it is a relief to have unburdened myself for once, and you have
+been the good genius of my unfortunate _menage_, for which heaven
+reward you.--Yours, in true cousinly regard and supreme reliance on
+your discretion,
+
+"LUIGI ANGELO FRANCESCO DE VALLORBES."
+
+
+That this, in any case, had a stamp of sincerity upon it, Richard could
+not doubt. It must be admitted that he had long ceased to accept Madame
+de Vallorbes' estimate of her husband with unqualified belief. But, be
+that as it might, whether he were a consummate, or merely an average,
+profligate, one thing was certain that this man trusted him--Richard
+Calmady,--and that he--Richard Calmady--had very vilely betrayed that
+trust. He stared at the letter, and certain sentences in it seemed to
+sear him, even as the branding-iron used on a felon might. This was a
+new shame, different to, and greater than, any his deformity had ever
+induced in him, even as evil done is different to, and greater than,
+evil suffered. Morality may be relative only and conventional. Honour,
+for all persons of a certain standing and breeding, remains absolute.
+And it was precisely of his own honour that he had deprived himself.
+Not only in body, but in character, he was henceforth monstrous. For a
+while Richard had remained very still, looking at this thing into which
+he had made himself as though it were external and physically visible
+to him.
+
+Then, suddenly, he had reached out his hand for his mother's letter. A
+decision of great moment was impending. He would know what she had to
+say before finally making that decision. He wondered bitterly, grimly,
+whether her words would plunge him yet deeper in this abyss of
+self-hatred and self-contempt.
+
+
+MY DARLING,"--she wrote,--"I am foolishly glad to learn that you are
+back at Naples. It gives me comfort to know you are even thus much
+nearer home and in a country where I too have traveled and of which I
+retain many dear and delightful recollections. You may be surprised,
+perhaps, to see the unaccustomed address upon my note-paper and may
+wonder what has made me guilty of deserting my post. Now, since the
+worst of it is certainly over, I may tell you that my health has failed
+a good deal of late. Nothing of a really serious nature--you need not
+be alarmed about me. But I had got into a rather weak and unworthy
+state, from which it became very desirable I should rouse myself.
+Selfishness is insidious, but none the less reprehensible because it
+takes the apparently innocent form of sitting in a chair with one's
+eyes shut! However, that best of men, John Knott, brought very bracing
+influences to bear on me, convincing me of sin--in the gentlest way in
+the world--by means of Honoria St. Quentin. And so I picked myself up,
+dear Dickie,--picked the whole of myself up, as I hope, always saving
+and excepting my self-indulgent inertia,--and came away here to
+Ormiston. At first, I confess, I felt very much like a dog at a fair,
+or the proverbial mummy at a feast. But they all bore with me in the
+plenty of their kindness, and, in the last week, I have banished the
+mummy and trained the scared dog to altogether polite and pretty
+behaviour. Till I came back to it, I hardly realised how truly I loved
+this place. How should it be otherwise? I met your father first here
+after his third term at Eton. I remember he snubbed me roundly. I met
+him again the year before our marriage. Without vanity I declare that
+then he snubbed me not one little bit. These things are very far away.
+But to me, though far away, they are very vivid and very lovely. I see
+them as you, when you were small, so often pleaded to see a fairy
+landscape by looking through the large end of the gold and
+tortoise-shell spy-glass upon my writing-table. All of which may seem
+to you somewhat childish and trivial, but I grow an old woman and have
+a fancy for toys and tender make-believes--such as fairy landscapes
+seen through the big end of a spy-glass. The actual landscape, at
+times, is a trifle discouragingly rain-washed and cloudy!---Roger and
+Mary are here. Their two boys are just gone back to school again. They
+are fine, courteous, fearless, little fellows. Roger makes a rather
+superb middle-aged man. He has much of my father--your grandfather's
+reticence and dignity. Indeed, he might prove slightly alarming, was
+one not so perfectly sure of him, dear creature. Mary remains, as of
+old, the most wholesome and helpful of women. Yes, it is good to dwell,
+for a time, among one's own people. And I cannot but rejoice that my
+eldest brother has come to an arrangement by which, at his death, your
+Uncle William will receive a considerable sum of money in lieu of the
+property. This last will go direct to Roger, and eventually to his
+boys. If your Uncle William had a son, the whole matter would be
+different. But I own it would hurt me that in the event of his death
+there would be no Ormiston at Ormiston after these many generations. In
+all probability the place would be sold immediately, moreover, for it
+is an open secret that, through no fault of his own, poor man, William
+is sadly embarrassed in money matters. And he has other sorrows--of a
+rather terrible nature, since they are touched with disgrace. But here
+you will probably detect a point of prejudice, so I had better stop!--I
+look out upon a gray, northern sea, where 'the white horses fume and
+fret' under a cold, gray, northern sky. The oaks in the park are just
+thickening with yellow-green buds. And there, close to my window,
+perched on a topmost twig, a missel-thrush is singing, facing the wind
+like a gentleman. You look out upon a purple sea, I suppose, beneath
+clear skies and over orange trees and palms. I wonder if any brave bird
+pipes to you as my storm-cock to me? It brings up one's courage to hear
+his song, so strong and wild and sweet, in the very teeth of the gale
+too! But now you will have had enough of my news and more than enough.
+I write to you more freely, you see, than for a long time past, being
+myself more free of spirit. And therefore I dare add this, in all and
+every case, my darling, God keep you. And remember, should you weary of
+wandering, that not only the doors of Brockhurst, but the doors of my
+heart, stand forever wide open to welcome you home.--Yours always,
+
+K. C."
+
+
+Reading which gentle, yet in a sense daring, words, Richard's shame
+took on another complexion, but one by no means calculated to mitigate
+the burning of it. His treachery towards de Vallorbes became almost
+vulgar and of small moment beside his cruelty to this superbly
+magnanimous woman, his mother. For, all these years, determinately and
+of set purpose, defiant of every better impulse, he had hardened his
+heart against her. To differ from her, to cherish that which was
+unsympathetic to her, to put aside every tradition in which she had
+nurtured him, to love that which she condemned, to condemn that which
+she loved--and this, if silently, yet unswervingly--had been the ruling
+purpose of his action. That which had its origin in passionate revolt
+against his own unhappy disfigurement, had come to be an interest and
+object in itself. In this quarrel with her--a quarrel, intimate,
+pre-natal, anterior to consciousness and to volition--he found the
+justification of his every lapse, his every crookedness of conduct and
+of thought. Since he could not reach Almighty God, and strike at the
+eternal First Cause which he held responsible for the inalienable wrong
+done to him, he would strike, with cold-blooded persistence, at the
+woman whom Almighty God had permitted to be His instrument in the
+infliction of that wrong. And to where had that sustained purpose of
+striking led him? Even--so he judged just now--to the dishonour and
+desolation of to-day, following upon the sacrilegious licence of last
+night.
+
+All this Richard saw with the alternately groping, benumbed, mental
+vision and the glaring, mental nakedness of breeding fever. Small
+wonder that looking for comfort, for promise of restoration, he found
+none in things material, in things intellectual, in others, or in
+himself! He felt outcasted beyond hope of redemption, but not
+repentant, hardly remorseful even, only aware of all that which had
+happened, and of his own state. For Lady Calmady's letter was to him
+little more, as yet, than a placing of facts. To trade upon her
+magnificent generosity of affection, and seek refuge in those
+outstretched arms now, with the mark of the branding-iron so sensibly
+upon him, appeared to him of all contemptible doings the most radically
+contemptible. Obviously it was impossible to go back. He must go on
+rather--out of sight, out of mind. Fantastic schemes of disappearing,
+of losing himself, far away, in remote and nameless places, among the
+coral islands of the Pacific or the chill majesty of the Antarctic
+seas, offered themselves to his imagination. The practical difficulties
+presented by such schemes, their infeasibility, did not trouble him. He
+would sever all connection with that which had been, with that which
+had made for good equally with that which had made for evil. By his own
+voluntary act and choice he would become as a man dead, the disgrace of
+his malformed body, the closer and more hideous disgrace of his defiled
+and prostituted soul, surviving in legend merely, as might some ugly,
+old-time fable useful for the frightening of unruly babies.
+
+And to that end of self-obliteration he instantly applied himself, with
+outward calm, but with the mental hurry and restlessness of increasing
+illness. His first duty was to end the whole matter of his relation to
+Helen,--Helen shorn of her divinity, convicted liar and wanton, yet
+mistress still for him, as he feared, of mighty enchantments. So he
+wrote to her very briefly. The note should be given her later in the
+day. In it he stated that he should have left the villa before this
+announcement reached her, left it finally and without remotest prospect
+of return, since he could not doubt that she recognised, as he did, how
+impossible it had become that he and she should meet again. He added
+that he would communicate with her shortly as to business arrangements.
+That done, he summoned Powell, his valet, bidding him pack. He would go
+down to the yacht at once. He had received information which made it
+imperative that he should quit Naples immediately.
+
+To be out of all this, rid of it, fairly started on the road of
+negation of social being, negation of recognised existence, infected
+him like a madness. But even the most forceful human will must bend to
+stupidities of detail and of material fact. Unexpected delays had
+occurred. The yacht was not ready for sea, neither coaled, nor
+provisioned, nor sound of certain small damages to her machinery.
+Vanstone, the captain, might mislay his temper, and the first mate
+expend himself in polysyllabic invective, young Penberthy cease to
+dream, stewards, engineers, carpenters, cooks, quartermasters, seamen,
+firemen, do their most willing and urgent best, nevertheless the
+morning of next day, and even the afternoon of it, still found Richard
+Calmady seated at the locker-table of the white-walled deck-cabin, his
+voyage towards self-obliteration not yet begun.
+
+Charts were outspread before him, upon which, at weary intervals, he
+essayed to trace the course of his coming wanderings. But his brain was
+dull, he had no power of consecutive thought. That same madness of
+going was upon him with undiminished power, yet he knew not where he
+wanted to go, hardly why he wanted to go, only that a blind obsession
+of going drove him. He was miserably troubled about other matters
+too--about that same brief letter he had written to Helen before
+leaving the villa. He was convinced that he had written such a letter,
+but struggle as he might to remember the contents of it they remained
+to him a blank. He was haunted by the fear that in that letter he had
+committed some irremediable folly, had bound himself to some absurdly
+unworthy course of action. But what it might be escaped and, in
+escaping, tortured him. And then, this surely was Friday, and Morabita
+sang at the San Carlo to-night? And surely he had promised to be there,
+and to meet the famous _prima donna_ and sup with her after the
+performance, as in former days at Vienna? He had not always been quite
+kind to her, poor, dear, fat, good-natured, silly soul! He could not
+fail her now.--And then he went back to a chart of the South Pacific
+again. Only he could not see it plainly, but saw, instead of it, the
+great folio of copper-plate engravings lying on the broad window-seat
+of the eastern bay of the Long Gallery at home. He was sitting there to
+watch for the race-horses coming back from exercise, Tom Chifney
+pricking along beside them on his handsome cob. And the long-ago,
+boyish desperation of longing for wholeness, for freedom, brought a
+moistness to his eyes, and a lump into his throat. And all the while
+the coal dust drifted in at each smallest crevice and aperture, and the
+air was vibrant with rasping, jarring uproar and nauseous with the
+stale, heavy odours of the city and the port. And steadily,
+ceaselessly, the descending rain drummed upon the roofing overhead.
+
+At length a stupor took him. His head sunk upon his arms, folded upon
+those outspread charts, while the noise of all the rude activities
+surrounding him subtly transformed itself into that of a great
+orchestra. And above this, superior to, yet nobly supported by it,
+Morabita's voice rose in the suave and passionate phrases of the
+glorious cavatina--"_Ernani, Ernani, involami, all aborito
+ampleso._"--Yes, her voice was as good as ever! Richard drew a long
+breath of relief. Here, at least, was something true to itself, and
+amid so much of change, so much of spoiling, still unspoilt! He raised
+his head and listened. For something must have happened, something of
+serious moment. The orchestra, for some unaccountable reason, had
+suddenly broken down. Yes, it must be the orchestra which disaster had
+overtaken, for a voice very certainly continued. No, not a voice, but
+voices--those of Vanstone the captain, and Price the first mate, and
+old Billy Tinn the boatswain--loud, imperative, violently remonstrant,
+but swept under and swamped at moments by cries and volleys of foulest,
+Neapolitan _argot_ from hoarse, Neapolitan throats. And that abruptly
+silenced orchestra?--Richard came back to himself, came back to
+actualities of environment and prosaic fact. An infinitely weariful
+despair seized him. For the sound that had reached so sudden a
+termination was not that of cunningly-attuned, musical instruments, but
+the long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal, pitched from the baskets
+down the echoing, iron shoots.
+
+The cabin door opened discreetly and Powell, incarnation of decorous
+punctualities even amid existing tumultuously discomposing
+circumstances, entered.
+
+"From the villa, sir," he said, depositing letters and newspapers upon
+the table.
+
+Richard put out his hand, turned them over mechanically. For again,
+somehow, notwithstanding the babel without, that exquisite
+invitation--"_Ernani, Ernani, involami_,"--assailed his ears.
+
+The valet waited a little, quiet and deferential in bearing, yet
+observing his master with a certain keenness and anxiety.
+
+"I saw Mr. Bates, as you desired, sir," he said at last.
+
+Richard looked up at him vaguely. And it struck him that while Powell
+was on shore to-day he had undoubtedly had his hair cut. This
+interested him--though why, he would have found it difficult to say.
+
+"Mr. Bates thought you should be informed that a gentleman called early
+yesterday afternoon, as he said by appointment."
+
+Yes--certainly Powell had had his hair cut.--"Did the gentleman give
+his name?"
+
+"Yes, sir, M. Paul Destournelle."
+
+Powell spoke slowly, getting his tongue carefully round the foreign
+syllables, and, for all the confusion of his hearer's mind, the name
+went home. Vagueness passed from Richard's glance.
+
+"He was refused, of course."
+
+"Her ladyship had given orders that should any person of that name call
+he was to be admitted."--Powell spoke with evident reluctance.
+"Consequently Mr. Bates was uncertain how to act, having received
+contrary orders from you, sir, the day before yesterday. He explained
+this to her ladyship, but she insisted."
+
+Richard's mind had become perfectly lucid.
+
+"Very well," he said coldly.
+
+"Mr. Bates also thought you should know, sir, that after M.
+Destournelle's visit her ladyship announced she should not remain at
+the villa. She left about five o'clock, taking her maid. Charles
+followed with all the baggage."
+
+The valet paused. Richard's manner was decidedly discouraging, yet,
+something further must at least be intimated.
+
+"Her ladyship gave no address to Mr. Bates for the forwarding of her
+letters."
+
+But here the cabin door, left slightly ajar by Powell, was opened wide,
+and that with none of the calm and discretion displayed by the
+functionary in question. A long perspective of grimy deck behind him,
+his oilskins shiny from the wet, with trim, black beard, square-made,
+bold-eyed, hot-tempered, warm-hearted, alert, humorous--typical West
+Countryman as his gentle dreamy cousin, Penberthy, the second mate,
+though of a very different type--stood Captain Vanstone. His
+easily-ruffled temper suffered from the after effects of what is
+commonly known as a "jolly row," and his speech was curt in consequence
+thereof.
+
+"Sorry to disturb you, Sir Richard," he said, "and still more sorry to
+disappoint you, but it can't be helped."
+
+Dickie turned upon him so strangely drawn and haggard a countenance,
+that Vanstone with difficulty repressed an exclamation. He looked in
+quick inquiry at the valet, who so far departed from his usual decorum
+as to nod his head in assent to the silent questioning.
+
+"What's wrong now?" Richard said.
+
+"Why, these beggarly rascals have knocked off. Price offered them a
+higher scale of pay. I had empowered him to do so. But they won't
+budge. The rain's washed the heart out of them. We've tried persuasion
+and we've tried threats--it's no earthly use. Not a basket more coal
+will they put on board before five to-morrow morning."
+
+"Can't we sail with what we have got?"
+
+"Not enough to carry us to Port Said."
+
+"What will be the extent of the delay this time?" Richard asked. His
+tone had an edge to it.
+
+Again Captain Vanstone glanced at the valet.
+
+"With luck we may get off to-morrow about midnight."
+
+He stepped back, shook himself like a big dog, scattering the water off
+his oilskins in a shower upon the slippery deck. Then he came inside
+the cabin and stood near Richard. His expression was very kindly,
+tender almost.
+
+"You must excuse me, sir," he said. "I know it doesn't come within my
+province to give you advice. But you do look pretty ill, Sir Richard.
+Every one's remarking that. And you are ill, sir--you know it, and I
+know it, and Mr. Powell here knows it. You ought to see a doctor,
+sir--and if you'll pardon plain language, this beastly cess-pit of a
+harbour is not a fit place for you to sleep in."
+
+And poor Dickie, after an instant of sharp annoyance, touched by the
+man's honest humanity smiled upon him--a smile of utter weariness,
+utter homelessness.
+
+"Perfectly true. Get me out to sea then, Vanstone. I shall be better
+there than anywhere else," he said.
+
+Whereupon the kindly sailor-man turned away, swearing gently into his
+trim, black beard.
+
+But the valet remained, impassive in manner, actively anxious at heart.
+
+"Have you any orders for the carriage, sir?" he asked. "Garcia drove me
+down. I told him to wait until I had inquired."
+
+Richard was long in replying. His brain was all confused and clouded
+again, while again he heard the voice of the famous soprano--"_Ernani,
+Ernani, involami_."
+
+"Yes," he said at last. "Tell Garcia to be here in good time to drive
+me to the San Carlo. I have an appointment at the opera to-night."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+IN WHICH DICKIE GOES TO THE END OF THE WORLD AND LOOKS OVER THE WALL
+
+
+The opera box, which Richard Calmady had rented along with the Villa
+Vallorbes, was fifth from the stage on the third tier, to the right of
+the vast horseshoe. Thus situated, it commanded a very comprehensive
+view of the interior of the house. The _parterre_--its somewhat
+comfortless seats, rising as on iron stilts, as they recede, row by
+row, from the proscenium--was packed. While, since the aristocratic
+world had not yet left town, the boxes--piled, tier above tier, without
+break of dress-circle or gallery, right up to the lofty roof--were
+well-filled. And it was the effect of these last that affected Richard
+oddly, displeasingly, as, helped by Powell and Andrews,--the first
+footman, who acted as his table-steward on board the _Reprieve_,--he
+made his way slowly down to the chair, placed on the left, at the front
+of the box. For the accepted aspects and relations of things seen were
+remote to him. He perceived effects, shapes, associations of colour,
+divorced from their habitual significance. It was as though he looked
+at the written characters of a language unknown to him, observing the
+form of them, but attaching no intelligible meaning to that form. And
+so it happened that those many superimposed tiers of boxes were to him
+as the waxen cells of a gigantic honeycomb, against the angular
+darknesses of which little figures, seen to the waist, took the
+light--the blond face, neck and arms of some woman, the fair colours of
+her dress--and showed up with perplexing insistence. For they were all
+peopled, these cells of the honeycomb, and--so it seemed to him--with
+larvae, bright-hued, unworking, indolent, full-fed. Down there upon the
+_parterre_, in the close-packed ranks of students, of men and women of
+the middle-class, soberly attired in walking costume, he recognised the
+working bees of this giant hive. By their unremitting labour the dainty
+waxen cells were actually built up, and those larvae were so amply, so
+luxuriously, fed. And the working bees--there were so many, so very
+many of them! What if they became mutinous, rebelled against labour,
+plundered and destroyed the indolent, succulent larvae of which he--yes,
+he, Richard Calmady--was unquestionably and conspicuously one?
+
+He leaned back in his chair, pulled forward the velvet drapery so as to
+shut out the view of the house, and fixed his eyes upon the heads of
+the musicians in the orchestra. The overture was nearly over. The
+curtain would very soon go up. Then he observed that Powell still stood
+near him. The man was strangely officious to-day, he thought. Could
+that be connected in any way with the fact he had had his hair cut? For
+a moment the notion appeared to Dickie quite extravagantly amusing. But
+he kept his amusement, as so much else, to himself. And again the
+working bees, down in the _parterre_, attracted his attention. They
+were buzzing, buzzing angrily, displeased with the full-fed larvae in
+the boxes, because these last were altogether too social, talked too
+loud and too continuously, drowning the softer passages of the
+overture. Those dull-coloured insects had expended store of hard-earned
+_lire_ upon the queer seats they occupied, mounted as upon iron stilts.
+They meant to have the whole of that which they had paid for, and hear
+every note. If they swarmed, now, swarmed upward, clung along the edges
+of those many tiers of boxes, punished inconsiderate insolence with
+stings?---It would hardly be unjust.--But there was Powell still, clad
+in sober garments. He belonged to the working bees. And Richard became
+aware of a singular diffidence and embarrassment in thinking of that.
+If they should swarm, those workers, he would rather the valet did not
+see it, somehow. He was a good fellow, a faithful servant, a man of
+nice feeling, and such an incident would place him in an awkward
+position. He ought to be spared that. Carefully Dickie reasoned it all
+out.
+
+"You need not stay here any longer, Powell," he said.
+
+"When shall I return, sir?"
+
+The curtain went up. A roll of drums, a chorus of men's voices,
+somewhat truculent, in the drinking song.
+
+"At the end of the performance, of course."
+
+But the valet hesitated.
+
+"You might require to send some message, sir."
+
+Richard stared at the chorus. The opera being performed but this once,
+economy prevailed. Costumiers had ransacked their stock for discovery
+of garments not unpardonably inappropriate. The result showed a fine
+superiority to details of time and place. One Spanish bandit, a portly
+_basso_, figured in a surprising variety of Highland dress designed,
+and that locally, for a chieftain in the opera of _Lucia di
+Lammermoor_. His acquaintance with the eccentricities of a kilt being
+of the slightest, consequences ensued broadly humorous.--Again Dickie
+experienced great amusement. But that message?--Had he really one to
+send? Probably he had. He could not remember, and this annoyed him.
+Possibly he might remember later. He turned to Powell, forgetting his
+amusement, forgetting the too intimate personal revelations of the
+unhappy _basso_.
+
+"Yes--well--come back at the end of the second act, then," he said.
+
+If the bees swarmed it would be over by that time, he supposed, so
+Powell's return would not matter much one way or the other. A
+persuasion of something momentous about to be accomplished deepened in
+him. The madness of going, which had so pushed him earlier in the day,
+fell dead before it. For this concourse of living creatures must be
+gathered together to witness some event commensurate in importance with
+the greatness of their number. He felt sure of that. Yes--before long
+they would swarm. Incontestably they would swarm!--Again he drew aside
+the velvet drapery and looked down curiously upon the arena and its
+occupants. For a new idea had come to him regarding these last. They
+still presented the effect of a throng of busy, angry insects. But
+Richard knew better. He had penetrated their disguise, a disguise
+assumed to insure their ultimate purpose with the greater certainty. He
+knew them to be human. He knew their purpose to be a moral one. And,
+looking upon them, recognising the spirit which animated them, he was
+taken with a reverence and sympathy for average, toiling humanity
+unfelt by him before. For he saw that by these, the workers, the final
+issues are inevitably decided, by these the final verdict is
+pronounced. Individually they may be contemptible, but in their
+corporate intelligence, corporate strength, they are little short of
+majestic. Of art, letters, practical civilisation, even religion, even,
+in a degree, nature herself, they are alike architects and judges. It
+must be so. It always has been so time out of mind in point of fact.
+And then he wondered why they were so patient of constraint? Why had
+they not risen long ago and obliterated the pretensions of those
+arrogant, indolent larvae peopling the angular apertures of the honey
+cells--those larvae of whom, by birth and wealth, sinfulness and
+uselessness, he was himself so conspicuous an example?
+
+But then still clearer understanding of this whole strange matter came
+to him.--They, like all else,--mighty though they are in their
+corporate intention,--are obedient to fate. They can only act when the
+time is ripe. And then he understood yet more clearly. Their purpose in
+congregating here, whether they were conscious of it or not, was
+retributive. They were present to witness and to accomplish an act of
+foreordained justice.--Richard paused a moment, struggling with his own
+thought. And then he saw quite plainly that he himself was the object
+of that act of foreordained justice, he himself was the centre of that
+dimly-apprehended, approaching event. His punishment, his deliverance
+by means of that punishment, was that which had brought this great
+multitude together here to-night. He was awed. Yet with that awe came
+thankfulness, gratitude, an immense sense of relief. He need not seek
+self-obliteration, losing himself in far-away, tropic islands, or the
+ice-bound regions of the uttermost South. He could stay here. Sit quite
+still even--and that was well, for he was horribly tired and spent. He
+need only wait. When the time was ripe, they would do all the rest--do
+it for him by doing it to him.--How finely simple it all was!
+Incidentally he wondered if it would hurt very much. Not that that
+mattered, for beyond lay peace. Only he hoped they would get to work
+pretty soon, so that it might be over before the end of the second act,
+when Powell, the valet, would come back.
+
+Richard's face had grown very youthful and eager. His eyes were
+unnaturally bright. And still he gazed down at that great company. His
+heart went out to it. He loved it, loved each and every member of it,
+as he had never conceived of loving heretofore. He would like to have
+gone down among them and become part of them, one with them in purpose,
+a partaker of their corporate strength. But that was forbidden. They
+were his preordained executioners. Yet in that capacity they were not
+the less, but the more, lovable. They were welcome to exact full
+justice. He longed after them, longed after the pain it was their
+mission to inflict.--And they were getting ready, surely they were
+getting ready! There was a sensible movement among them. They turned
+pale faces away from the brilliantly lighted stage, and towards the
+great horseshoe of waxen cells enclosing them. They were busy,
+dull-coloured insects again, and they buzzed--resentfully, angrily,
+they buzzed.
+
+Yet even while Dickie noted all this, greatly moved by it, appreciating
+its inner meaning, its profound relation to himself and the drama of
+his own existence, he was not wholly unmindful of the progress of the
+opera and the charm of the graceful and fluent music which saluted his
+ears. He was aware of the entrance of the hero, of his greeting by his
+motley-clad followers. He felt kindly, just off the surface of his
+emotion so to speak, towards this impersonator of Ernani. The young
+actor's appearance was attractive, his voice fresh and sympathetic, his
+bearing modest. But the aristocratic occupants of the boxes treated him
+cavalierly. The famous Milanese tenor, whose name was on the programme,
+having failed to arrive, this local, and comparatively inexperienced,
+artist had been called upon to fill his part. Therefore the smart world
+talked more loudly than before, while the democratic occupants of the
+_parterre_, jealous for the reputation of their fellow-citizen, broke
+forth into stormy protest. And Richard could have found it in his heart
+to protest also. For it was waste of energy, this senseless conflict!
+It was unworthy of the dignity of that dull-coloured multitude, on whom
+his hopes were so strangely set--of the men in whose hands are the
+final rewards and punishments, by whose voice the final judgment is
+pronounced. It pained him to see these ministers of the Eternal Justice
+thus led away by trivial happenings, and their attention distracted
+from the main issue. For what, in God's name, did he and his
+sentimental love-carrollings amount to, this pretty fellow of a player,
+this fictitious hero of the modern, Neapolitan, operatic stage? Weighed
+in the balances, he and his whole occupation and calling were lighter,
+surely, than vanity itself? Rightly considered, he and his singing were
+but as a spangle, as some glittering trifle of tinsel, upon the veil
+still hiding the awful, yet benign, countenance of that tremendous and
+so surely approaching event.--Let him sing away, then, sing in peace.
+For the sound of his singing might help to lighten the weariness of the
+hours until the supreme hour should strike, and the glittering veil be
+torn asunder, and the countenance it covered be at last and wholly
+revealed.
+
+Reasoning thus, Richard raised his opera glasses and swept those many
+superimposed ranges of waxen cells. And the aspect of them was to him
+very sinister, for everywhere he seemed to encounter soft, voluptuous,
+brainless faces, violences of hot colour, and costly clothing cunningly
+devised to heighten the physical allurements of womanhood. Everywhere,
+beside and behind these, he seemed to encounter the faces of men,
+gluttonous of pleasure, hungering for those generously-discovered,
+material charms. They were veritable antechambers of vice, those
+angular-mouthed, waxen cells. And, therefore, very fittingly, as he
+reflected, he had his place in one of them, since he was infected by
+the vices, active partaker in the sensuality, of his class.--Oh! that
+the bees would swarm--swarm, and make short work of it all, inflict
+completeness of punishment, and thereby cleanse him and set him free!
+In its intensity his longing came near taking the form of articulate
+prayer.
+
+And then his thought shifted once more, attaching itself curiously,
+speculatively, to individual objects. For his survey of the house had
+just now brought a box into view, situated on the grand tier and almost
+immediately opposite his own. It was occupied by a party of six
+persons. With four of those persons Richard was aware he had nothing to
+do. But with the remaining two persons--a woman fashioned, as it
+appeared, of ivory and gold, and a young man standing almost directly
+behind her--he had much, everything, in fact, to do. It was
+incomprehensible to him that he had not observed these two persons
+sooner, since they were as necessary to the accomplishment of that
+terrible, yet beneficent, approaching event as he himself was. The
+woman he knew actually and intimately, though as yet he could give her
+no name, nor recall in what his knowledge of her consisted. The young
+man he knew inferentially. And Dickie was sensible of regarding him
+with instinctive repulsion, since his appearance presented a living and
+grossly ribald caricature of a figure august, worshipful, and holy.
+Long and closely Richard studied those two persons, studied them,
+forgetful of all else, straining his memory to place them. And all the
+while they talked.
+
+But, at last, the woman fashioned of ivory and gold ceased talking. She
+folded her arms upon the velvet cushion of the front of the box and
+gazed right out into the theatre. There was a splendid arrogance in the
+pose of her head, and in the droop of her eyelids. Then she looked up
+and across, straight at Richard. He saw her drooping eyelids raised,
+her eyes open wide, and remain fixed as in amazement. A something
+alert, and very fierce, came into her expression. She seemed to think
+carefully for a brief space. She threw back her head, and he saw
+uncontrollable laughter convulse her beautiful throat. And, at that
+same moment, a mighty outburst of applause and of welcome shook the
+great theatre from floor to ceiling, and, as it died away, the voice of
+the famous soprano, rich and compelling as of old, swelled out, and
+made vibrant with passionate sweetness the whole atmosphere. And
+Richard hailed that glorious voice, not that in itself it moved him
+greatly, but because in it he recognised the beginning of the end. It
+came as prelude to catastrophe which was also salvation.--Very soon the
+bees would swarm now! He rallied his patience. He had not much longer
+to wait.
+
+Meanwhile he looked back at that box on the grand tier, striving to
+unriddle the mystery of his knowledge of those two persons. He needed
+glasses no longer. His sight had become preternaturally keen. Again the
+two were talking--and about him, that was somehow evident. And, as they
+talked, he beheld a being, exquisitely formed, perfect in every part,
+step forth from between the lips of the woman fashioned of ivory and
+gold. It knelt upon one knee. Over the heads of the vast, dull-coloured
+multitude of workers, those witnesses of and participators in the
+execution of Eternal Justice, it gazed at him, Richard Calmady, and at
+him alone. And its gaze enfolded and held him like an embrace. It wooed
+him, extending its arms in invitation. It was naked and unashamed. It
+was black--black as the reeking, liquid lanes between the hulls of the
+many ships, over which the screaming gulls circled seeking foul
+provender, down in Naples harbour.--And he knew the fair woman it came
+forth from for Helen de Vallorbes, herself, in her crocus-yellow gown
+sewn with seed pearls. And he knew it for the immortal soul of her. And
+he perceived, moreover, as it smiled on and beckoned him with
+lascivious gestures, that its hands and its lips were bloody, since it
+had broken the hearts of living women and torn and devoured the honour
+of living men.
+
+"_Ernani, Ernani, involami_"--still the air was vibrant with that
+glorious voice. But the love of which it was the exponent, the flight
+which it counseled, had ceased, to Richard's hearing, to bear relation
+to that which is earthly, concrete, and of the senses. The passion and
+promise of it were alike turned to nobler and more permanent uses,
+presaging the quick coming of expiation and of reconciliation contained
+in that supreme event. For he knew that, in a little moment, Helen must
+arise and follow the soul which had gone forth from her--the soul of
+which, in all its admirable perfection of outward form and blackness of
+intimate lies and lust, was close to him--though he no longer actually
+beheld it--here, beside him, laying subtle siege to him even yet. Where
+it went, there, of necessity, she who owned it must shortly follow,
+since soul and body cannot remain apart, save for the briefest space,
+until death effect their final divorce. Therefore Helen would come
+speedily. It could not be otherwise--so, at least, he argued. And her
+coming meant the culmination. Then, time being fully ripe, the bees
+would swarm, swarm at last,--labour revenging itself upon sloth, hunger
+upon gluttony, want upon wealth, obscurity upon privilege,--justice
+being thus meted out, and he, Richard, cleansed and delivered from the
+disgrace of deformity now so hideously infecting both his spirit and
+his flesh.
+
+Of this he was so well assured that, disregarding the felt, though
+unseen, presence of that errant soul, disdaining to do battle with it,
+he leaned forward once more, looking down into the close-packed arena
+of the great theatre. All those brilliant figures, members of his own
+class, here present, were matter of indifference to him. In this moment
+of conscious and supreme farewell, it was to the dull-coloured
+multitude that he turned. They still moved him to sympathy.
+Unconsciously they had enlightened him concerning matters of infinite
+moment. At their hands he would receive penance and absolution. Before
+they dealt more closely with him,--since that dealing must involve
+suffering which might temporarily cloud his friendship for them,--he
+wanted to bid them farewell and assure them of his conviction of the
+righteousness of their corporate action. So, silently, he blessed them,
+taking leave of them in peace. Then he found there were other farewells
+to be said.--Farewell to earthly life as he had known it, the struggle
+and very frequent anguish of it, its many frustrated purposes, fair
+illusions, unfulfilled hopes. He must bid farewell, moreover, to art as
+he had relished it--to learning, as he had all too intermittently
+pursued it--to travel, as he had found solace in it--to the
+inexhaustible interest, the inextinguishable humour and pathos, in
+brief, of things seen. And, reviewing all this, a profound nostalgia of
+all those minor happinesses which are the natural inheritance of the
+average man arose in him--happiness of healthy, light-hearted
+activities, not only of the athlete and the fighting-man, but of the
+playing-field, and the ball-room, and the river--happinesses to him
+inevitably denied. With an almost boyish passion of longing, he cried
+out for these.--Just for one day to have lived with the ease and
+freedom with which the vast majority of men habitually live! Just for
+one day to have been neither dwarf nor cripple, but to have taken his
+place and his chance with the rest, before it all was over and the tale
+told!
+
+But very soon Richard put these thoughts from him, deeming it unworthy
+to dwell upon them at this juncture. The call was to go forward, not to
+go back. So he settled himself in his chair once more, pulling the
+velvet drapery forward so as to shut out the sight of the house.
+Bitterness should have no part in him. When that happened which was
+appointed to happen, it must find him not only acquiescent but serene
+and undisturbed. He composed himself, therefore, with a decent and even
+lofty pride. Then he turned his eyes upon the narrow door, there in the
+semi-obscurity of the back of the box, and waited. And all the while
+royally, triumphantly, Morbita sang.
+
+During that period of waiting--whether in itself brief or prolonged, he
+knew not--sensation and thought alike were curiously in abeyance.
+Richard neither slept nor woke. He knew that he existed, but all active
+relation to being had ceased. And it was with painful effort he in a
+measure returned to more ordinary correspondence with fact, aroused by
+the sound of low-toned, emphatic speech close at hand, and by a
+scratching as of some animal denied and seeking admittance. Then he
+perceived that the door yielded, letting in a spread of yellow
+brightness from the corridor. And in the midst of that brightness, part
+and parcel of it thanks to the lustre of her crocus-yellow dress, her
+honey-coloured hair, her fair skin and softly-gleaming ornaments, stood
+Helen de Vallorbes. Behind her, momentarily, Richard caught sight of
+the young man whose face had impressed him as a ribald travesty of that
+of some being altogether worshipful and holy. The face peered at him
+with, as it seemed, malicious curiosity over the rounded shoulder of
+the woman of ivory and gold, The effect was very hateful, and, with a
+sense of thankfulness, Richard saw Helen close the door and come,
+alone, down the two steps leading from the back of the box. As she
+passed from the dimness into the clearer light, he watched her,
+quiescent, yet with absorbing interest. For he perceived that the hands
+of the clock had been put back somehow. Intervening years and the many
+events of them had ceased to obtain, so that, of all the many Helens,
+enchanting or evil, whom he had come to know, he saw now only one, and
+that the first and earliest--a little dancer, with blush-roses in her
+hat, dainty as a toy, finished to her rosy finger-tips and the toes of
+her pretty shoes, merry and merciless, as she had pirouetted round him
+mocking his shuffling, uncertain progress across the Chapel-Room at
+Brockhurst fifteen years ago.
+
+"Ah! so you have come back!" he exclaimed, almost involuntarily.
+
+Madam de Vallorbes pushed a chair from the front of the box into the
+shadow of the velvet draperies beside Richard.
+
+"It is unnecessary that all Naples should take part in our interview,"
+she said. She sat down, turning to him, leaning a little towards him.
+
+"You do not deserve that I should come back, you know, Dickie," she
+continued. "You both deserted and deceived me. That is hardly
+chivalrous, hardly just indeed, after taking all a woman has to give.
+You led me to suppose you had departed for good and all. Why should you
+deceive me?"
+
+"The yacht was not ready for sea," Richard said simply.
+
+"Then you might, in common charity, have let me know that. You were
+bound to give me an opportunity of speaking to you once again, I
+think."
+
+In his present state of detachment from all worldly considerations,
+absolute truthfulness compelled Richard. The event was so certain, the
+swarming of the bees so very near, that small diplomacies, small
+evasions, seemed absurdly out of place.
+
+"I did not want to hear you speak," he said.
+
+"But doesn't it strike you that was rather dastardly in face of what
+had taken place between us? Do you know that you appear in a new and
+far from becoming light?"
+
+Denial seemed to Richard futile. He remained silent.
+
+For a moment Helen looked towards the stage. When she spoke again it
+was as with reluctance.
+
+"I was desperately unhappy. I went all over the villa in the vain hope
+of finding you. I went back to that room of yours in which we parted. I
+wanted to see it again."--Helen paused. Her speech was low-toned, soft
+as milk.--"It was rather dreadful, Dickie, for the place was all in
+disarray, littered with signs of your hasty departure, damp,
+cheerless--the rain beating against the windows. And I hate rain. I
+found there, not you--whom I so sorely wanted--but something very much
+else.--A letter to you from de Vallorbes."--Once more she paused. "I
+excuse you of anything worse than negligence in omitting to destroy it.
+Misery knows no law, and I was miserable. I read it."
+
+Richard had listened with the same detachment, yet the same absorbed
+interest, with which he had watched her entrance. She was a wonderful
+creature in her adroitness, in her handling of means to serve her own
+ends! But he could not pay her back in her own coin. The time was too
+short for anything but simple truth. He felt strangely tired. These
+reiterated delays became harassing. If the bees would swarm, only
+swarm! Then it would be over, and he could sleep. He clasped his hands
+behind his head and looked at Madame de Vallorbes. Her soul kneeled on
+her lap, its delicate arms were clasped about her neck--black against
+the lustrous white of her skin and all those twisted ropes of seed
+pearls. It pressed its breasts against hers, amorously. It loved her
+and she it. And he understood that in the whole scope of nature there
+was but it alone, it only, that she ever had loved, or did, or could,
+love. And, understanding this, he was filled with a great compassion
+for her. And, answering her, his expression was gentle and pitiful.
+Still he needs must speak the truth.
+
+"Perhaps it was as well that you should read Luigi's letter," he said.
+
+She turned upon him fiercely and scornfully, yet even as she did so her
+soul fell to beckoning to him, soliciting him with evilly alluring
+gestures.
+
+"My congratulations to you," she exclaimed, "upon your praiseworthy
+candour! I am to gather, then, that you believe that which my husband
+advises himself to tell you? Under the circumstances it is exceedingly
+convenient to you to do so, no doubt."
+
+"How can I avoid believing it?" Richard asked, quite sweet-temperedly.
+"Surely we need not waste the little time which remains in argument as
+to that? You must admit, Helen, that Luigi's letter fits in. It
+supplies just the piece of the puzzle which was missing. It tallies
+with all the rest."
+
+"All the rest?"
+
+"Oh yes! It is part of the whole, precisely that part both of you and
+of Naples which I knew, and tried so hard not to know, from the first.
+But it is worse than useless to practice such refusals. The Whole, and
+nothing less than the whole, is bound to get one in the end. It is
+contrary to the nature of things that any integral portion of the whole
+should submit to permanent denial."--Richard's voice deepened. He spoke
+with a subdued enthusiasm, thinking of the dull-coloured multitude
+there in the arena and the act of retributive justice on the eve, by
+them, of accomplishment.--"It seems to me the radical weakness of all
+human institutions, of all systems of thought, resides in exactly that
+effort to select and reject, to exalt one part as against another part,
+and so build not upon the rock of unity and completeness, but upon the
+sand of partiality and division. And sooner or later the Whole revenges
+itself, and the fine-fanciful fabric crumbles to ruin, just for lack of
+that which in our short-sighted over-niceness we have taken such mighty
+great pains to miss out. This has happened times out of number in
+respect of religions, and philosophies, and the constitution of
+kingdoms, and in that of fair romances which promised to stand firm to
+all eternity. And now, now, in these last few days,--since laws which
+rule the general, also rule the individual life,--it has happened in
+respect of you, Helen, to my seeing, and in respect of Naples."--Richard
+smiled upon her sadly and very sweetly.--"I am sorry," he said, "yes,
+indeed, horribly sorry. It is a bitter thing to see the last of one's
+gods go overboard. But there is no remedy. Sorry or not, so it is."
+
+Madame de Vallorbes looked at him keenly. Her attitude was strained.
+Her face sombre with thought.
+
+"My God! my God!" she exclaimed, "that I should sit and listen to all
+this! And yet you were never more attractive. There is an unnatural
+force, unnatural beauty about you. You are ill, Richard. You look and
+you speak as a man might who was about to join hands with death."
+
+But Dickie's attention had wandered again. He pulled the velvet drapery
+aside somewhat, and gazed down into the crowded house. They lingered
+strangely in the performance of their mission, that dull-coloured
+multitude of workers!--Just then came another mighty outburst of
+applause, cries, _vivas_, the famous soprano's name called aloud. The
+sound was stimulating, as the shout of a victorious army. Richard
+hailed it as a sign of speedy deliverance, and sank back into his
+place.
+
+"Oh yes!" he said civilly and lightly, "I fancy I am pretty bad. I am a
+bit sick of this continued delay, you see. I suppose they know their
+own business best, but they do seem most infernally slow in getting
+under weigh. I was ready hours ago. However, they must be nearly
+through with preliminaries now. And when once we're fairly into it, I
+shall be all right."
+
+"You mean when the yacht sails?" Madame de Vallorbes asked. Still she
+looked at him intently. He turned to her smiling, and she observed that
+his eyes had ceased to be as windows opening back on to empty space.
+They were luminous with a certain gay content.
+
+"Yes, of course--when the yacht sails, if you like to put it that way,"
+he answered.
+
+"And when will that be?"
+
+The shout of the arena grew louder in the recall. It surged up to the
+roof and quivered along the lath and plaster partitions of the boxes.
+
+"Very soon now. Immediately, I think, please God," he said.--But why
+should she make him speak thus foolishly in riddles? Of a surety she
+must read the signs of the approach of that momentous and beneficent
+event as clearly as he himself! Was she not equally with himself
+involved in it? Was she not, like himself, to be cleansed and set free
+by it? Therefore it came as a painful bewilderment and shock to him
+when she drew closer to him, leaned forward, laid her hand lightly upon
+his thigh.
+
+"Richard," she said, very softly, "I forgive all. I am not satisfied
+with loving. I will come with you. I will stay with you. I will be
+faithful to you--yes, yes, even that. Your loving is unlike any other.
+It is unique, as you yourself are unique. I--I want more of it."
+
+"But you must know that it is too late to go back on that now," he
+said, reasoning with her, greatly perplexed and distressed by her
+determined ignoring of--to him--self-evident fact. "All that side of
+things for us is over and done with."
+
+Her lips parted in naughty laughter. And then, not without a shrinking
+of quick horror, Richard beheld the soul of her--that being of lovely
+proportions, exquisitely formed in every part, yet black as the foul,
+liquid lanes between the hulls of the many ships down in Naples
+harbour--step delicately in between those parted lips, returning whence
+it came. And, beholding this, instinctively he raised her hand from
+where it rested upon his thigh, and put it from him, put it upon her
+glistering, crocus-yellow lap where her soul had so lately kneeled.
+
+"Let us say no more, Helen," he entreated, "lest we both forfeit our
+remaining chance, and become involved in hopeless and final
+condemnation."
+
+But Madame de Vallorbes' anger rose to overwhelming height. She slapped
+her hands together.
+
+"Ah, you despise me!" she cried. "But let me assure you that in any
+case this assumption of virtue becomes you singularly ill. It really is
+a little bit too cheap, a work of supererogation in the matter of
+hypocrisy. Have the courage of your vices. Be honest. You can be so to
+the point of insult when it serves your purpose. Own that you are
+capricious, own that you have lighted upon some woman who provokes your
+appetite more than I do! I have been too tender of you, too lenient
+with you. I have loved too much and been weakly desirous to please. Own
+that you are tired of me, that you no longer care for me!"
+
+And he answered, sadly enough:--
+
+"Yes, that last is true. Having seen the Whole, that has happened which
+I always dreaded might happen. The last of my self-made gods has indeed
+gone overboard. I care for you no longer."
+
+Helen sprang up from her chair, ran to the door, flung it open. The
+first act of the opera was concluded. The curtain had come down. The
+house below and around, the corridor without, were full of confused
+noise and movement.
+
+"Paul, M. Destournelle, come here," she cried, "and at once!"
+
+But Richard was more than ever tired. The strain of waiting had been
+too prolonged. Lights, draperies, figures, the crowded arena, the vast
+honeycomb of boxes, tier above tier, swam before his eyes, blurred,
+indistinct, vague, shifting, colossal in height, giddy in depth. The
+bees were swarming, at last, swarming upward through seas of iridescent
+mist. But he had no longer empire over his own attitude and thoughts.
+He had hoped to meet the supreme moment in full consciousness, with
+clear vision and thankfulness of heart. But he was too tired to do so,
+tired in brain and body alike. And so it happened that a dogged
+endurance grew on him, simply a setting of the teeth and bracing of
+himself to suffer silently, even stupidly, all that might be in store.
+For the bees were close upon him now, countless in number, angry,
+grudging, violent. But they no longer appeared as insects. They were
+human, save for their velvet-like, expressionless eyes. And all those
+eyes were fixed upon him, and him alone. He was the centre towards
+which, in thought and action, all turned. Nor were the dull-coloured
+occupants of the _parterre_ alone in their attack. For those
+gay-coloured larvae--the men and women of his own class--indolent,
+licentious, full-fed, hung out of the angular mouths of the waxen
+cells, above the crimson and gold of their cushions, pointing at him,
+claiming and yet denouncing him. And in the attitude of these the
+democratic and the aristocratic sections--he detected a difference. The
+former swarmed to inflict punishment for his selfishness, uselessness,
+sensuality. But the latter jeered and mocked at his bodily infirmity,
+deriding his deformity, making merry over his shortened limbs and
+shuffling walk. And against this background, against this all-enclosing
+tapestry of faces which encircled him, two persons, and the atmosphere
+and aroma of them, so to speak, were clearly defined. They were close
+to him, here within the narrow limits of the opera box. Then a great
+humiliation overtook Richard, perceiving that they, and not the people,
+the workers, august in their corporate power and strength, were to be
+his executioners.--No--no--he wasn't worth that! And, for all his
+present dulness of sensation, a sob rose in his throat. Madame de
+Vallorbes, resplendent in crocus-yellow brocade, costly lace, and seed
+pearls, the young man, her companion--the young man of the light,
+forked beard, domed skull, vain eyes and peevish mouth--the young man
+of holy and dissolute aspect--were good enough instruments for the
+Eternal Justice to employ in respect of him, Richard Calmady.
+
+"Look, M. Destournelle," Helen said very quietly, "this is my cousin of
+whom I have already spoken to you. But I wished to spare him if
+possible, and give him room for self-justification, so I did not tell
+you all. Richard, this is my friend, M. Destournelle, to whom my honour
+and happiness are not wholly indifferent."
+
+Dickie looked up. He did not speak. Vaguely he prayed it might all soon
+be over. Paul Destournelle looked down. He raised his eye-glass and
+bowed himself, examining Richard's mutilated legs and strangely-shod
+feet. He broke into a little, bleating, goat-like laugh.
+
+"_Mais c'est etonnant!_" he observed reflectively.
+
+"I was in his house," Helen continued. "I was there unprotected, having
+absolute faith in his loyalty."--She paused a moment. "He seduced me.
+Richard can you deny that?"
+
+"_Canaille!_" M. Destournelle murmured. He drew a pair of gloves
+through his hands, holding them by the finger-tips. The metal buttons
+of them were large, three on each wrist. Those gloves arrested
+Richard's attention oddly.
+
+"I do not deny it," Dickie said.
+
+"And having thus outraged, he deserted me. Do you deny that?"
+
+"No," Dickie said again. For it was true, that which she asserted,
+true, though penetrated by subtle falsehood impossible, as it seemed to
+him, to combat,--"No, I do not deny it."
+
+"You hear!" Helen exclaimed. "Now do what you think fit."
+
+Still Destournelle drew the gloves through his hands, holding them by
+the finger-tips.
+
+"Under other circumstances I might feel myself compelled to do you the
+honour of sending you a challenge, _monsieur_," he said. "But a man of
+sensibility like myself cannot do such violence to his moral and
+artistic code as to fight with an outcast of nature, an abortion, such
+as yourself. The sword and the pistol I necessarily reserve for my
+equals. The deformed person, the cripple, whose very existence is an
+offense to the eye and to every delicacy of sense, must be condescended
+to, and, if chastised at all, must be chastised without ceremony,
+chastised as one would chastise a dog."
+
+And with that he struck Richard again and again across the face with
+those metal-buttoned gloves.
+
+Mad with rage, blinded and sick with pain, Dickie essayed to fling
+himself upon his assailant. But Destournelle was too adroit for him. He
+skipped aside, with his little, bleating, goat-like laugh, and Richard
+fell heavily full length, his forehead coming in contact with the lower
+step of the descent from the back of the box. He lay there, too weak to
+raise himself.
+
+Paul Destournelle bent down and again examined him curiously.
+
+"_C'est etonnant!_" he repeated.--He gave the prostrate body a
+contemptuous kick. "Dear madame, are you sufficiently avenged? Is it
+enough?" he inquired sneeringly.
+
+And vaguely, as from some incalculable distance, Richard heard Helen de
+Vallorbes' voice:--"Yes--it is a little affair of honour which dates
+from my childhood. It has taken many years in adjusting. I thank you,
+_mon cher_, a thousand times. Now let us go quickly. It is enough."
+
+Then came darkness, silence, rest.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI
+
+THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+IN WHICH MISS ST. QUENTIN BEARS WITNESS TO THE FAITH THAT IS IN HER
+
+
+Honoria divested herself of her traveling-cap, thrust her hands into
+the pockets of her frieze ulster, and thus, bareheaded, a tall, supple,
+solitary figure, paced the railway platform in the dusk. Above the
+gentle undulations of the western horizon splendours of rose-crimson
+sunset were outspread, veiled, as they flamed upward, by indigo cloud
+of the texture and tenuity of finest gauze. And those same rose-crimson
+splendours found repetition upon the narrow, polished surface of the
+many lines of rails, causing them to stand out, as though of red-hot
+metal, from the undeterminate gray-drab of the track where it curved
+away, southeastward, across the darkening country towards the Savoy
+Alps. And from out the fastnesses of these last, quick with the bleak
+purity of snow, came a breathing of evening wind. To Honoria it brought
+refreshing emphasis of silence, and of immunity from things human and
+things mechanical. It spoke to her of virgin and unvisited spaces,
+ignorant of mankind and of obligation to his so many and so insistent
+needs. And there being in Honoria herself a kindred defiance of
+subjection, a determination, so to speak, of physical and emotional
+chastity, she welcomed these intimations of the essential inviolability
+of nature, finding in them justification and support of her own mental
+attitude--of the entire wisdom of which she had, it must be owned,
+grown slightly suspicious of late.
+
+And this was the more grateful to her, not only as contrast to the
+noise and dust of a lengthy and hurriedly-undertaken journey, but
+because that same journey had been suddenly and, in a sense violently,
+imposed upon one whom she held in highest regard, by another whom she
+had long since agreed with herself to hold in no sort of regard at all.
+Since the highly-regarded one set forth, she--Honoria--of course, set
+forth likewise. And yet, in good truth, the whole affair rubbed her not
+a little the wrong way! She recognised in it a particularly flagrant
+example of masculine aggression. Some persons, as she reflected, are
+permitted an amount of elbow room altogether disproportionate to their
+deserts. Be sufficiently selfish, sufficiently odious, and everybody
+becomes your humble servant, hat in hand! That is unfair. It is,
+indeed, quite extensively exasperating to the dispassionate onlooker.
+And, in Miss St. Quentin's case, exasperation was by no means lessened
+by the fact that candour compelled her to admit doubt not only as to
+the actuality of her own dispassionateness, but, as has already been
+stated, to the wisdom of her mental attitude generally. She wanted to
+think and feel one way. She was more than half afraid she was much
+disposed to think and feel quite another way. This was worrying. And,
+therefore, it came about that Honoria hailed the present interval of
+silence and solitude, striving to put from her remembrance both the
+origin and object of her journey, while filling her lungs with the
+snow-fed purity of the mountain wind and yielding her spirit to the
+somewhat serious influences of surrounding nature. All too soon the
+great Paris-express would thunder into the station. The heavy,
+horse-box-like sleeping-car--now standing on the Culoz-Geneva-Bale
+siding--would be coupled to the rear of it. Then the roar and rush
+would begin again--from dark to dawn, and on through the long, bright
+hours to dark once more, by mountain gorge, and stifling tunnel, and
+broken woodland, and smiling coastline, and fertile plain, past
+Chambery, and Turin, and Bologna, and mighty Rome herself, until the
+journey was ended and distant Naples reached at last.
+
+But Miss St. Quentin's communings with nature were destined to speedy
+interruption. Ludovic Quayle's elongated person, clothed to the heels
+in a check traveling-coat, detached itself from the company of waiting
+passengers, and blue-linen-clad porters, upon the central platform
+before the main block of station buildings, and made its light and
+active way across the intervening lines of crimson-stained metals.
+
+"If I am a nuisance mention that chastening fact without hesitation,"
+he said, standing on the railway track and looking up at her with his
+air of very urbane intelligence. "Present circumstances permit us the
+privilege--or otherwise--of laying aside restraints of speech, along
+with other small proprieties of behaviour commonly observed by the
+polite. So don't spare my feelings, dear Miss St. Quentin. If I am a
+bore, tell me so, and I will return, and that without any lurking venom
+in my breast, whence I came."
+
+"Do anything you please," Honoria replied, "except be run over by the
+Paris train."
+
+"The Paris train, so I have just learned, is an hour late, consequently
+its arrival hardly enters into the question. But, since you are
+graciously pleased to bid me do as I like, I stay," Mr. Quayle
+returned, stepping on to the platform and turning to pace beside
+her.--"What a gaol delivery it is to get into the open! That last
+engine of ours threw ashes to a truly penitential extent. My mouth and
+throat still claim unpleasantly close relation to a neglected, kitchen
+grate. And if our much vaunted _waggon-lits_ is the last word of
+civilisation in connection with travel, then all I can say is that, in
+my humble opinion, civilisation has yet a most exceedingly long way to
+go. It really is a miraculously uncomfortable vehicle. And how Lady
+Calmady contrives to endure its eccentricities of climate and of
+motion, I'm sure I don't know."
+
+"In her case the end would make any sort of means supportable," Honoria
+answered.
+
+Her pacings had brought her to the extreme end of the platform where it
+sloped to the level of the track. She stood there a moment, her head
+thrown back, snuffing the wind as a hind, breaking covert, stands and
+snuffs it. A spirit of questioning possessed her, though not--as in the
+hind's case--of things concrete and material. It is true she could have
+dispensed with Mr. Quayle's society. She did not want him. But he had
+shown himself so full of resource, so considerate and helpful, ever
+since the news of Sir Richard Calmady's desperate state had broken up
+the peace of the little party at Ormiston Castle, now five days ago,
+that she forgave him even his preciousness of speech, even his slightly
+irritating superiority of manner. She had ceased to be on her guard
+with him during these days of travel, had come to take his presence for
+granted and to treat him with the comfortable indifference of honest
+good-fellowship. So, it followed that now, speaking with him, she
+continued to follow out her existing train of thought.
+
+"I'm by no means off my head about poor Dickie Calmady," she said
+presently,--"specially where Cousin Katherine is concerned. I couldn't
+go on caring about anybody, irrespective of their conduct, just because
+they were they. And yet I can't help seeing it must be tremendously
+satisfying to feel like that."
+
+"A thousand pardons," Ludovic murmured, "but like what?"
+
+"Why as Cousin Katherine feels--just whole-heartedly, without analysis,
+and without alloy--to feel that no distance, no fatigue, no nothing in
+short, matters, so long as she gets to him in time. I don't approve of
+such a state of mind, and yet"--Honoria wheeled round, facing the glory
+of colour dyeing all the west--"and yet, I'm untrue enough to my own
+principles rather to envy it."
+
+She sighed, and that sigh her companion noted and filed for reference.
+Indeed, an unusually expansive cheerfulness became, perceptible in Mr.
+Quayle.
+
+"By the bye, is there any further news?" she inquired.
+
+"General Ormiston has just had a telegram."
+
+"Anything fresh?"
+
+"Still unconscious, strength fairly maintained."
+
+"Oh! we know that by heart!" Honoria said.
+
+"We do. And we know the consequences of it--the sweet little see-saw of
+hope and fear, productive of unlimited discussion and anxiety. No weak
+letting one stand at ease about that telegram! It keeps one's nose hard
+down on the grindstone."
+
+"If he dies," Honoria said slowly, "if he dies--poor, dear Cousin
+Katherine!--When can we hear again?"
+
+"At Turin," Mr. Quayle replied.
+
+Then they both fell silent until the far end of the platform was
+reached. And there, once more, Honoria paused, her small head carried
+high, her serious eyes fixed upon the sunset. The rosy light falling
+upon her failed to disguise the paleness of her face or its slight
+angularity of line. She was a little worn and travel-stained, a little
+disheveled even. Yet to her companion she had rarely appeared more
+charming. She might be tired, she might even be somewhat untidy, but
+her innate distinction remained--nay, gained, so he judged, by
+suggestion of rough usage endured. Her absolute absence of affectation,
+her unself-consciousness, her indifference to adventitious prettinesses
+of toilet, her transparent sincerity, were very entirely approved by
+Ludovic Quayle.
+
+"Yes, that see-saw of hope and fear must be an awful ordeal, feeling as
+she does," Miss St. Quentin said presently. "And yet, even so, I am
+uncertain. I can't help wondering which really is best!"
+
+"Again a thousand pardons," the young man put in, "but I venture to
+remind you that I was not cradled in the forecourt of the temple of the
+Pythian Apollo, but only in the nursery of a conspicuously Philistine,
+English country-house."
+
+For the first time during their conversation Honoria looked full at
+him. Her glance was very friendly, yet it remained meditative, even a
+trifle sad.
+
+"Oh! I know, I'm fearfully inconsequent," she said. "But my head is
+simply rattled to pieces by that beastly _waggon-lit_. I had gone back
+to what I was thinking about before you joined me, and to what we were
+saying just now about Cousin Katherine."
+
+"Yes--yes, exactly," Ludovic put in tentatively. She was going to give
+herself away--he was sure of it. And such giving away might make for
+opportunity. In spirit, the young man proceeded to take his shoes from
+off his feet. The ground on which he stood might prove to be holy.
+Moreover Miss St. Quentin's direct acts of self-revelation were few and
+far between. He was horribly afraid those same shoes of his might
+creak, so to speak, thereby startling her into watchfulness, making her
+draw back. But Honoria did not draw back. She was too much absorbed by
+her own thought. She continued to contemplate the glory of the flaming
+west, her expression touched by a grave and noble enthusiasm.
+
+"I suppose one can't help worrying a little at times--it's laid hold of
+me very much during the last month or two--as to what is really the
+finest way to take life. One wants to arrive at that fairly early; not
+by a process of involuntary elimination, on the burnt-child-fears-the-fire
+sort of principle, when the show's more than half over, as so many
+people do. One wants to get hold of the stick by the right end now,
+while one's still comparatively young, and then work straight along. I
+want my reason to be the backbone of my action, don't you know, instead
+of merely the push of society and friendship, and superficial odds and
+ends of so-called obligation to other people."
+
+"Yes," Mr. Quayle put in again.
+
+"Now, it seems to me, that"--Honoria extended one hand towards the
+sunset--"is Cousin Katherine's outlook on life and humanity, full of
+colour, full of warmth. It burns with a certain prodigality of beauty,
+a superb absence of economy in giving. And that"--with a little shrug
+of her shoulders she turned towards the severe, and sombre, eastern
+landscape--"that, it strikes me, comes a good deal nearer my own. Which
+is best?"
+
+Mr. Quayle congratulated himself upon the removal of his shoes. The
+ground was holy--holy to the point of embarrassment even to so
+unabashable and ready-tongued a gentleman as himself. He answered with
+an unusual degree of diffidence.
+
+"An intermediate position is neither wholly inconceivable nor wholly
+untenable, perhaps."
+
+"And you occupy it? Yes, you are very neatly balanced. But then, do you
+really get anywhere?"
+
+"Is not that a rather knavish speech, dear Miss St. Quentin?" the young
+man inquired mildly.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, "I wish to goodness I did."
+
+Now was here god-given opportunity, or merely a cunningly devised snare
+for the taking of the unwary? Ludovic pondered the matter. He gently
+kicked a little pebble from the dingy gray-drab of the asphalt on to
+the permanent way. It struck one of the metals with a sharp click. A
+blue-linen-clad porter, short of stature and heavy of build, lighted
+the gas lamps along the platform. The flame of these wavered at first,
+and flickered, showing thin and will-o'-the-wisp-like against the great
+outspread of darkening country across which the wind came with a
+certain effect of harshness and barrenness--the inevitable concomitant
+of its inherent purity. And the said wind treated Miss St. Quentin
+somewhat discourteously, buffeting her, obliging her to put up both
+hands to push back stray locks of hair. Also the keen breath of it
+pierced her, making her shiver a little. Both of which things her
+companion noting, took heart of grace.
+
+"Is it permitted to renew a certain petition?" he asked, in a low
+voice.
+
+Honoria shook her head.
+
+"Better not, I think," she said.
+
+"And yet, dear Miss St. Quentin, pulverised though I am by the weight
+of my own unworthiness, I protest that petition is not wholly foreign
+to the question you did me the honour to ask me just now."
+
+"Oh! dear me! You always contrive to bring it round to that!" she
+exclaimed, not without a hint of petulance.
+
+"Far from it," the young man returned. "For a good, solid eighteen
+months, now, I have displayed the accumulated patience of innumerable
+asses."
+
+"Of course, I see what you're driving at," she continued hastily. "But
+it is not original. It's just every man's stock argument."
+
+"If it bears the hall-mark of hoary antiquity, so much the better. I
+entertain a reverence for precedent. And honestly, as common sense
+goes, I am not ashamed of that of my sex."
+
+Miss St. Quentin resumed her walk.
+
+"You really think it stands in one's way," she said reflectively, "you
+really think it a disadvantage, to be a woman?"
+
+"Oh! good Lord!" Mr. Quayle ejaculated, softly yet with an air so
+humorously aghast that it could leave no doubt as to the nature of his
+sentiments. Then he cursed himself for a fool. His shoes indeed had
+made a mighty creaking! He expected an explosion of scornful wrath. He
+admitted he deserved it. It did not come.
+
+Miss St. Quentin looked at him, for a moment, almost piteously. He
+fancied her mouth quivered and that her eyes filled with tears. Then
+she turned and swung away with her long, easy, even stride. Mentally
+the young man took himself by the throat, conscience-stricken at having
+humiliated her, at having caused her to fall, even momentarily, from
+the height of her serene, maidenly dignity. For once he became
+absolutely uncritical, careless of appearances. He fairly ran after her
+along the platform.
+
+"Dear Miss St. Quentin," he called to her, in tones of most persuasive
+apology.
+
+But Honoria's moment of piteousness was past. She had recovered all her
+habitual lazy and gallant grace when he came up with her.
+
+"No--no," she said. "Hear me. I began this rather foolish conversation.
+I laid myself open to--well to a snubbing. I got one, anyhow!"
+
+"In mercy don't rub it in!" Mr. Quayle murmured contritely.
+
+"But I did," Honoria returned. "Now it's over and I'm going to pick up
+the pieces and put them back in their places--just where they were
+before."
+
+"But I protest!--I hailed a new combination. I discover in myself no
+wild anxiety to have the pieces put back just where they were before."
+
+"Oh! yes, you do," Honoria declared. "At least, you certainly will when
+I explain it to you."--She paused.--"You see," she said, "it is like
+this. Living with and watching Cousin Katherine, I have come to know
+all that side of things at its very finest."
+
+"Forgive me.--It? What? May I recall to you the fact of the Philistine
+nursery?"
+
+The young lady's delicate face straightened.
+
+"You know perfectly well what I mean," she said.--"That which we all
+think about so constantly, and yet affect to speak of as a joke or a
+slight impropriety--love, marriage, motherhood."
+
+"Yes, Lady Calmady is a past-master in those arts," Mr. Quayle
+replied.--Again the ground was holy. He was conscious his pulse
+quickened.
+
+"The beauty of it all, as one sees it in her case, breaks one up a
+little. There is no laugh left in one about those things. One sees that
+to her they are of the nature of religion--a religion pure and
+undefiled, a new way of knowing God and of bringing oneself into line
+with the truth as it is in Him. But, having once seen that, one can
+decline upon no lower level. One grows ambitious. One will have it that
+way or not at all."
+
+Honoria paused again. The bleak wind buffeted her. But she was no
+longer troubled or chilled by it, rather did it brace her to greater
+fearlessness of resolve and of speech.
+
+"You are contemptuous of women," she said.
+
+"I have betrayed characteristics of the ass, other than its patience,"
+Ludovic lamented.
+
+"Oh! I didn't mean that," Honoria returned, smiling in friendliest
+fashion upon him. "Every man worth the name really feels as you do, I
+imagine. I don't blame you. Possibly I am growing a trifle shaky as to
+feminine superiority, and woman spelled with a capital letter, myself.
+I'm awfully afraid she is safest--for herself and others--under slight
+restraint, in a state of mild subjection. She's not quite to be
+trusted, either intellectually or emotionally--at least, the majority
+of her isn't. If she got her head, I've a dreadful suspicion she would
+make a worse hash of creation generally than you men have made of it
+already, and that"--Honoria's eyes narrowed, her upper lip shortened,
+and her smile shone out again delightfully--"that's saying a very great
+deal, you know."
+
+"My spirits rise to giddy heights," Mr. Quayle exclaimed. "I endorse
+those sentiments. But whence, oh, dear lady, this change of front?"
+
+"Wait a minute. We've not got to the end of my contention yet."
+
+"The Paris train is late. There is time. And this is all excellent
+hearing."
+
+"I'm not quite so sure of that," Honoria said. "For, you see, just in
+proportion as I give up the fiction of her superiority, and admit that
+woman already has her political, domestic, and social deserts, I feel a
+chivalry towards her, poor, dear thing, which I never felt before. I
+even feel a chivalry towards the woman in myself. She claims my pity
+and my care in a quite new way."
+
+"So much the better," Mr. Quayle observed, outwardly discreetly urbane,
+inwardly almost riotously jubilant.
+
+"Ah! wait a minute," she repeated. Her tone changed, sobered. "I don't
+want to spread myself, but you know I can meet men pretty well on their
+own ground. I could shoot and fish as well as most of you, only that I
+don't think it right to take life except to provide food, or in
+self-defense. There's not so much happiness going that one's justified
+in cutting any of it short. Even a jack-snipe may have his little
+affairs of the heart, and a cock-salmon his gamble. But I can ride as
+straight as you can. I can break any horse to harness you choose to put
+me behind. I can sail a boat and handle an axe. I can turn my hand to
+most practical things--except a needle. I own I always have hated a
+needle worse--well, worse than the devil! And I can organise, and can
+speak fairly well, and manage business affairs tidily. And have I not
+even been known--low be it spoken--to beat you at lawn tennis, and Lord
+Shotover at billiards?"
+
+"And to overthrow my most Socratic father in argument. And outwit my
+sister Louisa in diplomacy--_vide_ our poor, dear Dickie Calmady's
+broken engagement, and the excellent, scatter-brain Decies' marriage."
+
+"But Lady Constance is happy?" Honoria put in hastily.
+
+"Blissful, positively blissful, and with twins too! Think of
+it!--Decies is blissful also. His sense of humour has deteriorated
+since his marriage, from constant association with good, little Connie
+who was never distinguished for ready perception of a joke. He regards
+those small, simultaneous replicas of himself with unqualified
+complacency, which shows his appreciation of comedy must be a bit
+blunted."
+
+"I wonder if it does?" Miss St. Quentin observed reflectively. Whereat
+Mr. Quayle permitted himself a sound as nearly approaching a chuckle as
+was possible to so superior a person.
+
+"A thousand pardons," he murmured, "but really, dear lady, you are so
+very much off on the other tack."
+
+"Am I?" Miss St. Quentin said. "Well, you see--to go back to my
+demonstration--I've none of the quarrel with your side of things most
+women have, because I'm not shut out from it, and so I don't envy you.
+I can amuse and interest myself on your lines. And therefore I can
+afford to be very considerate and tender of the woman in me. I grow
+more and more resolved that she shall have the very finest going, or
+that she shall have nothing, in respect of all which belongs to her
+special province--in regard to love and marriage. In them she shall
+have what Cousin Katherine has had, and find what Cousin Katherine has
+found, or all that shall be a shut book to her forever. Even if
+discipline and denial make her a little unhappy, poor thing, that's far
+better than letting her decline upon the second best."
+
+Honoria's voice was full and sweet. She spoke from out the deep places
+of her thought. Her whole aspect was instinct with a calm and seasoned
+enthusiasm. And, looking upon her, it became Ludovic Quayle's turn to
+find the evening wind somewhat bleak and barren. It struck chill, and
+he turned away and moved westwards towards the sunset. But the
+rose-crimson splendours had become faint and frail, while the indigo
+cloud had gathered into long, horizontal lines as of dusky smoke, so
+that the remaining brightness was seen as through prison bars. A
+sadness, indeed, seemed to hold the west, even greater than that which
+held the east, since it was a sadness not of beauty unborn, but of
+beauty dead. And this struck home to the young man. He did not care to
+speak. Miss St. Quentin walked beside him in silence, for a time. When
+at last she spoke it was very gently.
+
+"Please don't be angry with me," she pleaded. "I like you so much
+that--that I'd give a great deal to be able to think less of my duty to
+the tiresome woman in me."
+
+"I would give a great deal too," he declared, regardless of grammar.
+
+"But I'm not the only woman in the world, dear Mr. Quayle," she
+protested presently.
+
+"But I, unfortunately, have no use for any other," he returned.
+
+"Ah, you distress me!" Honoria cried.
+
+"Well, I don't know that you make me superabundantly cheerful," he
+answered.
+
+Just then the far-away shriek of a locomotive and dull thunder of an
+approaching train was heard. Mr. Quayle looked once more towards the
+western horizon.
+
+"Here's the Paris-express!" he said. "We must be off if we mean to get
+round before our horse-box is shunted."
+
+He jumped down on to the permanent way. Miss St. Quentin followed him,
+and the two ran helter-skelter across the many lines of metals, in the
+direction of the Culoz-Geneva-Bale siding. That somewhat childish and
+undignified proceeding ministered to the restoration of good
+fellowship.
+
+"Great passions are rare," Mr. Quayle said, laughing a little. His
+circulation was agreeably quickened. How surprisingly fast this
+nymph-like creature could get over the ground, and that gracefully,
+moreover, rather in the style of a lissome, long-limbed youth than in
+that of a woman.
+
+"Rare? I know it," she answered, the words coming short and sharply.
+"But I accept the risk. A thousand to one the book remains shut
+forever."
+
+"And I, meanwhile, am not too proud to pass the time of day with the
+second best, and take refuge in the accumulated patience of innumerable
+asses."
+
+And, behind them, the express train thundered into the station.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+TELLING HOW, ONCE AGAIN, KATHERINE CALMADY LOOKED ON HER SON
+
+
+The bulletin received at Turin was sufficiently disquieting. Richard
+had had a relapse. And when at Bologna, just as the train was starting,
+General Ormiston entered the compartment occupied by the two ladies,
+there was that in his manner which made Miss St. Quentin lay aside the
+magazine she was reading and, rising silently from her place opposite
+Lady Calmady, go out on to the narrow passageway of the long
+sleeping-car. She was very close to the elder woman in the bonds of a
+dear and intimate friendship, yet hardly close enough, so she judged,
+to intrude her presence if evil-tidings were to be told. A man going
+into battle might look, so she thought, as Roger Ormiston looked
+now--very stern and strained. It was more fitting to leave the brother
+and sister alone together for a little space.
+
+At the far end of the passageway the servants were grouped--Clara,
+comely of face and of person, neat notwithstanding the demoralisation
+of feminine attire incident to prolonged travel. Winter, the Brockhurst
+butler, clean-shaven, gray-headed, suggestive of a distinguished
+Anglican ecclesiastic in mufti. Miss St. Quentin's lady's-maid,
+Faulstich by name, a North-Country woman, angular of person and of
+bearing, loyal of heart. And Zimmermann, the colossal German-Swiss
+courier, with his square, yellow beard and hair _en brosse_. An air of
+discouragement pervaded the party, involving even the polyglot
+conductor of the _waggon-lits_, a small, quick, sandy-complexioned,
+young fellow of uncertain nationality, with a gold band round his
+peaked cap. He respected this family which could afford to take a
+private railway-carriage half across Europe. He shared their anxieties.
+And these were evidently great. Clara wept. The old butler's mouth
+twitched, and his slightly pendulous cheeks quivered. The door at the
+extreme end of the car was set wide open. Ludovic Quayle stood upon the
+little, iron balcony smoking. His feet were planted far apart, yet his
+tall figure swayed and curtseyed queerly as the heavy carriage bumped
+and rattled across the points. High walls, overtopped by the dark
+spires of cypresses, overhung by radiant wealth of lilac Wisteria, and
+of roses red, yellow, and white, reeled away in the keen sunshine to
+the left and right. Then, clearing the outskirts of the town, the train
+roared southward across the fair, Italian landscape beneath the
+pellucid, blue vault of the fair, Italian sky. And to Honoria there was
+something of heartlessness in all that fair outward prospect. Here, in
+Italy, the ancient gods reigned still, surely, the gods who are
+careless of human woe.
+
+"Is there bad news, Winter?" she asked.
+
+"Mr. Bates telegraphs to the General that it would be well her ladyship
+should be prepared for the worst."
+
+"It'll kill my lady. For certain sure it will kill her! She never could
+be expected to stand up against that. And just as she was getting round
+from her own illness so nicely too----"
+
+Audibly Clara wept. Her tears so affected the sandy-complexioned,
+polyglot conductor that he retired into his little pantry and made a
+most unholy clattering among the plates and knives and forks. Honoria
+put her hand upon the sobbing woman's shoulder and drew her into the
+comparative privacy of the adjoining compartment, rendered not a little
+inaccessible by a multiplicity of rugs, traveling-bags, and
+hand-luggage.
+
+"Come, sit down, Clara," she said. "Have your cry out. And then pull
+yourself together. Remember Lady Calmady will want just all you can do
+for her if Sir Richard--if"--and Honoria was aware somehow of a sharp
+catch in her throat--"if he does not live."
+
+And, meanwhile, Roger Ormiston, now in sober and dignified middle-age,
+found himself called upon to repeat that rather sinister experience of
+his hot and rackety youth, and, as he put it bitterly, "act hangman to
+his own sister." For, as he approached her, Katherine, leaning back
+against the piled-up cushions in the corner of the railway carriage,
+suddenly sat bolt-upright, stretching out her hands in swift fear and
+entreaty, as in the state bedroom at Brockhurst nine-and-twenty years
+ago.
+
+"Oh, Roger, Roger!" she cried, "tell me, what is it?"
+
+"Nothing final as yet, thank God," he answered. "But it would be cruel
+to keep the truth from you, Kitty, and let you buoy yourself up with
+false hopes."
+
+"He is worse," Katherine said.
+
+"Yes, he is worse. He is a good deal weaker. I'm afraid the state of
+affairs has become very grave. Evidently they are apprehensive as to
+what turn the fever may take in the course of the next twelve hours."
+
+Katherine bowed herself together as though smitten by sharp pain. Then
+she looked at him hurriedly, fresh alarms assaulting her.
+
+"You are not trying to soften the blow to me? You are not keeping
+anything back?"
+
+"No, no, no, my dear Kitty. There--see--read it for yourself. I
+telegraphed twice, so as to have the latest news. Here's the last
+reply."
+
+Ormiston unfolded the blue paper, crossed by white strips of printed
+matter, and laid it upon her lap. And as he did so it struck him,
+aggravating his sense of sinister repetition, that she had on the same
+rings and bracelets as on that former occasion, and that she wore
+stone-gray silk too--a long traveling sacque, lined and bordered with
+soft fur. It rustled as she moved. A coif of black lace covered her
+upturned hair, framed her sweet face, and was tied soberly under her
+chin. And, looking upon her, Ormiston yearned in spirit over this
+beautiful woman who had borne such grievous sorrows, and who, as he
+feared, had sorrow yet more grievous still to bear.--"For ten to one
+the boy won't pull through--he won't pull through," he said to himself.
+"Poor, dear fellow, he's nothing left to fall back upon. He's lived too
+hard." And then he took himself remorsefully to task, asking himself
+whether, among the pleasures and ambitions and successes of his own
+career, he had been quite faithful to the dead, and quite watchful
+enough over the now dying, Richard Calmady? He reproached himself, for,
+when Death stands at the gate, conscience grows very sensitive
+regarding any lapses, real or imagined, of duty towards those for whom
+that dread ambassador waits.
+
+Twice Katherine read the telegram, weighing each word of it. Then she
+gave the blue paper back to her brother.
+
+"I will ask you all to let me be alone for a little while, dear Roger,"
+she said. "Tell Honoria, tell Ludovic, tell my good Clara. I must turn
+my face to the wall for a time, so that, when I turn it upon you dear
+people again, it may not be too unlovely."
+
+And Ormiston bent his head and kissed her hand, and went out, closing
+the door behind him--while the train roared southward, through the
+afternoon sunshine, southward towards Chiusi and Rome.
+
+And Katherine Calmady sat quietly amid the noise and violent,
+on-rushing movement, making up accounts with her own motherhood. That
+she might never see Dickie again, she herself dying, was an idea which
+had grown not unfamiliar to her during these last sad years. But that
+she should survive, only to see Dickie dead, was a new idea and one
+which joined hands with despair, since it constituted a conclusion big
+with the anguish of failure to the tragedy of their relation, hers and
+his. Her whole sense of justice, of fitness, rebelled under it,
+rebelled against it. She implored a space, however brief, of
+reconciliation and reunion before the supreme farewell was said. But it
+had become natural to Katherine's mind, so unsparingly self-trained in
+humble obedience to the divine ordering, not to stay in the
+destructive, but pass on to the constructive stage. She would not
+indulge herself in rebellion, but rather fashion her thought without
+delay to that which should make for inward peace. And so now, turning
+her eyes, in thought, from the present, she went back on the baby-love,
+the child-love which, notwithstanding the abiding smart of Richard's
+deformity, had been so very exquisite to her. Upon the happier side of
+all that she had not dared to dwell during this prolonged period of
+estrangement. It was too poignant, too deep-seated in the springs of
+her physical being. To dwell on it enervated and unnerved her. But now,
+Richard the grown man dying, she gave herself back to Richard the
+little child. It solaced her to do so. Then he had been wholly hers.
+And he was wholly hers still, in respect of that early time. The man
+she had lost--so it seemed, how far through fault of her own she could
+not tell. And just now she refused to analyse all that. Upon all which
+strengthened endurance, upon gracious memories engendering
+thankfulness, could her mind alone profitably be fixed. And so, as the
+train roared southward, and the sun declined and the swift dusk spread
+its mantle over the face of the classic landscape, Katherine cradled a
+phantom baby on her knee, and sat in the oriel window of the
+Chapel-Room, at Brockhurst, with the phantom of her boy beside her,
+while she told him old-time legends of war, and of high endeavour, and
+of gallant adventure, watching the light dance in his eyes as her words
+awoke in him emulation of those masters of noble deeds whose exploits
+she recounted. And in this she found comfort, and a chastened calm. So
+that, when at length General Ormiston--incited thereto by the faithful
+Clara, who protested that her ladyship must and should dine--returned
+to her, he found her storm-tossed no longer, but tranquil in expression
+and solicitous for the comfort of others. She had conquered nature by
+grace--conquered, in that she had compelled herself to unqualified
+submission. If this cup might not pass from her, still would she praise
+Almighty God and bless His Holy Name, asking not that her own, but His
+will, be done.
+
+It followed that the evening, spent in that strangely noisy,
+oscillating, onward-rushing dwelling-place of a railway-carriage, was
+not without a certain subdued brightness of intercourse and
+conversation. Katherine was neither preoccupied nor distrait, or
+unamused even by the small accidents and absurdities of travel. Later,
+while preparations were being made by the servants for the coming
+night, she went out, with the two gentlemen and Honoria St. Quentin, on
+to the iron platform at the rear of the swaying car, and stood there
+under the stars. The mystery of these last, and of the dimly discerned
+and sleeping land, offered penetrating contrast to the sleeplessness of
+the hurrying train with its long, sinuous line of lighted windows, and
+to the sleeplessness of her own heart. The fret of human life is but as
+a little island in the great ocean of eternal peace--so she told
+herself--and then bade that sleepless heart of hers both still its
+passionate beating and take courage. And when, at length, she was
+alone, and lay down in her narrow berth, peace and thankfulness
+remained with Katherine. The care and affection of brother, friends,
+and servants, was very grateful to her, so that she composed herself to
+rest, whether slumber was granted her or not. The event was in the
+hands of God--that surely was enough.
+
+And in the dawn, reaching Rome, the news was so far better that it was
+not worse. Richard lived. And when, some seven hours later, the train
+steamed into Naples station, and Bates, the house-steward--the marks of
+haste and keen anxiety upon him--pushed his way up to the carriage
+door, he could report there was this amount of hope even yet, that
+Richard still lived, though his strength was as that of an infant and
+whether it would wax or wane wholly none as yet could say.
+
+"Then we are in time, Bates?" Lady Calmady had asked, desiring further
+assurance.
+
+"I hope so, my lady. But I would advise your coming as quickly as
+possible."
+
+"Is he conscious?"
+
+"He knew Captain Vanstone this morning, my lady, just before I left."
+
+The man-servant shouldered the crowd aside unceremoniously, so as to
+force a passage for Lady Calmady.
+
+"Her ladyship should go up to the villa at once, sir," he said to
+General Ormiston. "I had better accompany her. I will leave Andrews to
+make all arrangements here. The carriage is waiting."
+
+Then, Honoria beside her, Katherine was aware of the hot glare and hard
+shadow, the grind and clatter, the violent colour, the strident
+vivacity of the Neapolitan streets, as with voice and whip, Garcia
+sprung the handsome, long-tailed, black horses up the steep ascent.
+This, followed by the impression of a cool, spacious, and lofty
+interior, of mild-diffused light, of pale, marble floors and stairways,
+of rich hangings and distinguished objects of art, of the soft, green
+gloom of ilex and myrtle, the languid drip of fountains. And this last
+served to mark, as with raised finger, the hush,--bland, yet very
+imperative--which held all the place. After the ceaseless jar and
+tumult of that many-days' journey, here, up at the villa, it seemed as
+though urgency were absurd, hot haste of affection a little vulgar, a
+little contemptible, all was so composed, so urbane.
+
+And that urbanity, so bland, so, in a way, supercilious, affected
+Honoria St. Quentin unpleasantly. She was taken with unreasoning
+dislike of the place, finding something malign, trenching on cruelty
+even, in its exalted serenity, its unchanging, inaccessible, mask-like
+smile. Very certainly the ancient gods held court here yet, the gods
+who are careless of human tears, heedless of human woe! And she looked
+anxiously at Lady Calmady, penetrated by fear that the latter was about
+to be exposed to some insidious danger, to come into conflict with
+influences antagonistic and subtly evil. Wicked deeds had been
+committed in this fair place, wicked designs nourished and brought to
+fruition here. She was convinced of that. Was convinced further that
+those designs had connection with and had been directed against Lady
+Calmady. The thought of Helen de Vallorbes, exquisite and vicious,--as
+she now reluctantly admitted her to be,--was very present to her. As
+far as she knew, it was quite a number of years since Helen had set
+foot in the villa. Yet it spoke of her, spoke of the more dangerous
+aspects of her nature.--Honoria sighed over her friend. Helen had gone,
+latterly, very much to the bad, she feared. And as all this passed
+rapidly through her mind it aroused all her knight-errantry, raising a
+strongly protective spirit in her. She questioned just how much active
+care she might take of Lady Calmady without indiscretion of
+over-forwardness.
+
+But even while she thus debated, opportunity of action was lost.
+Quietly, a great simplicity and singleness of purpose in her demeanour,
+without word spoken, without looking back, Katherine followed the
+house-steward across the cool, spacious hall, through a doorway and out
+of sight.
+
+And that singleness of purpose, so discernible in her outward
+demeanour, possessed Katherine's being throughout. She was as one who
+walks in sleep, pushed by blind impulse. She was not conscious of
+herself, not conscious of joy or fear, or any emotion. She moved
+forward dumbly, and without volition, towards the event. Her senses
+were confused by this transition to stillness from noise, by the
+immobility of all surrounding objects after the reeling landscape on
+either hand the swaying train, by the bland and tempered light after
+the harsh contrasts of glare and darkness so constantly offered to her
+vision of late. She was dazed and faint, moreover, so that her knees
+trembled, her sensibility, her powers of realisation and of sympathy,
+for the time being, atrophied.
+
+The house-steward ushered her into a large, square room. The low,
+darkly-painted, vaulted ceiling of it produced a cavernous effect. An
+orderly disorder prevailed, and a somewhat mournful dimness of closed,
+green-slatted shutters and half-drawn curtains. The furniture, costly
+in fact, but dwarfed, in some cases actually legless, was ranged
+against the squat, carven bookcases that lined the walls, leaving the
+middle of the room vacant save for a low, narrow camp-bed. The bed
+stood at right angles to the door by which Katherine entered, the head
+of it towards the shuttered, heavily-draped windows, the foot towards
+the inside wall of the room. At the bedside a man knelt on one knee,
+and his appearance aroused, in a degree, Katherine's dormant powers of
+observation. He had a short, crisp, black beard and crisp, black hair.
+He was alert and energetic of face and figure, a man of dare-devil,
+humorous, yet kindly eyes. He wore a blue serge suit with brass buttons
+to it. He was in his stocking-feet. The wristbands and turn-down collar
+of his white shirt were immaculate. Katherine, lost, trembling, the
+support of the habitual taken from her, a stranger in a strange land,
+liked the man. He appeared so admirable an example of physical health.
+He inspired her with confidence, his presence seeming to carry with it
+assurance of that which is wholesome, normal, and sane. He glanced at
+her sharply, not without hint of criticism and of command.
+Authoritatively he signed to her to remain silent, to stand at the head
+of the bed, and well clear of it, out of sight. Katherine did not
+resent this. She obeyed.
+
+And standing thus, rallying her will to conscious effort, she looked
+steadily, for the first time, at the bed and that which lay upon it.
+And so doing she could hardly save herself from falling, since she saw
+there precisely that which the shape of the room and the disarray of
+it, along with vacant space and the low camp-bed in the centre of that
+space, had foretold--for all her dumbness of feeling, deadness of
+sympathy--she must assuredly see.--All these last four-and-twenty hours
+she had solaced herself with the phantom society of Dickie the
+baby-child, of Dickie the eager boy, curious of many things. But here
+was one different from both these. Different, too, from the young man,
+tremendous in arrogance, and in revolt against the indignity put on him
+by fate, from whom she had parted in such anguish of spirit nearly five
+years back. For, in good truth, she saw now, not Richard Calmady her
+son, her anxious charge, whose debtor--in that she had brought him into
+life disabled--she held herself eternally to be, but Richard Calmady
+her husband, the desire of her eyes, the glory of her youth--saw him,
+worn by suffering, disfigured by unsightly growth of beard, pallid,
+racked by mortal weakness, the sheet expressing the broad curve of his
+chest, the sheet and light blanket disclosing the fact of that hideous
+maiming he had sustained--saw him now as on the night he died.
+
+Captain Vanstone, meanwhile reassured as to the newcomer's discretion
+and docility, applied his mind to his patient.
+
+"See here, sir," he said, banteringly yet tenderly, "we were just
+getting along first-rate with these uncommonly mixed liquors. You
+mustn't cry off again, Sir Richard."
+
+He slipped his arm under the pillows, dexterously raising the young
+man's head, and held the cup to his lips.
+
+"My dear good fellow, I wish you would let me be," Dickie murmured.
+
+He spoke courteously, yet there were tears in his voice for very
+weakness. And, hearing him, it was as though something stirred within
+Katherine which had long been bound by bitterness of heavy frost.
+
+Vanstone shook his head.--"Very sorry, Sir Richard," he replied.
+"Daren't let you off. I've got my orders, you see."
+
+The bold and kindly eyes had a certain magnetic efficacy of compulsion
+in them. The sick man drank, swallowed with difficulty, yet drank
+again. Then he lay back, for a while, his eyes closed, resting. And
+Katherine stood at the head of the bed, out of sight, waiting till her
+time should come. She folded her hands high upon her bosom. Her thought
+remained inarticulate, yet she began to understand that which she had
+striven so sternly to uproot, that which she had supposed she had
+extirpated, still remained with her. Once more, with a terror of joyful
+amazement, she began to scale the height and sound the depth of human
+love.
+
+Presently the voice--whether that of husband or of son she did not stay
+to discriminate--it gripped her very vitals--reached her from the bed.
+She fancied it rang a little stronger.
+
+"It is contemptibly futile, and therefore conspicuously in keeping with
+the rest, to have taken all this trouble about dying only, in the end,
+to sneak back."
+
+"Oh! well, sir, after all you're not so very far on the return voyage
+yet!" Vanstone put in consolingly.
+
+Richard opened his eyes. Katherine's vision was blurred. She could not
+see very clearly, but she fancied he smiled.
+
+"Yes, with luck, I may still give you all the slip," he said.
+
+"Now, a little more, sir, please. Yes, you can if you try."
+
+"But I tell you I don't care about this business of sneaking back. I
+don't want to live."
+
+"Very likely not. But I'm very much mistaken if you want to die, like a
+cat in a cupboard, here ashore. Mend enough to get away on board the
+yacht to sea. There'll be time enough then to argue the question out,
+sir. Half a mile of blue water under your feet sends up the value of
+life most considerably."
+
+As he spoke the sailor looked at Katherine Calmady. His glance enjoined
+caution, yet conveyed encouragement.
+
+"Here, take down the rest of it, Sir Richard," he said persuasively.
+"Then I swear I won't plague you any more for a good hour."
+
+Again he raised the sick man dexterously, and as he did so Katherine
+observed that a purple scar, as of a but newly healed wound, ran right
+across Dickie's cheek from below the left eye to the turn of the lower
+jaw. And the sight of it moved her strangely, loosening that last
+binding as of frost. A swift madness of anger against whoso had
+inflicted that ugly hurt arose in Katherine, while her studied
+resignation, her strained passivity of mental attitude, went down
+before a passion of fierce and primitive emotion. The spirit of battle
+became dominant in her along with an immense necessity of loving and of
+being loved. Tender phantoms of past joy ceased to solace. The actual,
+the concrete, the immediate, compelled her with a certain splendour of
+demand. Katherine appeared to grow taller, more regal of presence. The
+noble energy of youth and its limitless generosity returned to her.
+Instinctively she unfastened her pelisse at the throat, took the lace
+coif from her head, letting it fall to the ground, and moved nearer.
+
+Richard pushed the cup away from his lips.
+
+"There's some one in the room, Vanstone!" he said, his voice harsh with
+anger. "Some woman--I heard her dress. I told you all--whatever
+happened--I would have no woman here."
+
+But Katherine, undismayed, came straight on to the bedside. She loved.
+She would not be gainsaid. With the whole force of her nature she
+refused denial of that love.--For a brief space Richard looked at her,
+his face ghastly and rigid as that of a Corpse. Then he raised himself
+in the bed, stretching out both arms, with a hoarse cry that tore at
+his throat and shuddered through all his frame. And, as he would have
+fallen forward, exhausted by the effort to reach her and the lovely
+shelter of her, Katherine caught and, kneeling, held him, his poor
+hands clutching impotently at her shoulders, his head sinking upon her
+breast. While, in that embrace, not only all the motherhood in her
+leapt up to claim the sonship in him, but all the womanhood in her
+leapt up to claim the manhood in him, thereby making the broken circle
+of her being once more wholly perfect and complete, so that carrying
+the whole dear burden of his fever-wasted body in her encircling arms
+and upon her breast, even as she had carried, long since, that dear
+fruit of love, the unborn babe, within her womb, Katherine was taken
+with a very ecstasy and rapture of content.
+
+"My beloved is mine--is mine!" she cried,--"and I am his."
+
+Captain Vanstone was on his feet and half-way across the room.
+
+"Man alive, but it hurts like merry hell!" he said, as he softly closed
+the door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CONCERNING A SPIRIT IN PRISON
+
+
+Upon those moments of rapture followed days of trembling, during which
+the sands of Richard Calmady's life ran very low, and his brain
+wandered in delirium, and he spoke unwittingly of many matters of which
+it was unprofitable to hear. Periods of unconsciousness, when he lay as
+one dead; periods of incessant utterance--now violent in unavailing
+repudiation, now harsh with unavailing remorse--alternated. And, at
+this juncture, much of Lady Calmady's former very valiant pride
+asserted itself. In tender jealousy for the honour of her beloved one
+she shut the door of that sick-room, of sinister aspect, against
+brother and friend, and even against the faithful Clara. None should
+see or hear Richard in his present alienation and abjection, save
+herself and those who had hitherto ministered to him. He should regain
+a measure, at least, of his old distinction and beauty before any,
+beyond these, looked on his face. And so his own men-servants--Captain
+Vanstone, capable, humorous, and alert--and Price, the red-headed,
+Welsh first-mate, of varied and voluminous gift of invective--continued
+to nurse him. These men loved him. They would be loyal in silence,
+since, whatever his lapses, Dickie was and always had been--as
+Katherine reflected--among the number of those happily-endowed persons
+who triumphantly give the lie to the cynical saying that "no man is a
+hero to his _valet de chambre_."
+
+To herself Katherine reserved the right to enter that sinister
+sick-room whenever she pleased, and to sit by the bedside, waiting for
+the moment--should it ever come--when Richard would again recognise
+her, and give himself to her again. And those vigils proved a searching
+enough experience, notwithstanding her long apprenticeship to service
+of sorrow--which was also the service of her son. For, in the mental
+and moral nudity of delirium, he made strange revelation, not only of
+acts committed, but of inherent tendencies of character and of thought.
+He spoke, with bewildering inconsequence and intimacy, of incidents and
+of persons with whom she was unacquainted, causing her to follow him--a
+rather brutal pilgrimage--into regions where the feet of women, bred
+and nurtured like herself, but seldom tread. He spoke of persons with
+whom she was well acquainted also, and whose names arrested her
+attention with pathetic significance, offering, for the moment, secure
+standing ground amid the shifting quicksand of his but half-comprehended
+words. He spoke of Morabita, the famous _prima donna_, and of gentle
+Mrs. Chifney down at the Brockhurst racing-stables. He grew heated in
+discussion with Lord Fallowfeild. He petted little Lady Constance
+Quayle. He called Camp, coaxed and chaffed the dog merrily--whereat
+Lady Calmady rose from her place by the bedside and stood at one of the
+dim, shuttered windows for a while. He spoke of places, too, and of
+happenings in them, from Westchurch to Constantinople, from a nautch at
+Singapore to a country fair at Farley Row. But, recurrent through all
+his wanderings, were allusions, unsparing in revolt and in self-abasement,
+to a woman whom he had loved and who had dealt very vilely with him,
+putting some unpardonable shame upon him, and to a man whom he himself
+had very basely wronged. The name, neither of man nor woman, did
+Katherine learn.--Madame de Vallorbes' name, for which she could not
+but listen, he never mentioned, nor did he mention her own.--And
+recurrent, also, running as a black thread through all his speech, was
+lament, not unmanly but very terrible to hear--the lament of a creature,
+captive, maimed, imprisoned, perpetually striving, perpetually
+frustrated in the effort, to escape. And, noting all this, Katherine
+not only divined very dark and evil pages in the history of her beloved
+one, but a struggle so continuous and a sorrow so abiding that, in her
+estimation at all events, they cancelled and expiated the darkness and
+evil of those same pages. While the mystery, both of wrong done and
+sorrow suffered, so wrought upon her that, having, in the first ecstasy
+of recovered human love, deserted and depreciated the godward love a
+little, she now ran back imploring assurance and renewal of that last,
+in all penitence and humility, lest, deprived of the counsel and sure
+support of it, she should fail to read the present and deal with the
+future aright--if, indeed, any future still remained for that beloved
+one other than the yawning void of death and inscrutable silence of the
+grave!
+
+The better part of a week passed thus, and then, one fair morning,
+Winter, bringing her breakfast to the anteroom of that same sea-blue,
+sea-green bedchamber--sometime tenanted by Helen de Vallorbes--disclosed
+a beaming countenance.
+
+"Mr. Powell wishes me to inform your ladyship that Sir Richard has
+passed a very good night. He has come to himself, my lady, and has
+asked for you."
+
+The butler's hands shook as he set down the tray.
+
+"I hope your ladyship will take something to eat before you go
+down-stairs," he added. "Mr. Powell told Sir Richard that it was still
+early, and he desired that on no consideration should you be hurried."
+
+Which little word of thoughtfulness on Dickie's part brought a
+roundness to Katherine's cheek and a soft shining into her sweet eyes,
+so that Honoria St. Quentin, sauntering into the room just then with
+her habitual lazy grace, stood still a moment in pleased surprise,
+noting the change in her friend's appearance.
+
+"Why, dear Cousin Katherine," she asked, "what's happened? All's right
+with the world!"
+
+"Yes," Katherine answered. "God's very much in His heaven, to-day, and
+all's right with all the world, because things are a little more right
+with one man in it.--That is the woman's creed--always has been, I
+suppose, and I rather hope always will be. It is frankly personal and
+individualistic, I know. Possibly it is contemptibly narrow-minded.
+Still I doubt if she will readily find another one which makes for
+greater happiness or fulness of life. You don't agree, dearest, I
+know--nevertheless pour out my tea for me, will you? I want to dispose
+of this necessary evil of breakfast with all possible despatch. Richard
+has sent for me. He has slept and is awake."
+
+And as Miss St. Quentin served her dear friend, she pondered this
+speech curiously, saying to herself:--"Yes, I did right, though I never
+liked Ludovic Quayle better than now, and never liked any other man as
+well as I like Ludovic Quayle. But that's not enough. I'm getting hold
+of the appearance of the thing, but I haven't got hold of the thing
+itself. And so the woman in me must continue to be kept in the back
+attic. She shall be denied all further development. She shall have
+nothing unless she can have the whole of it, and repeat Cousin
+Katherine's creed from her heart."
+
+Richard did not speak when Lady Calmady crossed the room and sat down
+at the bedside. He barely raised his eyelids. But he felt out for her
+hand across the surface of the sheet. And she took the proffered hand
+in both hers and fell to stroking the palm of it with her finger-tips.
+And this silent greeting, and confiding contact of hand with hand, was
+to her exquisitely healing. It gave an assurance of nearness and
+acknowledged ownership, more satisfying and convincing than many
+eloquent phrases of welcome. And so she, too, remained silent, only
+indeed permitting herself, for a little while, to look at him, lest so
+doing she should make further demand upon his poor quantity of
+strength. A folding screen in stamped leather, of which age had
+tempered the ruby and gold to a sober harmony of tone, had been placed
+round the head of the bed, throwing this last into clear, quiet shadow.
+The bed linen was fresh and smooth. Richard had made a little toilet.
+His silk shirt, open at the throat, was also fresh and smooth. He was
+clean shaven, his hair cropped into that closely-fitting, bright-brown
+cap of curls. Katherine perceived that his beauty had begun to return
+to him, though his face was distressingly worn and emaciated, and the
+long, purplish line of that unexplained scar still disfigured his
+cheek. His hands were little more than skin and bone. Indeed, he was
+fragile, she feared, as any person could be who yet had life in him,
+and she wondered, rather fearfully, if it was yet possible to build up
+that life again into any joy of energy and of activity. But she put
+such fears from her as unworthy. For were they not together, he and
+she, actually and consciously reunited? That was sufficient. The rest
+could wait.
+
+And to-day, as though lending encouragement to gracious hopes, the
+usually gloomy and cavernous room had taken to itself a quite generous
+plenishing of air and light. The heavy curtains were drawn aside. The
+casements of one of the square, squat windows were thrown widely open.
+The slatted shutters without were partially opened likewise. A shaft of
+strong sunshine slanted in and lay, like a bright highway, across the
+rich colours of the Persian carpet. The air was hot but nimble, and of
+a vivacious and stimulating quality. It fluttered some loose papers on
+the writing-table near the open window. It fluttered the delicate laces
+and fine muslin frills of Lady Calmady's morning-gown. There was a
+sprightly mirthfulness in the touch of it, not unpleasing to her. For
+it seemed to speak of the ever-obtaining youth, the incalculable power
+of recuperation, the immense reconstructive energy resident in nature
+and the physical domain. And there was comfort in that thought. She
+turned her eyes from the bed and its somewhat sorrowful burden--the
+handsome head, the broad, though angular, shoulders, the face, immobile
+and mask-like, with closed eyelids and unsmiling lips, reposing upon
+the whiteness of the pillows--and fixed them upon that radiant space of
+outer world visible between the dark-framing of the half-open shutters.
+Beyond the dazzling, black-and-white chequer of the terrace and
+balustrade, they rested on the cool green of the formal garden, the
+glistering dome and slender columns of the pavilion set in the angle of
+the terminal wall.--And this last reminded her quaintly of that other
+pavilion, embroidered, with industry of innumerable stitches, upon the
+curtains of the state bed at home--that pavilion, set for rest and
+refreshment in the midst of the tangled ways of the Forest of This
+Life, where the Hart may breathe in security, fearless of Care, the
+pursuing Leopard, which follows all too close behind.--Owing to her
+position and the sharp drop of the hillside, Naples itself, the great
+painted city, its fine buildings and crowded shipping, was unseen. But,
+far away, the lofty promontory of Sorrento sketched itself in palest
+lilac upon the azure of the sea and sky.
+
+And, as Katherine reasoned, if this fair prospect, after so many ages
+of tumultuous history and the shock of calamitous events, after battle,
+famine, terror of earthquake and fire, devastation by foul disease,
+could still recover and present such an effect of triumphant
+youthfulness, such, at once august and mirthful, charm, might not her
+beloved one, lying here broken in health and in spirit, likewise regain
+the glory of his manhood and the delight of it, notwithstanding present
+weakness and mournful eclipse?--Yes, it would come right--come
+right--Katherine told herself, thereby making one of those magnificent
+acts of faith which go so far to produce just that which they prophesy.
+God could not have created so complex and beautiful a creature, and
+permitted it so to suffer, save to the fulfilment of some clear purpose
+which would very surely be made manifest at last. God Almighty should
+be justified of His strange handiwork; and she of her love before the
+whole of the story was told.--And, stirred by these thoughts, and by
+the fervour of her own pious confidence, Katherine's finger-tips
+traveled more rapidly over the palm of that outstretched and passive
+hand. Then, on a sudden, she became aware that Richard was looking
+fixedly at her. She turned her head proudly, the exaltation of a living
+faith very present in her smile.
+
+"You are the same," he said slowly. His voice was low, toneless, and
+singularly devoid of emotion.--"Deliciously the same. You are just as
+lovely. You still have your pretty colour. You are hardly a day
+older----"
+
+He paused, still regarding her fixedly.
+
+"I'm glad you have got on one of those white, frilly things you used to
+wear. I always liked them."
+
+Katherine could not speak just then. This sudden and complete intimacy
+unnerved her. It was so long since any one had spoken to her thus. It
+was very dear to her, yet the toneless voice gave a strange unreality
+to the tender words.
+
+"It's a matter for congratulation that you are the same," Richard went
+on, "since everything else, it appears, is destined to continue the
+same. One should have one thing it is agreeable to contemplate in that
+connection, considering the vast number of things altogether the
+reverse of agreeable which one fondly hoped one was rid of forever, and
+which intrude themselves."
+
+He shifted himself feebly on the pillows, and the flicker of a smile
+crossed his face.
+
+"Poor, dear mother," he said, "you see again, without delay, the old
+bad habit of grumbling!"
+
+"Grumble on, grumble on, my best beloved," Katherine murmured, while
+her finger-tips traveled softly over his palm.
+
+"Verily and indeed, you are the same!" Richard rejoined. Once more he
+lay looking full at her, until she became almost abashed by that
+unswerving scrutiny. It came over her that the plane of their relation
+had changed. Richard was, as never heretofore, her equal, a man grown.
+
+Suddenly he spoke.
+
+"Can you forgive me?"
+
+And so far had Katherine's thought journeyed from the past, so absorbed
+was it in the present, that she answered, surprised:--
+
+"My dearest, forgive what?"
+
+"Injustice, ingratitude, desertion," Richard said, "neglect, systematic
+cruelty. There is plenty to swell the list. All I boasted I would do I
+have done--and more."--His voice, until now so even and emotionless,
+faltered a little. "I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and
+am no more worthy to be called thy son."
+
+Katherine's hand closed down on his firmly.
+
+"All that, as far as I am concerned, is as though it was not and never
+had been," she answered.--"So much for judgment on earth,
+dearest.--While in heaven, thank God, we know there is more joy over
+the one sinner who repents than over the ninety-and-nine just persons
+who need no repentance."
+
+"And you really believe that?" Richard said, speaking half indulgently,
+half ironically, as if to a child.
+
+"Assuredly, I believe it."
+
+"But supposing the sinner is not repentant, but merely cowed?"--Richard
+straightened his head on the pillows and closed his eyes. "You gave me
+leave to grumble--well, then, I am so horribly disappointed. Here have
+life and death been sitting on either side of me for the past month,
+and throwing with dice for me. I saw them as plainly as I can see you.
+The queer thing was they were exactly alike, yet I knew them apart from
+the first. Day and night I heard the rattle of the dice--it became
+hideously monotonous--and felt the mouth of the dice-box on my chest
+when they threw. I backed death heavily. It seemed to me there were
+ways of loading the dice. I loaded them. But it wasn't to be, mother.
+Life always threw the highest numbers--and life had the last throw."
+
+"I praise God for that," Katherine said, very softly.
+
+"I don't, unfortunately," he answered. "I hoped for a neat little
+execution--a little pain, perhaps, a little shedding of blood, without
+which there is no remission of sins--but I suppose that would have been
+letting me off too easy."
+
+He drew away his hand and covered his eyes.
+
+"When I had seen you I seemed to have made my final peace. I understood
+why I had been kept waiting till then. Having seen you, I flattered
+myself I might decently get free at last. But I am branded afresh,
+that's all, and sent back to the galleys."
+
+Lady Calmady's eyes sought the radiant prospect--the green of the
+garden, the slender columns of the airy pavilion, the lilac land set in
+the azure of sea and sky. No words of hers could give comfort as yet,
+so she would remain silent. Her trust was in the amiable ministry of
+time, which may bring solace to the tormented, human soul, even as it
+reclothes the mountainside swept by the lava stream, or cleanses and
+renders gladly habitable the plague devastated city.
+
+But there was a movement upon the bed. Richard had turned on his side.
+He had recovered his self-control, and once more looked fixedly at her.
+
+"Mother," he said calmly, "is your love great enough to take me back,
+and give yourself to me again, though I am not fit so much as to kiss
+the hem of your garment?"
+
+"There is neither giving nor taking, my beloved," she answered, smiling
+upon him. "In the truth of things, you have never left me, neither have
+I ever let you go."
+
+"Ah! but consider these last four years and their record!" he rejoined.
+"I am not the same man that I was. There's no getting away from fact,
+from deeds actually done, or words actually said, for that matter. I
+have kept my singularly repulsive infirmity of body, and to it I have
+added a mind festering with foul memories. I have been a brute to you,
+a traitor to a friend who trusted me. I have been a sensualist, an
+adulterer. And I am hopelessly broken in pride and self-respect. The
+conceit, the pluck even, has been licked right out of me."--Richard
+paused, steadying his voice which faltered again.--"I only want, since
+it seems I've got to go on living, to slink away somewhere out of
+sight, and hide myself and my wretchedness and shame from every one I
+know.--Can you bear with me, soured and invalided as I am, mother? Can
+you put up with my temper, and my silence, and my grumbling, useless
+log as I must continue to be?"
+
+"Yes--everlastingly yes," Katherine answered.
+
+Richard threw himself flat on his back again.
+
+"Ah! how I hate myself--my God, how I hate myself!" he exclaimed.
+
+"And how beyond all worlds I love you," Katherine put in quietly.
+
+He felt out for her hand across the sheet, found and held it. There
+were footsteps upon the terrace to the right, the scent of a cigar,
+Ludovic Quayle's voice in question, Honoria St. Quentin's in answer,
+both with enforced discretion and lowness of tone. General Ormiston
+joined them. Miss St. Quentin laughed gently. The sound was musical and
+sweet. Footsteps and voices died away. A clang of bells and the hooting
+of an outward-bound liner came up from the city and the port.
+
+Richard's calm had returned. His expression had softened.
+
+"Will those two marry?" he asked presently.
+
+Lady Calmady paused before speaking.
+
+"I hope so--for Ludovic's sake," she said. "He has served, if not quite
+Jacob's seven years, yet a full five for his love."
+
+"If for Ludovic's sake, why not for hers?" Dickie asked.
+
+"Because two halves don't always make a whole in marriage," Katherine
+said.
+
+"You are as great an idealist as ever!"--He paused, then raised
+himself, sitting upright, speaking with a certain passion.
+
+"Mother, will you take me away, away from every one, at once, just as
+soon as possible? I never want to see this room, or this house, or
+Naples again. The climax was reached here of disillusion, and of
+iniquity, and of degradation. Don't ask what it was. I couldn't tell
+you. And, mercifully, only one person, whose lips are sealed in
+self-defense, knows exactly what took place besides myself. But I want
+to get away, away alone with you, who are perfectly unsullied and
+compassionate, and who have forgiven me, and who still can love. Will
+you come? Will you take me? The yacht is all ready for sea."
+
+"Yes," Katherine said.
+
+"I asked this morning who was here with you, and Powell told me. I
+can't see them, mother, simply I can't! I haven't the nerve. I haven't
+the face. Can you send them away?"
+
+"Yes," Katherine said.
+
+Richard's eyes had grown dangerously bright. A spot of colour burned on
+either cheek. Katherine leaned over him.
+
+"My dearest," she declared, "you have talked enough."
+
+"Yes, they're beginning to play again, I can hear the rattle of the
+dice.--Mother take me away, take me out to sea, away from this dreadful
+place.--Ah! you poor darling, how horribly selfish I am!--But let me
+get out to sea, and then later, take me home--to Brockhurst. The house
+is big. Nobody need see me."
+
+"No, no," Katherine said, laying him back with tender force upon the
+pillows.--"No one has seen you, no one shall see you. We will be alone,
+you and I, just as long as you wish. With me, my beloved, you are very
+safe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+DEALING WITH MATTERS OF HEARSAY AND MATTERS OF SPORT
+
+
+One raw, foggy evening, early in the following December, the house at
+Newlands presented an unusually animated scene. On the gravel of the
+carriage-sweep, without, grooms walked breathed and sweating
+horses--the steam from whose bodies and nostrils showed white in the
+chill dusk--slowly up and down. In the hall, within, a number of
+gentlemen, more or less mud-bespattered, regaled themselves with
+cheerful conversation, with strong waters of unexceptionable quality,
+and with their host, Mr. Cathcart's very excellent cigars. They moved
+stiffly and stood in attitudes more professional than elegant. The
+long, clear-coloured drawing-room beyond offered a perspective of much
+amiable comfort. The glazed surfaces of its flowery-patterned chintzes
+gave back the brightness of candles and shaded lamps, while drawn
+curtains shut out the somewhat mournful prospect of sodden garden, bare
+trees, and gray, enshrouding mist. At the tea-table, large, mild,
+reposeful, clothed in wealth of black silk and black lace, was Mrs.
+Cathcart. Lord Fallowfeild, his handsome, infantile countenance beaming
+with good-nature and good-health above his blue-and-white, bird's-eye
+stock and scarlet hunting-coat, sat by her discoursing with great
+affability and at great length. Mary Ormiston stood near them, an
+expression of kindly diversion upon her face. Her figure had grown
+somewhat matronly in these days, and there were lines in her forehead
+and about the corners of her rather large mouth, but her crisp hair was
+still untouched by gray, her bright, gipsy-like complexion had retained
+its freshness, she possessed the same effect of wholesomeness and good
+sense as of old, while her honest, brown eyes were soft with satisfied
+mother-love as they met those of the slender, black-headed boy at her
+side.--Godfrey Ormiston was in his second term at Eton, and had come to
+Newlands to-day for his exeat.--The little party was completed by Lord
+Shotover, who stood before the fire warming that part of his person
+which by the lay mind, unversed in such mysteries, might have been
+judged to be already more than sufficiently warmed by the saddle, his
+feet planted far apart and a long glass of brandy and soda in his hand.
+For this last he had offered good-tempered apology.
+
+"I know I've no business to bring it in here, Mrs. Cathcart," he said,
+"and make your drawing-room smell like a pot-house. But, you see, there
+was a positive stampede for the hearth-rug in the hall. A modest man,
+such as myself, hadn't a chance. There's a regular rampart, half the
+county in fact, before that fire. So I thought I'd just slope in here,
+don't you know? It looked awfully warm and inviting. And then I wanted
+to pay my respects to Mrs. Ormiston too, and talk to this young chap
+about Eton in peace."
+
+Whereat Godfrey flushed up to the roots of his hair, being very
+sensibly exalted. Since what young male creature who knew anything
+really worth knowing--that was Godfrey's way of putting it at
+least--did not know that Lord Shotover had been a mighty sportsman from
+his youth up, and upon a certain famous occasion had won the Grand
+National on his own horse?
+
+"Only tea for me, Mrs. Cathcart," Lord Fallowfeild was saying. "Capital
+thing tea. Never touch spirits in the daytime and never have. No
+reflection upon other men's habits."--He turned an admiring, fatherly
+glance upon the tall, well-made Shotover.--"Other men know their own
+business best. Always have been a great advocate for believing every
+man knows his own business best. Still stick to my own habits. Like to
+be consistent. Very steadying, sobering thing to be consistent, very
+strengthening to the character. Always have told all my children that.
+As you begin, so you shall go on. Always have tried to begin as I was
+going on. Haven't always succeeded, but have made an honest effort. And
+it is something, you know, to make an honest effort. Try to bear that
+in mind, you young gentleman,"--this, genially, to Godfrey Ormiston.
+"Not half a bad rule to start in life with, to go on as you begin, you
+know."
+
+"Always provided you start right, you know, my dear fellow," Shotover
+observed, patting the boy's shoulder with his disengaged hand, and
+looking at the boy's mother with a humorous suggestion of
+self-depreciation. Now, as formerly, he entertained the very
+friendliest sentiments towards all good women, yet maintained an
+expensively extensive acquaintance with women to whom that adjective is
+not generically applicable.
+
+But Lord Fallowfeild was fairly under weigh. Words flowed from him,
+careless of comment or of interruption. He was innocently and
+conspicuously happy. He had enjoyed a fine day's sport in company with
+his favourite son, whose financial embarrassments were not, it may be
+added, just now in a critical condition. And then, access of material
+prosperity had recently come to Lord Fallowfeild in the shape of a
+considerable coal-producing property in the North of Midlandshire. The
+income derived from this--amounting to from ten to twelve thousand a
+year--was payable to him during his lifetime, with remainder, on trust,
+in equal shares to all his children. There were good horses in the
+Whitney stables now, and no question of making shift to let the house
+in Belgrave Square for the season, while the amiable nobleman's
+banking-account showed a far from despicable balance. And consciousness
+of this last fact formed an agreeable undercurrent to his every
+thought. Therefore was he even more than usually garrulous according to
+his own kindly and innocent fashion.
+
+"Very hospitable and friendly of you and Cathcart, to be sure," he
+continued, "to throw open your house in this way. Kindness alike to man
+and beast, man and beast, for which my son and I are naturally very
+grateful."
+
+Lord Shotover looked at Mary again, smiling.--"Little mixed that
+statement, isn't it," he said, "unless we take for granted that I'm the
+beast?"
+
+"I was a good deal perplexed, I own, Mrs. Cathcart, as to how we should
+get home without giving the horses a rest and having them gruelled.
+Fourteen miles----"
+
+"A precious long fourteen too," put in Shotover.
+
+"So it is," his father agreed, "a long fourteen. And my horse was
+pumped, regularly pumped. I can't bear to see a horse as done as that.
+It distresses me, downright distresses me. Hate to over-press a horse.
+Hate to over-press anything that can't stand up to you and take its
+revenge on you. Always feel ashamed of myself if I've over-pressed a
+horse. But I hadn't reckoned on the distance."
+
+"'The pace was too hot to inquire,'" quoted Shotover.
+
+"So it was. Meeting at Grimshott, you see, we very rarely kill so far
+on this side of the country."
+
+"Breaking just where he did, I'd have bet on that fox doubling back
+under Talepenny wood and making across the vale for the earths in the
+big Brockhurst warren," Lord Shotover declared.
+
+"Would you, though?" said his father. "Very reasonable forecast, very
+reasonable, indeed. Quite the likeliest thing for him to do, only he
+didn't do it. Don't believe that fox belonged to this side of the
+country at all. Don't understand his tactics. If it had been in my poor
+friend Denier's time, I might have suspected him of being a bagman."
+
+Lord Fallowfeild chuckled a little.
+
+"Ran too straight for a bagman," Shotover remarked. "Well, he gave us a
+rattling good spin whose-ever fox he was."
+
+"Didn't he, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild genially.--He turned
+sideways in his chair, threw one shapely leg across the other, and
+addressed himself more exclusively to his hostess. "Haven't had such a
+day for years," he continued. "And a very pleasant thing to have such a
+day just when my son's down with me--very pleasant, indeed. It reminds
+me of my poor, dear friend Henniker's time. Good fellow, Henniker. I
+liked Henniker. Never had a better master than Tom Henniker, very
+tactful, nice-feeling man, and had such an excellent manner with the
+farmers---- Ah! here's Cathcart--and Knott. How d'ye do, Knott? Always
+glad to see you.--Very pleasant meeting such a number of friends. Very
+pleasant ending to a pleasant day, eh, Shotover? Mrs. Cathcart and I
+were just speaking of poor Tom Henniker. You used to hunt then,
+Cathcart. Do you remember a run, just about this time of year?--It may
+have been a little earlier. I tell you why. It was the second time the
+hounds met after my poor friend Aldborough's funeral."
+
+"Lord Aldborough died on the twenty-seventh of October," John Knott
+said. The doctor limped in walking. He suffered a sharp twinge of
+sciatica and his face lent itself to astonishing contortions.
+
+"Plain man, Knott," Lord Fallowfeild commented inwardly. "Monstrously
+able fellow, but uncommonly plain. So's Cathcart for that matter.
+Well-dressed man and very well-preserved as to figure, but remarkably
+like an ourang-outang now his eyes are sunk and his eyebrows have grown
+so tufty."--Then he glanced anxiously at Lord Shotover to assure
+himself of the entire absence of simian approximations in the case of
+his own family.--"Oh! ah! yes," he remarked aloud, and somewhat
+vaguely. "Quite right, Knott. Then of course it was earlier. Record run
+for that season. Seldom had a better. We found a fox in the Grimshott
+gorse and ran to Water End without a check."
+
+"And Lemuel Image got into the Tilney brook," Mary Ormiston said,
+laughing a little.
+
+"So he did though!" Lord Fallowfeild rejoined, beaming. And then
+suddenly his complacency suffered eclipse. For, looking at the speaker,
+he became disagreeably aware of having, on some occasion, said
+something highly inconvenient concerning this lady to one of her near
+relations. He rushed into speech again:--"Loud-voiced, blustering kind
+of fellow, Image. I never have liked Image. Extraordinary marriage that
+of his with a connection of poor Aldborough's. Never have understood
+how her people could allow it."
+
+"Oh! money'll buy pretty well everything in this world except brains
+and a sound liver," Dr. Knott said, as he lowered himself cautiously on
+to the seat of the highest chair available.
+
+"Or a good conscience," Mrs. Cathcart observed, with mild dogmatism.
+
+"I am not altogether so sure about that," the doctor answered. "I have
+known the doubling of a few charitable subscriptions work extensive
+cures under that head. Depend upon it there's an immense deal more
+conscience-money paid every year than ever finds its way into the
+coffers of the Chancellor of the Exchequer."
+
+"So there is though!" said Lord Fallowfeild, with an air of regretful
+conviction. "Never put it as clearly as that myself, Knott, but must
+own I am afraid there is."
+
+Mr. Cathcart, who had joined Lord Shotover upon the hearth-rug, here
+intervened. He had a tendency to air local grievances, especially in
+the presence of his existing noble guest, whom he regarded, not wholly
+without reason, as somewhat lukewarm and dilatory in questions of
+reform.
+
+"I own to sharing your dislike of Image," he remarked. "He behaved in
+an anything but straightforward manner about the site for the new
+cottage hospital at Parson's Holt."
+
+"Did he, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild.
+
+"Yes.--I supposed it had been brought to your notice."
+
+Lord Fallowfeild fidgeted a little.--"Rather too downright, Cathcart,"
+he said to himself. "Gets you into a corner and fixes you. Not fair,
+not at all fair in general society.--Oh! ah!--cottage hospital, yes,"
+he added aloud. "Very tiresome, vexatious business about that hospital.
+I felt it very much at the time."
+
+"It was a regular job," Mr. Cathcart continued.
+
+"No, not a job, not a job, my dear fellow. Unpleasant word job. Nothing
+approaching a job, only an oversight, at most an unfortunate error of
+judgment," Lord Fallowfeild protested.--He glanced at his son inviting
+support, but that gentleman was engaged in kindly conversation with
+bright-eyed, little Godfrey Ormiston. He glanced at Mary--remembered
+suddenly that his unfortunate remark regarding that lady had been
+connected with her resemblance to her father, and the latter's striking
+defect of personal beauty. He glanced at the doctor. But John Knott sat
+all hunched together, watching him with an expression rather sardonic
+than sympathetic.
+
+"There was culpable negligence somewhere, in any case," his persecutor,
+Mr. Cathcart, went on. "It was obvious Image pressed that bit of land
+at Waters End on the committee simply because no one would buy it for
+building purposes. His affectation of generosity as to price was a
+piece of transparent hypocrisy."
+
+"I suppose it was," Lord Fallowfeild agreed mildly.
+
+"A certain anonymous donor had promised a second five hundred pounds,
+if the hospital was built on high ground with a subsoil of gravel."
+
+"It is on gravel," put in Lord Fallowfeild anxiously. "Saw it
+myself--distinctly remember seeing gravel when the heather had been
+pared before digging the foundations--bright yellow gravel."
+
+"Yes, and with a ten-foot bed of blue clay underneath. Most dangerous
+soil going,"--this from Dr. Knott, grimly.
+
+"Is it, though?" Lord Fallowfeild inquired, with an amiable effort to
+welcome unpalatable, geological information.
+
+"Not a doubt of it. The surface water and generally the sewage--for we
+are very far yet from having discovered a drain-pipe which is
+impeccable in respect of leakage--soak through the porous cap down to
+the clay and lie there--to rise again not at the Last Day by any means,
+but on the evening of the very first one that's been hot enough to
+cause evaporation."
+
+"Do they, though?" said Lord Fallowfeild. He was greatly
+impressed.--"Capable fellow, Knott, wonderful thing science," he
+commented inwardly and with praiseworthy humility.
+
+But Mr. Cathcart returned to the charge.
+
+"The hospital was disastrously the loser, in any case," he remarked.
+"As a matter of course, the conditions having been disregarded, Lady
+Calmady withdrew her promise of a second donation."
+
+"Oh! ah! Lady Calmady, really!" the simple-minded nobleman exclaimed.
+"Very interesting piece of news and very generous intention, no doubt,
+on the part of Lady Calmady. But give you my word Cathcart that until
+this moment I had no notion that the anonymous donor of whom we heard
+so much from one or two members of the committee--heard too much, I
+thought, for I dislike mysteries--foolish, unprofitable things
+mysteries--always turn out to be nothing at all in the finish--oh! ah!
+yes--well, that the anonymous donor was Lady Calmady!"
+
+And thereupon he shifted his position with as much assumption of
+_hauteur_ as his inherent amiability permitted. He turned his chair
+sideways, presenting an excellently flat, if somewhat broad,
+scarlet-clad back to his persecutor upon the hearth-rug.--"Sorry to set
+a man down in his own house," he said to himself, "but Cathcart's a
+little wanting in taste sometimes. He presses a subject home too
+closely. And, if I was bamboozled by Image, it really isn't Cathcart's
+place to remind me of it."
+
+He turned a worried and puckered countenance upon his hostess, upon Dr.
+Knott, upon the drawing-room door. In the hall beyond one or two guests
+still lingered. A lady had just joined them, notably straight and tall,
+and lazily graceful of movement. Lord Fallowfeild knew her, but could
+not remember her name.
+
+"Oh! ah! Shotover," he said, over his shoulder, "I don't want to hurry
+you, my dear boy, but perhaps it would be as well if you'd just go
+round to the stables and take a look at the horses."
+
+Then, as the gentleman addressed moved away, escorted by his host and
+followed in admiring silence by Godfrey Ormiston, he repeated, almost
+querulously:--"Foolish things mysteries. Nothing in them, as a rule,
+when you thrash them out. Mares' nests generally. And that reminds me,
+I hear young"--Lord Fallowfeild's air of worry became accentuated--"young
+Calmady's got home again at last."
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Cathcart said, "Richard and his mother have been at
+Brockhurst nearly a month."
+
+"Have they, though?" exclaimed Lord Fallowfeild. He fidgeted. "It's a
+painful subject to refer to, but I should be glad to know the truth of
+these nasty, uncomfortable rumours about young Calmady. You see there
+was that question of his and my youngest daughter's marriage. I never
+approved. Shotover backed me up in it. He didn't approve either. And in
+the end Calmady behaved in a very high-minded, straightforward manner.
+Came to me himself and exhibited very good sense and very proper
+feeling, did Calmady. Admitted his own disabilities with extraordinary
+frankness, too much frankness, I was inclined to think at the time. It
+struck me as a trifle callous, don't you know. But afterwards, when he
+left home in that singular manner and went abroad, and we all lost
+sight of him, and heard how reckless he had become and all that, it
+weighed on me. I give you my word, Mrs. Cathcart, it weighed very much
+on me. I've seldom been more upset by anything in my life than I was by
+the whole affair of that wedding."
+
+"I am afraid it was a great mistake throughout," Mrs. Cathcart said.
+She folded her plump, white hands upon her ample lap and sighed gently.
+
+"Wasn't it, though? So I told everybody from the start you know,"
+commented Lord Fallowfeild.
+
+"It caused a great deal of unhappiness."
+
+"So it did, so it did," the good man said, quite humbly. He looked
+crestfallen, his kindly and well-favoured countenance being overspread
+by an expression of disarmingly innocent penitence.--"It weighed on me.
+I should be glad to be able to forget it, but now it's all cropping up
+again. You see there are these rumours that poor, young Calmady's gone
+under very much one way and another, that his health's broken up
+altogether, and that he is shut up in two rooms at Brockhurst
+because--it's a terribly distressing thing to mention, but that's the
+common talk, you know--because he's a little touched here"--the speaker
+tapped his smooth and very candid forehead--"a little wrong here!
+Horrible thing insanity," he repeated.
+
+At this point Dr. Knott, who had been watching first one person present
+and then another from under his shaggy eyebrows with an air of somewhat
+harsh amusement, roused himself.
+
+"Pardon me, all a pack of lies, my lord," he said, "and stupid ones
+into the bargain. Sir Richard Calmady's as sane as you are yourself."
+
+"Is he, though?" the other exclaimed, brightening sensibly. "Thank you,
+Knott. It is a very great relief to me to hear that."
+
+"Only a man with a remarkably sound constitution could have pulled
+round. I quite own he's been very hard hit, and no wonder. Typhoid and
+complications----"
+
+"Ah! complications?" inquired Lord Fallowfeild, who rarely let slip an
+opportunity of acquiring information of a pathological description.
+
+"Yes, complications. Of the sort that are most difficult to deal with,
+emotional and moral--beginning with his engagement to Lady
+Constance----"
+
+"Oh, dear me!"--this, piteously, from that lady's father.
+
+"And ending--his Satanic Majesty knows where! I don't. It's no concern
+of mine, nor of any one else's in my opinion. He has paid his
+footing--every man has to pay it, sooner or later--to life and
+experience, and personal acquaintance with the _thou shalt not_ which,
+for cause unknown, goes for so almighty much in this very queer
+business of human existence. He has had a rough time, never doubt that,
+with his high-strung, arrogant, sensitive nature and the dirty trick
+played on him by that heartless jade, Dame Fortune, before his birth.
+For the time, this illness had knocked the wind out of him. If he sulks
+for a bit, small blame to him. But he'll come round. He is coming round
+day by day."
+
+As he finished speaking the doctor got on to his feet somewhat
+awkwardly. His subject had affected him more deeply than he quite cared
+either to own to himself or to have others see.
+
+"That plaguy sciatic nerve again!" he growled.
+
+Lord Fallowfeild had risen also.--"Capable man, Knott, but rather rough
+at times, rather too didactic," he said to himself, as he turned to
+greet Miss St. Quentin. She had strolled in from the hall. Her charming
+face was full of merriment. There was something altogether gallant in
+the carriage of her small head.
+
+"I was so awfully glad to see Lord Shotover!" she said, as she gave her
+hand to that gentleman's father. "It's an age since he and I have met."
+
+"Very pleasant hearing, my dear young lady, for Shotover, if he was
+here to hear it! Lucky fellow, Shotover."--The kindly nobleman beamed
+upon her. He was nothing if not chivalrous. Mentally, all the same, he
+was much perplexed. "Of course, I remember who she is. But I understood
+it was Ludovic," he said to himself. "Made sure it was Ludovic.
+Uncommonly attractive, high-bred woman. Very striking looking pair, she
+and Shotover. Can't fancy Shotover settled though. Say she's a lot of
+money. Wonder whether it is Shotover?--Uncommonly fine run, best run
+we've had for years," he added aloud. "Pity you weren't out, Miss St.
+Quentin.--Well, good-bye, Mrs. Cathcart. I must be going. I am
+extremely grateful for all your kindness and hospitality. It is seldom
+I have the chance of meeting so many friends this side of the
+country.--Good-day to you, Knott--goodbye, Miss St. Quentin.--Wonder if
+I'd better ask her to Whitney," he thought, "on the chance of its being
+Shotover? Better sound him first though. Never let a man in for a woman
+unless you've very good reason to suppose he wants her."
+
+Honoria, meanwhile, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her long,
+fur-lined, tan, cloth, driving-coat sat down on the arm of Mary
+Ormiston's flowery-patterned, chintz-covered chair.
+
+"I left you all in a state of holy peace and quiet," she said, smiling,
+"and a fine show you've got on hand by the time I come back."
+
+"They ran across the ten-acre field and killed in the shrubbery," Mrs.
+Ormiston put in.
+
+John Knott limped forward. He stood with his hands behind him looking
+down at the two ladies. Some months had elapsed since he and Miss St.
+Quentin had met. He was very fond of the young lady. It interested him
+to meet her again. Honoria glanced up at him smiling.
+
+"Have you been out too?" she asked.
+
+"Not a bit of it. I'm too busy mending other people's brittle anatomy
+to have time to risk breaking any part of my own. I'm ugly enough
+already. No need to make me uglier. I came here for the express purpose
+of calling on you."
+
+"You saw Katherine?" Mary asked.
+
+"Oh yes! I saw Cousin Katherine."
+
+"How is she?"
+
+"An embodiment of faith, hope, and charity, as usual, but with just
+that pinch of malice thrown in which gives the compound a flavour. In
+short, she is enchanting. And then she looks so admirably well."
+
+"That six months at sea was a great restorative," Mary remarked.
+
+"Yet it really is rather wonderful when you consider the state she was
+in before we went to you at Ormiston, and how frightened we were at her
+undertaking the journey to Naples."
+
+"Her affections are satisfied," Dr. Knott said, and his loose lips
+worked into a smile, half sneering, half tender. "I am an old man, and
+I have had a good lot to do with women--at second hand. Feed their
+hearts, and the rest of the mechanism runs easy enough. Anything short
+of organic disease can be cured by that sort of nourishment. Even
+organic disease can be arrested by it. And what's more, I have known
+disease develop in an apparently perfectly healthy subject simply
+because the heart was starved. Oh! I tell you, you're marvelous
+beings."
+
+"And yet you know I feel so abominably sold," Honoria declared, "when I
+consider the way in which we all--Roger, Mr. Quayle, and I--acted
+bodyguard, attended Cousin Katherine to Naples, wrapped her in cotton
+wool, dear thing, sternly determined to protect her at all costs and
+all hazards from--well, I am ashamed to say I had no name bad enough at
+that time for Richard Calmady! And then this very person, whom we
+regarded as her probable destruction, proves to be her absolute
+salvation, while she proceeds to turn the tables upon us in the
+smartest fashion imaginable. She showed us the door and entreated us,
+in the most beguiling manner, to return whence we came and leave her
+wholly at the mercy of the enemy. I was furious"--Miss St. Quentin
+laughed--"downright furious! And Roger's temper, for all his
+high-mightiness, was a thing to swear at, rather than swear by, the
+morning he and I left Naples. With the greatest difficulty we persuaded
+her even to keep Clara. She had a rage, dear thing, for getting rid of
+the lot of us. Oh! we had a royal skirmish and no mistake."
+
+"So Roger told me."
+
+Honoria stretched herself a little, lolled against the back of the
+chair, steadying herself by laying one hand affectionately on the other
+woman's shoulder. And John Knott, observing her, noted not only her
+nonchalant and almost boyish grace, but a swift change in her humour
+from light-hearted laughter to a certain, and as he fancied,
+half-unwilling enthusiasm.
+
+"But to-day," she went on, "when Cousin Katherine told me about it, I
+confess the whole situation laid hold of me. I could not help seeing it
+must have been finely romantic to go off like that--those two
+alone--caring as she cares, and after the long separation. It sounds
+like a thing in some Elizabethan ballad. There's a rhythm in it all
+which stirs one's blood. She says the yacht's crew were delightful to
+her, and treated her as a queen. One can fancy that--the stately,
+lovely queen-mother, and that strange only son!--They called in at the
+North African ports, and at Gib and Madeira, and the Cape de Verds, and
+then ran straight for Rio. Then they steamed up the coast to
+Pernambuco, and on to the West Indies. Richard never went ashore,
+Cousin Katherine only once or twice. But they squattered about in the
+everlasting summer of tropic harbours, fringed with palms and low, dim,
+red-roofed, tropic houses--just sampled it all, the colour, and light,
+and beauty, and far awayness of it--and then, when the fancy took them,
+got up steam and slipped out again to sea. And the name of the yacht is
+the _Reprieve_. That's in the picture, isn't it?"
+
+Honoria paused. She leaned forward, her chin in her hands, her elbows
+on her knees. She looked up at John Knott, and there was a singular
+expression in her clear and serious eyes.
+
+"I used to pity Cousin Katherine," she said. "I used to break my heart
+over her. And now--now, upon my word, I believe I envy her.--And see
+here, Dr. Knott, she has asked me to go on to Brockhurst from here. It
+seems that though Richard refuses to see any one, except you of course,
+and Julius March, he fusses at his mother being so much alone. What
+ought I to do? I feel rather uncertain. I have fought him, I own I
+have. We have never been friends, he and I. He doesn't like me. He's no
+reason to like me--anything but! What do you say? Shall I refuse or
+shall I go?"
+
+And the doctor reflected a little, drawing his great, square hand down
+over his mouth and heavy, bristly chin.
+
+"Yes, go," he answered. "Go and chance it. Your being at Brockhurst may
+work out in more of good than we now know."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+TELLING HOW DICKIE CAME TO UNTIE A CERTAIN TAG OF RUSTY, BLACK RIBBON
+
+
+Yet, as those gray, midwinter weeks went on to Christmas, and the
+coming of the New Year, it became undeniable there was that in the
+aspect of affairs at Brockhurst which might very well provoke curious
+comment. For the rigour of Richard Calmady's self-imposed seclusion, to
+which Miss St. Quentin had made allusion in her conversation with Dr.
+Knott, was not relaxed. Rather, indeed, did it threaten to pass from
+the accident of a first return, after long absence and illness, into a
+matter of fixed and accepted habit. For those years of lonely wandering
+and spasmodic rage of living, finding their climax in deepening
+disappointment, disillusion, and the shock of rudely inflicted insult
+and disgrace, had produced in Richard a profound sense of alienation
+from society and from the amenities of ordinary intercourse. Since he
+was apparently doomed to survive, he would go home--but go home very
+much as some trapped or wounded beast crawls back to hide in its lair.
+He was master in his own house, at least, and safe from intrusion
+there. The place offered the silent sympathy of things familiar, and
+therefore, in a sense, uncritical. It is restful to look on that upon
+which one has already looked a thousand times. And so, after his
+reconciliation with his mother, followed, in natural sequence, his
+reconciliation with Brockhurst. Here he would see only those who loved
+him well enough--in their several stations and degrees--to respect his
+humour, to ask no questions, to leave him to himself. Richard was
+gentle in manner at this period, courteous, humorous even. But a great
+discouragement was upon him. It seemed as though some string had
+snapped, leaving half his nature broken, unresponsive, and dumb. He had
+no ambitions, no desire of activities. Sport and business, were as
+little to his mind as society.
+
+More than this.--At first the excuse of fatigue had served him, but
+very soon it came to be a tacitly admitted fact that Richard did not
+leave the house. Surely it was large enough, he said, to afford space
+for all the exercise he needed? Refusing to occupy his old suite of
+rooms on the ground-floor, he had sent orders, before his arrival, that
+the smaller library, adjoining the Long-Gallery, should be converted
+into a bedchamber for him. It had been Richard's practice, when on
+board ship, to steady his uncertain footsteps, on the slippery or
+slanting plane of the deck, by the use of crutches. And this practice
+he in great measure retained. It increased his poor powers of
+locomotion. It rendered him more independent. Sometimes, when secure
+that Lady Calmady would not receive visitors, he would make his way by
+the large library, the state drawing-room, and stair-head, to the
+Chapel-Room and sit with her there. But more often his days were spent
+exclusively in the Long-Gallery. He had brought home many curious and
+beautiful objects from his wanderings. He would add these to the
+existing collection. He would examine the books too, procure such
+volumes as were needed to complete any imperfect series, and, in the
+departments both of science, literature, and travel, bring the library
+up to date. He would devote his leisure to the study of various
+subjects--especially natural science--regarding which he was conscious
+of a knowledge, deficient, or merely empirical.
+
+"I really am perfectly contented, mother," he said to Lady Calmady more
+than once. "Look at the length and breadth of the gallery! It is as a
+city of magnificent distances, after the deck of the dear, old yacht
+and my twelve-foot cabin. And I'm not a man calculated to occupy so
+very much space after all! Let me potter about here with my books and
+my _bibelots_. Don't worry about me, I shall keep quite well, I promise
+you. Let me hybernate peacefully until spring, anyhow. I have plenty of
+occupation. Julius is going to amend the library catalogue with me, and
+there are those chests of deeds, and order-books, and diaries, which
+really ought to be looked over. As it appears pretty certain I shall be
+the last of the race, it would be only civil, I think, to bestow a
+little of my ample leisure upon my forefathers, and set down some more
+or less comprehensive account of them and their doings. They appear to
+have been given to rather dramatic adventures.--Don't you worry, you
+dear sweet! As I say, let me hybernate until the birds of passage come
+and the young leaves are green in the spring. Then, when the days grow
+long and bright, the sea will begin to call again, and, when it calls,
+you and I will pack and go."
+
+And Katherine yielded, being convinced that Richard could treat his own
+case best. If healing, complete and radical, was to be affected, it
+must come from within and not from without. Her wisdom was to wait in
+faith. There was much that had never been told, and never would be
+told. Much which had not been explained, and never would be explained.
+For, notwithstanding the very gracious relation existing between
+herself and Richard, Katherine realised that there were blank spaces
+not only in her knowledge of his past action, but in her knowledge of
+the sentiments which now animated him. As from a far country his mind,
+she perceived, often traveled to meet hers. "There was a door to which
+she found no key." But Katherine, happily, could respect the
+individuality even of her best beloved. Unlike the majority of her sex
+she was incapable of intrusion, and did not make affection an excuse
+for familiarity. Love, in her opinion, enjoins obligation of service,
+rather than confers rights of examination and direction. She had
+learned the condition in which his servants had found Richard, in the
+opera box of the great theatre at Naples, lying upon the floor
+unconscious, his face disfigured, cut, and bleeding. But what had
+produced this condition, whether accident or act of violence, she had
+not learned. She had also learned that her niece, Helen de Vallorbes,
+had stayed at the villa just before the commencement of Richard's
+illness--he merely passing his days there, and spending his nights on
+board the yacht in the harbour, where, no doubt, that same illness had
+been contracted. But she resisted the inclination to attempt further
+discovery. She even resisted the inclination to speculate regarding all
+this. What Richard might elect to tell her, that, and that only, would
+she know, lest, seeking further, bitter and vindictive thoughts should
+arise in her and mar the calm, pathetic sweetness of the present and
+her deep, abiding joy in the recovery of her so-long-lost delight. She
+refused to go behind the fact--the glad fact that Richard once more was
+with her, that her eyes beheld him, her ears heard his voice, her hands
+met his. Every little act of thoughtful care, every pretty word of
+half-playful affection, confirmed her thankfulness and made the present
+blest. Even this somewhat morbid tendency of his to shut himself away
+from the observation of all acquaintance, conferred on her such sweetly
+exclusive rights of intercourse that she could not greatly quarrel with
+his secluded way of life. As to the business of the estate and
+household, this had become so much a matter of course to her that it
+caused her but small labour. If she could deal with it when Richard was
+estranged and far away, very surely she could deal with it now, when
+she had but to open the door of that vast, silvery-tinted, pensively
+fragrant, many-windowed room, and entering, among its many strange and
+costly treasures, find him--a treasure as strange, and if counted by
+her past suffering, as costly, as ever ravished and tortured a woman's
+heart.
+
+And so it came about that, to such few friends as she received,
+Katherine could show a serene countenance. Shortly before Christmas,
+Miss St. Quentin came to Brockhurst, and coming stayed, adapting
+herself with ready tact to the altered conditions of life there.
+Katherine found not only pleasure, but support, in the younger woman's
+presence, in her devoted yet unexacting affection, in her practical
+ability, and in the sight of so graceful a creature going to and fro.
+She installed her guest in the Gun-Room suite. And, by insensible
+degrees, permitted Honoria to return to many of her former avocations
+in connection with the estate, so that the young lady took over much of
+the outdoor business, riding forth almost daily, by herself or in
+company with Julius March, to superintend matters of building or
+repairing, of road-mending, hedging, copsing, or forestry, and not
+infrequently cheering Chifney--a somewhat sour-minded man just now and
+prickly-tempered, since Richard asked no word of him or of his
+horses--by visits to the racing stables.
+
+"I had better step down and have a crack with the poor, old dear,
+Cousin Katherine," she would say, "or those unlucky little wretches of
+boys will catch it double tides, which really is rather superfluous."
+
+And all the while, amid her very varied interests and occupations,
+remembrance of that hidden, twilight life, going forward up-stairs in
+the well-known rooms which she now never entered, came to Honoria as
+some perpetually recurrent and mournful harmony, in an otherwise not
+ungladsome piece of music, might have come. It exercised a certain
+dominion over her mind. So that Richard Calmady, though never actually
+seen by her, was never wholly absent from her thought. All the orderly
+routine of the great house, all the day's work and the sentiment of it,
+was subtly influenced by awareness of the actuality of his invisible
+presence. And this affected her strongly, causing her hours of
+repulsion and annoyance, and again hours of abounding, if reluctant
+pity, when the unnatural situation of this man--young as herself,
+endowed with a fine intelligence, an aptitude for affairs, the craving
+for amusement common to his age and class--and the pathos inherent in
+that situation, haunted her imagination. His self-inflicted
+imprisonment appeared a reflection upon, in a sense a reproach to, her
+own freedom of soul and pleasant liberty of movement. And this troubled
+her. It touched her pride somehow. It produced in her a false
+conscience, as though she were guilty of an unkindness, a lack of
+considerateness and perfect delicacy.
+
+"Whether he behaves well or ill, whether he is good or bad, Richard
+Calmady invariably takes up altogether too much room," she would tell
+herself half angrily--to find herself within half an hour, under plea
+of usefulness to his mother, warmly interested in some practical matter
+from which Richard Calmady would derive, at least indirectly, distinct
+advantage and benefit!
+
+This, then, was the state of affairs one Saturday afternoon at the
+beginning of February. With poor Dickie himself the day had been marked
+by abundant discouragement. He was well in body. The restfulness of one
+quiet, uneventful week following another had steadied his nerves,
+repaired the waste of fever, and restored his physical strength. But,
+along with this return of health had come a growing necessity to lay
+hold of some idea, to discover some basis of thought, some incentive to
+action, which should make life less purposeless and unprofitable.
+Richard, in short, was beginning to generate more energy than he could
+place. The old order had passed away, and no new order had, as yet,
+effectively disclosed itself. He had not formulated all this, or even
+consciously recognised the modification of his own attitude.
+Nevertheless he felt the gnawing ache of inward emptiness. It
+effectually broke up the torpor which had held him. It made him very
+restless. It reawoke in him an inclination to speculation and
+experiment.
+
+Snow had fallen during the earlier hours of the day, and, the surface
+of the ground being frost-bound, it, though by no means deep, remained
+unmelted. The whiteness of it, given back by the ceiling and pale
+paneling of walls of the Long-Gallery, notwithstanding the generous
+fires burning in the two ornate, high-ranging chimney-places, produced,
+as the day waned, an effect of rather stark cheerlessness in the great
+room. This was at once in unison with Richard's somewhat bleak humour,
+and calculated to increase the famine of it.
+
+All day long he had tried to stifle the cry of that same famine, that
+same hunger of unplaced energy, by industrious work. He had examined,
+noted, here and there transcribed, passages from deeds, letters,
+order-books, and diaries offering first-hand information regarding
+former generations of Calmadys. It happened that studies he had
+recently made in contemporary science, specially in obtaining theories
+of biology, had brought home to him what tremendous factors in the
+development and fate of the individual are both evolution and heredity.
+At first idly, and as a mere pastime, then with increasing
+eagerness--in the vague hope his researches might throw light on
+matters of moment to himself and of personal application--he had tried
+to trace out tastes and strains of tendency common to his ancestors.
+But under this head he had failed to make any very notable discoveries.
+For these courtiers, soldiers, and sportsmen were united merely by the
+obvious characteristics of a high-spirited, free-living race. They were
+raised above the average of the country gentry, perhaps, by a greater
+appreciation, than is altogether common, of literature and art. But as
+Richard soon perceived it was less any persistent peculiarity of mental
+and physical constitution, than a similarity of outward event united
+them. The perpetually repeated chronicle of violence and accident which
+he read, in connection with his people, intrigued his reason, and
+called for explanation. Was it possible, he began to ask himself, that
+a certain heredity in incident, in external happening, may not cling to
+a race? That these may not by some strange process be transmissible, as
+are traits of character, temperament, stature, colouring, feature, and
+face? And if this--as matter of speculation merely--was the case, must
+there not exist some antecedent cause to which could be referred such
+persistent effect? Might not an hereditary fate in external events take
+its rise in some supreme moral or spiritual catastrophe, some violation
+of law? The Greek dramatists held it was so. The writers of the Old
+Testament held it was so, too.
+
+Sitting at the low writing-table, near the blazing fire, that stark
+whiteness reflected from off the snow-covered land all around him,
+Richard debated this point with himself. He admitted the theory was not
+scientific, according to the reasoning of modern physical science. It
+approached an outlook theological rather than rationalistic, yet he
+could not deny the conception, admission. The vision of a doomed family
+arose before him--starting in each successive generation with brilliant
+prospects and high hope, only to find speedy extinction in some more or
+less brutal form of death--a race dwindling, moreover, in numbers as
+the years passed, until it found representation in a single individual,
+and that individual maimed, and incomplete! Heredity of accident,
+heredity of disaster, finding final expression in himself--this
+confronted Richard.--He had reckoned himself, heretofore, a solitary
+example of ill-fortune. But, mastering the contents of these records,
+he found himself far from solitary. He merely participated, though
+under a novel form, in the unlucky fate of all the men of his race. And
+then arose the question--to him, under existing circumstances, of vital
+importance--what stood behind all that--blind chance, cynical
+indifference, wanton and arbitrary cruelty, or some august,
+far-reaching necessity of, as yet, unsatisfied justice?
+
+Richard pushed the crackling, stiffly-folded parchments, the letters
+frayed and yellow with age, the broken-backed, discoloured diaries and
+order-books, away from him, and sat, his elbows on the table, his chin
+in his hands, thinking. And the travail of his spirit was great, as it
+needs must be, at times, with every human being who dares live at
+first, not merely at second hand--who dares attempt a real, and not
+merely a nominal assent--who dares deal with earthly existence, the
+amazing problems and complexities of it, immediately, refusing to
+accept--with indolent timidity--tradition, custom, hearsay,
+convenience, as his guides.--Oh! for some sure answering, some
+unimpeachable assurance, some revelation not relative and symbolic, but
+absolute, some declaration above all suspicion of cunningly-devised
+opportunism, concerning the dealings of the unknown force man calls
+God, with the animal man calls man!--And then Richard turned upon
+himself contemptuously. For it was childish to cry out thus. The
+heavens were dumb above him as the snow-bound earth was dumb beneath.
+There was no sign!--Never had been. Never would be, save in the fond
+imaginations of religious enthusiasts, crazed by superstition, by
+austerities, and hysteria, duped by ignorance, by hypocrites and
+quacks.
+
+With long-armed adroitness he reached down and picked up those
+light-made, stunted crutches, slipped from his chair and adjusted them.
+For a long while he had used them as a matter of course without
+criticism or thought. But now they produced in him a swift disgust. His
+hands, grasping the lowest crossbar of them, were in such
+disproportionate proximity to the floor! For the moment he was disposed
+to fling them aside. Then again he turned upon himself with scathing
+contempt. For this too was childish. What did the use of them matter,
+since, used or not, the fact of his crippled condition remained? And
+so, with a renewal of bitterness and active rebellion, lately unknown
+to him, he moved away down the great room--past bronze athlete and
+marble goddess, past oriental jars, tall as himself, uplifted on the
+squat, carven, ebony stands, past strangely-painted, half-fearful,
+lacquer cabinets, past porcelain bowls filled with faint sweetness of
+dried rose-leaves, bay, lavender, and spice, past trophies of savage
+warfare and, hardly less savage, civilised sport, towards the wide
+mullion-window of the eastern bay. But just before reaching it, he came
+opposite to a picture by Velasquez, set on an easel across the corner
+of the room. 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, of scarlet and gold, were ingeniously designed so as
+to emphasise the physical degradation of its contorted person. Richard
+had come, of late, to take a sombre pleasure in the contemplation of
+this picture. The desolate eyes, looking out of the marred and brutal
+face, met his own with a certain claim of kinship. There existed a
+tragic freemasonry between himself and this outcasted being, begotten
+of a common knowledge, a common experience. As a boy Richard hated this
+picture, studiously avoided the sight of it. It had suggested
+comparisons which wounded his self-respect too shrewdly and endangered
+his self-security. He hated it no longer, finding grim solace, indeed,
+in its sad society.
+
+And it was thus, in silent parley with this rather dreadful companion,
+as the blear February twilight descended upon the bare, black trees and
+snow-clad land without, and upon the very miscellaneous furnishings of
+the many-windowed gallery within, that Julius March now discovered
+Richard Calmady. He had returned, across the park, from one of the
+quaint brick-and-timber cottages just without the last park gate, at
+the end of Sandyfield Church-lane. A labourer's wife was dying,
+painfully enough, of cancer, and he had administered the Blessed
+Sacrament to her, there, in her humble bedchamber. The august promises
+and adorable consolations of that mysterious rite remained very
+sensibly present to him on his homeward way. His spirit was uplifted by
+the confirmation of the divine compassion therein perpetually renewed,
+perpetually made evident. And, it followed, that coming now upon
+Richard Calmady alone, here, in the stark, unnatural pallor of the
+winter dusk, holding silent communion with that long-ago victim of
+merciless practices and depraved tastes, not only caused him a painful
+shock, but also moved him with fervid desire to offer comfort and
+render help.--Yet, what to say, how to approach Richard without risk of
+seeming officiousness and consequent offense, he could not tell. The
+young man's experiences and his own were so conspicuously far apart.
+For a moment he stood uncertain and silent, then he said:--
+
+"That picture always fills me with self-reproach."
+
+Richard looked round with a certain lofty courtesy by no means
+encouraging. And, as he did so, Julius March was conscious of receiving
+a further, and not less painful impression. For Richard's face was very
+still, not with the stillness of repose, but with that of fierce
+emotion held resolutely in check, while in his eyes was a desolation
+rivalling that of the eyes portrayed by the great Spanish artist upon
+the canvas close at hand.
+
+"When I first came to Brockhurst, that picture used to hang in the
+study," he continued, by way of explanation.
+
+"Ah! I see, and you turned it out!" Richard observed, not without an
+inflection of irony.
+
+"Yes. In those days I am afraid I did not discriminate very justly
+between refinement of taste and self-indulgent fastidiousness. While
+pluming myself upon an exalted standard of sensibility and sentiment, I
+rather basely spared myself acquaintance with that, both in nature and
+in art, which might cause me distress or disturbance of thought. I was
+a mental valetudinarian, in short. I am ashamed of my defect of moral
+courage and charity in relation to that picture."
+
+Richard shifted his position slightly, looked fixedly at the canvas and
+then down at his own hands in such disproportionate proximity to the
+floor.
+
+"Oh! you were not to blame," he said. "It is obviously a thing to laugh
+at, or run from, unless you happen to have received a peculiar mental
+and physical training. Anyhow the poor devil has found his way home now
+and come into port safely enough at last?"
+
+He glanced back at the picture, over his shoulder, as he moved across
+the room.
+
+"Perhaps he's even found a trifle of genuine sympathy--so don't vex
+your righteous soul over your repudiation of him, my dear Julius. The
+lapses of the virtuous may make, indirectly, for good. And your
+instinct, after all, was both the healthy and the artistic one.
+Velasquez ought to have been incapable of putting his talent to such
+vile uses, and the first comer with a spark of true philanthropy in him
+ought to have knocked that poor little monstrosity on the head."
+
+Richard came to the writing-table, glanced at the papers which
+encumbered it, made for an armchair drawn up beside the fire.
+
+"Sit down, Julius," he said. "There is something quite else about which
+I want to speak to you. I have been working through all these
+documents, and they give rise to speculations neither strictly
+scientific nor strictly orthodox, yet interesting all the same. You are
+a dealer in ethical problems. I wonder if you can offer any solution of
+this one, of which the basis conceivably is ethical. As to these
+various owners of Brockhurst--Sir Denzil, the builder of the house, is
+a delightful person, and appears to have prospered mightily in his
+undertakings, as so liberal-minded and ingenious a gentleman had every
+right to prosper. But after him--from the time, at least, of his
+grandson, Thomas--everything seems to have gone to rather howling grief
+here. We have nothing but battle, murder, and sudden death. These
+become positively monotonous in the pertinacity of their repetition. Of
+course one may argue that adventurous persons expose themselves to an
+uncommon number of dangers, and consequently pay an uncommon number of
+forfeits. I dare say that is the reasonable explanation. Only the
+persistence of the thing gets hold of one rather. The manner of their
+dying is very varied, yet there are two constant quantities in each
+successive narrative, namely, violence and comparative youth."
+
+Richard's speech had become rapid and imperative. Now he paused.
+
+"Think of my father's death, for instance----" he said.
+
+His narrow, black figure crouched together, Julius March knelt on one
+knee before the fire. He held his thin hands outspread, so as to keep
+the glow of the burning logs from his face. He was deeply moved,
+debating a certain matter with himself.
+
+"To all questions supremely worth having answered, there is no
+answer--I take that for granted," the young man continued. "And yet one
+is so made that it is impossible not to go on asking. I can't help
+wanting to get at the root of this queer recurrence of accident, and
+all the rest of it, which clings to my people. I can't help wanting to
+make out whether there was any psychological moment which determined
+the future, and started them definitely on the down-grade. What
+happened--that's what I want to arrive at--what happened at that
+moment? Had it any reasonable and legitimate connection with all which
+has followed?"
+
+As he held them outspread, between his face and the glowing fire,
+Julius March's hands trembled. He found himself confronted by a
+situation which he had long foreseen, long and earnestly prayed to
+avoid. The responsibility was so great of either giving or withholding
+the answer, as he knew it, to that question of Dickie's. A way of
+rendering possible help opened before him. But it was a way beset with
+difficulties, a way at once fantastic and coarsely realistic, a way
+along which the sublime and the ridiculous jostled each other with
+somewhat undignified closeness of association, a way demanding
+childlike faith, not to say childish credulity, coupled with a great
+fearlessness and self-abnegation before ever a man's steps could be
+profitably set in it. If presented to Richard, would he not turn
+angrily from it as an insult offered to his intellect and his breeding
+alike? Indeed, the hope of effecting good showed very thin. The danger
+of provoking evil bulked very big. What was his duty? He suffered an
+agony of indecision. And again with a slight inflection of mockery in
+his tone, Richard spoke.
+
+"All blind chance, Julius? I declare I get a little weary of this Deity
+of yours. He neglects his business so flagrantly. He really is rather
+scandalously much of an absentee. And He would be so welcome if He
+would condescend to deal a trifle more openly with one, and satisfy
+one's intelligence and moral sense. If, for instance, He would afford
+me some information regarding this same psychological moment which I
+need so badly just now as a peg to hang a theory of casualty upon. I am
+ambitious--as much in the interests of His reputation as in those of my
+own curiosity--to get at the logic of the affair, to get at the why and
+wherefore of it, and lay my finger on the spot where differentiation
+sets in."
+
+Julius March stood upright. Richard's scorn hurt him. It also
+terminated his indecision. For a little space he looked out into the
+stark whiteness of the snowy dusk, and then down at the young man,
+leaning back in the low chair, there close before him. To Julius'
+short-sighted eyes, in the uncertain light, Dickie's face bore
+compelling resemblance to Lady Calmady's. This touched him with the
+memory of much, and he went back on the thought of the divine
+compassion, perpetually renewed, perpetually made evident in the
+Eucharistic Sacrifice. Man may rail, yet God is strong and faithful to
+bless. Perhaps that way was neither too fantastic, nor too humble,
+after all, for Richard to walk in.
+
+"Has no knowledge of the received legend about this subject ever
+reached you?"
+
+"No--never--not a word."
+
+"I became acquainted with it accidentally, long ago, before your birth.
+It is inadmissible, according to modern canons of thought, as such
+legends usually are. And events, subsequent to my acquaintance with it,
+conferred on it so singular and painful a significance that I kept my
+knowledge to myself. Perhaps when you grew up I ought to have put you
+in possession of the facts. They touch you very nearly."
+
+Richard raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Indeed," he said coldly.
+
+"But a fitting opportunity--at least, so I judged, being, I own,
+backward and reluctant in the matter--never presented itself. In this,
+as in much else, I fear I have betrayed my trust and proved an
+unprofitable servant--if so may God forgive me."
+
+"It would have gone hard with Brockhurst without you, Julius," Richard
+said, a sudden softening in his tone.
+
+"I will bring you the documents the last thing to-night, when--when
+your mother has left you. They are best read, perhaps, in silence and
+alone."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A LITANY OF THE SACRED HEART
+
+
+Richard drew himself up on to the wide, cushioned bench below the
+oriel-window. The February day was windless and very bright. And
+although, in sheltered, low-lying places, where the frost held, the
+snow still lingered, in the open it had already disappeared, and that
+without unsightliness of slush--shrinking and vanishing, cleanly burned
+up and absorbed by the genial heat. A Sabbath-day restfulness held the
+whole land. There was no movement of labour, either of man or beast.
+And a kindred restfulness pervaded the house. The rooms were vacant.
+None passed to and fro. For it so happened that good Mr. Caryll's
+successor, the now rector of Sandyfield, had been called away to
+deliver certain charity sermons at Westchurch, and that to-day Julius
+March officiated in his stead. Therefore Lady Calmady and Miss St.
+Quentin, and the major part of the Brockhurst household, had repaired
+by carriage or on foot to the little, squat, red-brick, Georgian church
+whose two bells rang out so friendly and fussy an admonition to the
+faithful to gather within its walls.
+
+Richard had the house to himself. And this accentuation of solitude,
+combined with wider space wherein he could range without fear of
+observation, was far from unwelcome to him. Last night he had untied
+the tag of rusty, black ribbon binding together the packet of tattered,
+dog's-eared, little chap-books which for so long had reposed in the
+locked drawer of Julius March's study table beneath the guardianship of
+the bronze _pieta_. With very conflicting feelings he had mastered the
+contents of those same untidy, little volumes, and learned the sordid,
+and probably fabulous, tale set forth in them in meanest vehicle of
+jingling verse. Vulgarly told to catch the vulgar ear, pandering to the
+popular superstitions of a somewhat ignoble age, it proved repugnant
+enough--as Julius had anticipated--both to Richard's reason and to his
+taste. The critical faculty rejected it as an explanation absurdly
+inadequate. The cause was wholly disproportionate to the effect, as
+though a mouse should spring forth a mountain instead of a mountain a
+mouse. At least that was how the matter struck Richard at first. For
+the story was, after all, as he told himself, but a commonplace of life
+in every civilised community. Many a man sins thus, and many a woman
+suffers, and many bastards are yearly born into the world
+without--perhaps unfortunately--subsequent manifestation of the divine
+wrath and signal chastisement of the sinner, or of his legitimate
+heirs, male or female. Affiliation orders are as well known to
+magistrate's clerks, as are death-certificates of children bearing the
+maiden name of their mother to those of the registrar.
+
+All that Richard could dispose of, if with a decent deploring of the
+frequency of it, yet composedly enough. But there remained that other
+part of it. And this he could not dispose of so cursorily. His own
+unhappy deformity, it is true, was amply accounted for on lines quite
+other than the fulfilment of prophecy, offering, as it did, example of
+a class of prenatal accidents which, if rare, is still admittedly
+recurrent in the annals of obstetrics and embryology. Nevertheless, the
+foretelling of that strange Child of Promise, whose outward aspect and
+the circumstances of whose birth--as set forth in the sorry rhyme of
+the chap-book--bore such startling resemblance to his own, impressed
+him deeply. It astonished, it, in a sense, appalled him. For it came so
+very near. It looked him so insistently in the face. It laid strong
+hands on him from out the long past, claiming him, associating itself
+imperatively with him, asserting, whether he would or no, the actuality
+and inalienability of its relation to himself. Science might pour scorn
+on that relation, exposing the absurdity of it both from the moral and
+physical point of view. But sentiment held other language. And so did
+that nobler morality which takes its rise in considerations spiritual
+rather than social and economic, and finds the origins and ultimates,
+alike, not in things seen and temporal, but in things unseen and
+eternal--things which, though they tarry long for accomplishment, can
+neither change, nor be denied, nor, short of accomplishment, can pass
+away.
+
+And it was this aspect of the whole, strange matter--the thought,
+namely, of that same Child of Promise who, predestined to bear the last
+and heaviest stroke of retributive justice, should, bearing it rightly,
+bring salvation to his race--which obtained with Dickie on the fair
+Sunday morning in question. It refused to quit him. It affected him
+through all his being. It appealed to the poetry, the idealism, of his
+nature--a poetry and idealism not dead, as he had bitterly reckoned
+them, though sorely wounded by ill-living and the disastrous issues of
+his passion for Helen de Vallorbes. He seemed to apprehend the approach
+of some fruitful, far-ranging, profoundly-reconciling and beneficent
+event. As in the theatre at Naples, when Morabita sang, and to his
+fever-stricken, brain-sick fancy the dull-coloured multitude in the
+_parterre_ murmured, buzzing remonstrant as angry swarming bees, so now
+a certain exaltation of feeling, exaltation of hope, came upon him. Yet
+having grown, through determined rebellion and unlovely experience, not
+a little distrustful of all promise of good, he turned on himself
+bitterly enough, asking if he would never learn to profit by
+hardly-bought, practical knowledge? If he would never contrive to cast
+the simpleton wholly out of him? He had been fooled many times, fooled
+there at Naples to the point of unpardonable insult and degradation.
+What so probable as that he would be fooled again, now?
+
+And so, in effort to shake off both the dominion of unfounded hope, and
+the gnawing ache of inward emptiness which made that hope at once so
+cruel and so dear, as the sound of wheels dying away along the lime
+avenue assured him that the goodly company of church-goers had, verily
+and indeed, departed, he set forth on a pilgrimage through the great,
+silent house. Passing through the two libraries, the antechamber and
+state drawing-room--with its gilded furniture, fine pictures and
+tapestries--he reached the open corridor at the stair-head. Here the
+polished, oak floor, the massive balusters, and tall, carven
+newel-posts--each topped by a guardian griffin, long of tail, ferocious
+of beak, and sharp of claw--showed with a certain sober cheerfulness in
+the pleasant light. For, through all the great windows of the eastern
+front, the sun slanted in obliquely. While in the Chapel-Room beyond,
+situated in the angle of the house and thus enjoying a southern as well
+as eastern aspect, Richard found a veritable carnival of misty
+brightness, so that he moved across to the oriel-window--whose gray,
+stone mullions and carved transomes showed delicately mellow of tone
+between the glittering, leaded panes--in a glory of welcoming warmth
+and sunlight. Frost and snow might linger in the hollows, but here in
+the open, on the upland, spring surely had already come.
+
+With the help of a brass ring, riveted by a stanchion into the space of
+paneling below the stone window-sill--placed there long ago, when he
+was a little lad, to serve him in such case as the present--Richard
+drew himself up on to the cushioned bench. He unfastened one of the
+narrow, curved, iron-framed casements, and, leaning his elbows on the
+sill, looked out. The air was mild. The smell of the earth was sweet,
+with a cleanly, wholesome sweetness. The sunshine covered him. And
+somehow, whether he would or no, hope reasserted its dominion, and that
+exaltation of feeling entered into possession of him once again, as he
+rested, gazing away over the familiar home scene, over this land,
+which, as far as sight carried, had belonged to his people these many
+generations, and was now his own.
+
+Directly below, at the foot of the descending steps of the main
+entrance, lay the square, red-walled space of gravel and of turf. He
+looked at it curiously, for there, with the maiming and death of Thomas
+Calmady's bastard, if legend said truly, all this tragic history of
+disaster had begun. There, too, the Clown, race-horse of merry name and
+mournful memory, had paid the penalty of wholly involuntary
+transgression just thirty years ago. That last was a rather horrible
+incident, of which Richard never cared to think. Chifney had told him
+about it once, in connection with the parentage of Verdigris--had told
+him just by chance. To think of it, even now, made a lump rise in his
+throat. Across the turf--offering quaint contrast to those somewhat
+bloody memories--the peacocks, in all their bravery of royal
+blue-purple, living green and gold, led forth their sober-clad mates.
+They had come out from the pepper-pot summer-houses to sun themselves.
+They stepped mincingly, with a worldly and disdainful grace, and,
+reaching the gravel, their resplendent trains swept the rounded
+pebbles, making a small, dry, rattling sound, which, so deep was the
+surrounding quiet, asserted itself to the extent of saluting Dickie's
+ears. Beyond the red wall the parallel lines of the elm avenue swept
+down to the blue and silver levels of the Long Water, the alder copses
+bordering which showed black-purple, and the reed-beds rusty as a fox,
+against thin stretches of still unmelted snow. The avenue climbed the
+farther ascent to the wide archway of the red and gray gate-house, just
+short of the top of the long ridge of bare moorland. The grass slopes
+of the park, to the left, were backed by the dark, sawlike edge of the
+fir forest, and a soft gloom of oak woods, gray-brown and mottled as a
+lizard's belly and back, closed the end of the valley eastward. On the
+right the terraced gardens, with their ranges of glittering
+conservatories, fell away to the sombre pond in the valley, home of
+loudly-discoursing companies of ducks. The gentle hillside above was
+clothed by plantations, and a grove of ancient beech trees, whose pale,
+smooth boles stood out from among undergrowth of lustrous hollies and
+the warm russet of fallen leaves. And over it all brooded the
+restfulness of the Sabbath, and the gladness of a fair and equal light.
+
+And the charm of the scene worked upon Richard, not with any heat of
+excitement, but with a temperate and reasonable grace. For the spirit
+of it all was a spirit of temperance, of moderation, of secure
+tranquillity--a spirit stoic rather than epicurean, ascetic rather than
+hedonic, yet generous, spacious, nobly reasonable, giving ample scope
+for very sincere, if soberly-clad pleasures, and for activities by no
+means despicable or unmanly, though of a modest, unostentatious sort.
+Dickie had tried not a few desperate adventures, had conformed his
+thought and action to not a few glaring patterns, rushing to violences
+of extreme colour, extreme white and black. All that had proved
+preeminently unsuccessful, a most poisonous harvest of Dead Sea fruit.
+What, he began to ask himself, if he made an effort to conform it to
+the pattern actually presented to him--mellow, sun-visited, with the
+brave red of weather stained masonry in it, blue and silver of water
+and sky, lustre of sturdy hollies, as well as the solemnity of leafless
+woods, finger of frost in the hollows, and bleakness of snow?
+
+And, as he sat meditating thus, breathing the clear air, feeling the
+tempered, yet genial, sun-heat, many questions began to resolve
+themselves. He seemed to look, as down a long, cloudy vista--beyond the
+tumult and unruly clamour, the wayward resistance and defiant sinning,
+the craven complainings, the ever-repeated suspicions and
+misapprehensions of man--away into the patient, unalterable purposes of
+God. And looking, for the moment, into those purposes, he saw this
+also--namely, that sorrow, pain, and death, are sweet to whosoever
+dares, instead of fighting with, or flying from them, to draw near, to
+examine closely, to inquire humbly, into their nature and their
+function. He began to perceive that these three reputed enemies--hated
+and feared of all men--are, after all, the fashioners and teachers of
+humanity, to whom it is given to keep hearts pure, godly and
+compassionate, to purge away the dross of pride, hardness, and
+arrogance, to break the iron bands of ambition, self-love, and vanity,
+to purify by endurance and by charity, welding together--as with the
+cunning strokes of the master-craftsman's hammer--the innumerable
+individual atoms into a corporate whole, of fair form, of supreme
+excellence of proportion, the image and example of a perfect
+brotherhood, of a republic more firmly based and more beneficent than
+even that pictured by the divine Plato himself--since that was
+consolidated by exclusion, this by inclusion and pacification of those
+things which men most dread.--Perceived that, without the guiding and
+chastening of these three lovely terrors, humanity would, indeed, wax
+wanton, and this world become the merriest court of hell, lust and
+corruption have it all their own foul way, the flesh triumph, and all
+bestial things come forth to flaunt themselves gaudily, greedily,
+without remonstrance and without shame in the light of day.--Perceived
+in these three, a Trinity of Holy Spirits, bearing forever the message
+of the divine mercy and forgiveness.--Perceived how, of necessity, only
+the Man of Sorrows can truly be the Son of God.
+
+And, perceiving all this, Richard's attitude towards his own unhappy
+deformity began to suffer modification. The sordid, yet extravagant,
+chap-book legend no longer outraged either his moral or his scientific
+sense. He recalled his emotions in the theatre at Naples when Morabita
+sang, remembering how wholly welcome had then been to him that imagined
+approaching-act of retributive justice. He recalled, too, the going
+forth of love towards his supposed executioners which he had
+experienced, his reverence for, and yearning towards, the dull-coloured
+working-bees of the _parterre_. How he had longed to be at one with
+them, partaker of their corporate action and corporate strength! How he
+had rejoiced in the conviction that the final issues are subject to
+their ruling, that the claims of want are stronger than those of
+wealth, that labour is more honourable than sloth, intelligence than
+privilege, liberty more abiding than tyranny--the idea of equality, of
+fellowship, more excellent than the aristocratic idea, that of born
+master and of born serf! And both that welcome of the accomplishment of
+a signal act of justice, and that desire to participate in the eternal
+strength of the children of labour as against the ephemeral and
+fictitious strength of the children of idleness and wealth, found
+strange confirmation in the chap-book legend.
+
+For it seemed to Richard that, taking all that singular matter both of
+prophecy and of cure simply--as believers take some half-miraculous,
+scripture tale--he had already, in his own person, in right of the
+physical uncomeliness of it, paid part, at all events, of the price
+demanded by the Eternal Justice for his ancestors' sinning and for his
+own. It was not needful that the bees should swarm and the dull-coloured
+multitude revenge itself on the indolent, full-fed larvae peopling the
+angular honey-cells, as far as he, Richard Calmady, was concerned. That
+revenge had been taken long ago, in a mysterious and rather terrible
+manner, before his very birth. While, in the stern denunciation, the
+adhering curse, of the outraged and so-soon-to-be-childless mother, he
+found the just and age-old protest, the patient faith in the eventual
+triumph of the proletariat--of the defenseless poor as against the
+callous self-seeking and sensuality of the securely guarded rich. By
+the fact of his deformity he was emancipated from the delusions of his
+class, was made one, in right of the suffering and humiliation of it,
+with the dull-coloured multitudes whose corporate voice declares the
+ultimate verdict, who are the architects and judges of civilisation, of
+art, even of religion, even, in a degree, of nature herself. Salvation,
+according to the sorry yet inspiring rhyme of the chap-book, was
+contingent upon precisely this recognition of brotherhood with, and
+practice of willing service towards, all maimed and sorrowful
+creatures. His America was here or nowhere, his vocation clearly
+indicated, his work immediate and close at hand.
+
+How the Eternal Justice might see fit to deal with other souls, why he
+had been singled out for so peculiar and conspicuous a fate, Richard
+did not pretend to say. All that had become curiously unimportant to
+him. For he had ceased to call that fate a cruel one. It had changed
+its aspect. It had come suddenly to satisfy both his conscience and his
+imagination. With a movement at once of wonder and of deep-seated
+thankfulness, he, for the first time, held out his hands to it,
+accepting it as a comrade, pledging himself to use rather than to spurn
+it. He looked at it steadfastly and, so looking, found it no longer
+abhorrent but of mysterious virtue and efficacy, endued with power to
+open the gates of a way, closed to most men, into the heart of
+humanity, which, in a sense, is nothing less than the heart of Almighty
+God Himself. It was as though, like the saint of old, daring to kiss
+the scabs and sores of the leper, he found himself gazing on the divine
+lineaments of the risen Christ. And this brought to him a sense of
+almost awed repose. It released him from the vicious circle of self, of
+sharp-toothed disappointment and leaden-heavy discouragement, in which
+he had so long fruitlessly turned. He seemed consciously to slough off
+the foul and ragged garment of the past and all its base, unprofitable
+memories, as the snake sloughs off her old skin in the warm May weather
+and glides forth, glittering, in a coat of untarnished, silver mail.
+The whole complexion of his thought regarding his personal
+disfigurement was changed.
+
+Not that he flattered himself the discomfort, the daily vexation and
+impediment of it, had passed away. On the contrary these very actually
+remained, and would remain to the end. And the consequences they
+entailed remained also, the restrictions and deprivations they
+inflicted. They put many things, dear to every sane and healthy-minded
+man, hopelessly out of his reach, very much upon the shelf. Love and
+marriage were shelved thus, in his opinion, let alone lesser and more
+ephemeral joys. Only the ungrudging acceptance of the denial of those
+joys, whether small or great, was a vital part of that idea to the
+evolution of which he now dedicated himself--that Whole which, in
+process of its evolution, would make for a sober and temperate
+well-being, formed on the pattern, sober yet nobly spacious, cleanly,
+and wholesome, of the sun-visited landscape there without. He had just
+got to discipline himself into the harmony with the idea newly revealed
+to him. And that, as he told himself, not without a sense of the humour
+of the situation in certain aspects, meant in more than one department,
+plenty of work!--And he had to spend himself and go on, through good
+report and ill, through gratitude and, if needs be, through abuse and
+detraction, still spending himself, actively, untiringly, in the effort
+to make some one person--it hardly mattered whom, but for choice, those
+who like himself had been treated unhandsomely by nature or by
+accident--just a trifle happier day by day.
+
+But, while Richard rested thus in the quiet sunshine, he lost count of
+time. High-noon came and passed, finding and leaving him in absorbed
+contemplation of his own thought. At last a barking of dogs, and the
+sound of wheels away on the north side of the house, broke up the
+silence. Then a faint echo of voices, a boy's laughter in the great
+hall below. Then footsteps, which he took to be Lady Calmady's, coming
+lightly up the grand staircase. At the stair-head those footsteps
+paused for a little space, as though in indecision whither to turn. And
+Richard, pushed by an impulse of considerateness somewhat, it must be
+owned, new to him, called:--
+
+"Mother, is that you? Do you want me? I'm here."
+
+Whereat the footsteps came forward, in at the open door and through the
+soft glory of the all-pervading sunshine, with an effect of gentle
+urgency and haste. Katherine's gray, silk pelisse was unfastened,
+showing the grey, silk gown, its floating ribbons, pretty frills and
+flounces, beneath. Every detail of her dress was very fresh and very
+finished, a demure daintiness in it, from the topmost, gray plume and
+upstanding, velvet bow of her bonnet to the pretty shoes upon her feet.
+Along with a lace handkerchief and her church books, she carried a
+bunch of long-stalked violets. Her face was delicately flushed, a great
+surprise, touching upon anxiety, tempering the quick pleasure of her
+expression.
+
+"My dearest," she said, "this is as delightful as it is unexpected.
+What brings you here?"
+
+And Richard smiled at her without reserve, no longer as though putting
+a force upon himself or of set purpose, but naturally, spontaneously,
+as one who entertains pleasant thoughts. He took her hand and kissed it
+with a certain courtliness and reverent fervour.
+
+"I came to look for something here," he said, "which I have looked for
+at many times and in very various places, yet never somehow managed to
+find."
+
+But Katherine, at once tenderly charmed and rendered yet more anxious
+by a quality in his manner and his speech unfamiliar to her, the
+purport of which she failed at once to gauge, answered him literally.
+
+"My dearest, why didn't you tell me? I would have looked for it before
+I went to church, and saved you the trouble of the journey from the
+gallery here."
+
+"Oh! the journey wasn't bad for me, I rather enjoyed it," Dickie said.
+"And then to tell you the truth, you've spent the better part of your
+dear life in looking for that same something which I could never manage
+to find! Poor, sweet mother, no thanks to me, so far, that you haven't
+utterly worn yourself out in the search for it."--He paused, and gazed
+away out of the open casement.--"But I have a good hope that's all over
+and done with now, and that at last I've found the thing myself."
+
+And Katherine, still charmed, still anxious, looked down at him
+wondering, for there was a perceptible undercurrent of emotion beneath
+the lightness of his speech.
+
+"However, all that will keep," he continued.--"How did you enjoy your
+church? Did dear old Julius distinguish himself? How did he preach?"
+
+And Katherine, still wondering, again answered literally.
+
+"Very beautifully," she said, "with an unusual force and pathos. He
+took the congregation not a little by storm. He fairly carried us
+away. He was eloquent, and that with a simplicity which made one
+question whether he did not speak out of some pressing personal
+experience."--Katherine's manner was touched by a pretty edge of
+pique.--"Really I believed I knew all about Julius and his doings by
+this time, but it seems I don't! I think I must find out. It would vex
+me that anything should happen in which he needed sympathy, and that I
+did not offer it.--His subject was the answer to prayer and the
+fulfilment of prophecy--and how both come, come surely and directly,
+yet often in so different a form to that which, in our narrowness of
+vision and dulness of sense, we anticipate, that we fail to recognise
+either the answer or the fulfilment, and so miss the blessing they must
+needs bring, and which is so richly, so preciously, ours if we had but
+the wit to understand and lay hold of it."
+
+Whereupon Richard smiled again.
+
+"Yes," he said, "very probably Julius did speak out of personal
+experience, or rather vicarious experience. However, I don't think he
+need worry this time, at least I hope not. The answer to prayer and
+fulfilment of prophecy, when they're good enough to come along, don't
+always get the cold shoulder."--Then his expression changed, hardened a
+little, his lips growing thin and his jaw set.--"Look here, mother," he
+added, "I think perhaps I have been rather playing the fool lately,
+since we came home. I propose to take to the ordinary habits of
+civilised, Christian man again. If it doesn't bother you, would you
+kindly let the servants know that I'm coming down to luncheon?"
+
+"Oh! my dearest, how stupid of me, I'm so grieved!" Katherine cried.
+She sat down beside him on the cushioned bench, dropping service books,
+handkerchief, and violets, in the extremity of her gentle and
+apologetic distress.--"It never occurred to me that you might like to
+come down. The Newlands people came over to church, and I brought Mary
+and the two boys back. Godfrey is over from Eton for the Sunday, and
+little Dick has had a cold and has not gone back to school yet. What
+can we do? It would be lovely to have you, and yet I don't quite know
+how I can send them away again."
+
+"But why on earth should they be sent away?" Richard said, touched and
+amused by her earnestness. "Mary's always a dear, And I've been
+thinking lately I shouldn't mind seeing something of that younger boy.
+He is my godson, isn't he? And Knott tells me he is curiously like you
+and Uncle Roger. You see it's about time to select an heir-apparent for
+Brockhurst. Luckily I've a free hand. My life's the last in the
+entail."
+
+Then, looking at him, Lady Calmady's lips trembled a little. Health had
+returned and with it his former good looks, but matured, spiritualised,
+as it seemed to her just now. The livid line of the scar had died out
+too, and was nearly gone. And all this, taken in connection with his
+words just uttered, affected her to so great and poignant a love, so
+great and poignant a fear of losing him, that she dared not trust
+herself to make any comment on those same words lest the flood-gates of
+emotion should be opened and she should lose her self-control.
+
+"Very well, Dickie," she said, bowing her head.--Then she added
+quickly, with a little gasp of renewed distress and apology:--"But--but,
+oh! dear me, Honoria is here too!"
+
+Whereat Richard laughed outright. He could not help it, she was so
+vastly engaging in her distress.
+
+"All right," he said, "I am equal to accepting Honoria St. Quentin into
+the bargain. In short, mother dear, I take over the lot, and if anybody
+else turns up between now and two o'clock I'll take them over as
+well.--Why, why, you dear sweet, don't look so scared! There's nothing
+to trouble about. I'm not too good to live, never fear. On the
+contrary, I am prepared to do quite a fine amount of living--only on
+new and more modest lines perhaps. But we won't talk about that just
+yet, please. We'll wait to give it a name until we're a little more
+sure how it promises to work out."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WHEREIN TWO ENEMIES ARE SEEN TO CRY QUITS
+
+
+Godfrey Ormiston scudded along the terrace, past the dining-room
+windows, at the top of his speed, and Miss St. Quentin followed him at
+a hardly less unconventional pace. Together they burst, by the small,
+arched side-door, into the lobby. There ensued discussion lively though
+brief. Then, Winter setting wide the dining-room door in invitation,
+sight of Honoria was presented to the company assembled within.--She,
+in brave attire of dark, red cloth, black braided and befrogged, heavy,
+silk cords and knotted, dangling tassels--head-gear to match, dark red
+and black, a tall, stiff aigrette set at the side of it--in all
+producing a something delightfully independent, soldierly, ruffling
+even, in her aspect, as she pushed the black-haired, bright-faced,
+slim-made lad, her two hands on his shoulders, before her into the
+room.
+
+"May we come to luncheon as we are, Cousin Katherine?" she cried.
+"We're scandalously late, but we're also most ferociously hungry
+and----"
+
+But here, although Lady Calmady turned on her a welcoming and far from
+unjoyful countenance, she stopped dead, while Godfrey incontinently
+gave vent to that which his younger brother--sitting beside his mother,
+Mary Ormiston, at table, on Richard Calmady's right--described mentally
+as "the most awful squawk." Which squawk, it may be added--whatever its
+effect upon other members of the company--as denoting involuntary and
+unceremonious descent from the high places of thirteen-year-old,
+public-school omniscience on the part of his elder, produced in
+eight-year-old Dick Ormiston such overflowings of unqualified rapture
+that, for a good two minutes, he had to forego assimilation of
+chocolate _soufflet_, and, slipping his hands beneath the table,
+squeeze them together just as hard as ever he could with both knees, to
+avoid disgracing himself by emission of an ecstatic giggle. For once he
+had got the whip hand of Godfrey!--Having himself, for the best part of
+an hour now, been conversant with interesting developments, he found it
+richly diverting to behold his big brother thus incontinently bowled
+over by sudden disclosure of them. He repressed the giggle, with the
+help of squeezing knees and a certain squirming all down his neat,
+little back, but his blue eyes remained absolutely glued to Godfrey's
+person, as the latter, recovering his presence of mind and good
+manners, proceeded solemnly up to the head of the table to greet his
+unlooked-for host.
+
+Honoria, meanwhile, if guiltless of an audible squawk, had been--as she
+subsequently reflected--potentially alarmingly capable of some such
+primitive expression of feeling. For the shock of surprise which she
+suffered was so forcible, that it induced in her an absurd unreasoning
+instinct of flight. Indeed, that had happened, or rather was in process
+of happening, which revolutionised all her outlook. For that the unseen
+presence, consciousness of which had come to be so constant a quantity
+in her action and her thought, should thus declare itself in visible
+form, be materialised, become concrete, and that instantly, without
+prologue or preparation, projecting itself wholesale--so to speak--into
+the comfortable commonplaces of a Sunday luncheon--after her slightly
+uproarious race home with a perfectly normal schoolboy, from morning
+church too--affected her much as sudden intrusion of the supernatural
+might. It modified all existing relations, introducing a new and, as
+yet, incalculable element. Nor had she quite yet realised what power
+the unseen Richard Calmady, these many years, had exercised over her
+imagination, until Richard Calmady seen, was there evident, actually
+before her. Then all the harsh judgments she had passed upon him, all
+the disapproval of, and dislike she had felt towards, him, flashed
+through her mind. And that matter too of his cancelled engagement!--The
+last time she had seen him was in the house in Lowndes Square, on the
+night of Lady Louisa Barking's great ball, standing--she could see all
+that now--it was as if photographed upon her brain--always would
+be--and it turned her a little sick.--Nevertheless it was impossible to
+pause any longer. It would be ridiculous to fly, so she must stick it
+out. That best of good Samaritans, Mary Ormiston, began talking to
+Julius March across the length of the table.
+
+"Oh dear, yes, of course," she was saying. "But I never realised she
+was a sister of your old Oxford friend. I wish I had. It would have
+been so pleasant to talk about you and about home in that far country!
+Her husband is in the Rifle Brigade, and she really is a nice, dear
+woman. I saw a great deal of her while we were at the Cape."
+
+And so, under cover of Mary's kindly conversation, Miss St. Quentin
+settled down into her lazy, swinging stride. Her small head carried
+high, her pale, sensitive face very serious, her straight eyebrows
+drawn together by concentration of purpose, concentration of thought,
+she followed the boy up the long room.
+
+As she came towards him, Richard Calmady looked full at her. His head
+was carried somewhat high too. His face was very still. His eyes--with
+those curiously small pupils to them--were very observant, in effect
+hiding rather than revealing his thought. His manner, as he held out
+his hand to her, was courteous, even friendly, and yet, notwithstanding
+her high and fearless spirit, Honoria--for the first time in her life
+probably--felt afraid. And then she began to understand how it came
+about that, whether he behaved well or ill, whether he was good or bad,
+cruel or kind, seen or unseen even, Richard, of necessity, could not
+but occupy a good deal of space in the lives of all persons brought
+into close contact with him. For she recognised in him a rather
+tremendous creature, self-contained, not easily accessible, possessed
+of a larger portion than most men of energy and resolution, possessed
+too--and this, as she thought of it, again turned her a trifle sick--of
+an unusual capacity of suffering.
+
+"I am ashamed of being so dreadfully late," she said as she slipped
+into the vacant place on his left.--Godfrey Ormiston was beyond her,
+next to Julius March.--Honoria was aware that her voice sounded
+slightly unsteady, in part from her recent scamper, in part from a
+queer emotion which seemed to clutch at her throat.--"But we walked
+home over the fields and by the Warren, and just in that boggy bit
+where you cross the Welsh-road, Godfrey found the slot of a red-deer in
+the snow, and naturally we both had to follow it up."
+
+"Naturally," Richard said.
+
+"I'm not so sure it was a red-deer, Honoria," the boy broke in.
+
+"Oh yes, it was," she declared as she helped herself to a cutlet. "It
+couldn't have been anything else."
+
+"Why not?" Richard asked. He was interested by the tone of assurance in
+which she spoke.
+
+"Oh, well, the tracks were too big for a fallow-deer to begin with. And
+then there's a difference, you can't mistake it if you've ever compared
+the two, in the cleft of the hoof."
+
+"And you have compared the two?"
+
+"Oh, certainly," Honoria answered.--She was beginning to recover her
+nonchalance of manner and indolent slowness of speech. "I lose no
+opportunity of acquiring odds and ends of information. One never knows
+when they may come in handy."
+
+She looked at him as she spoke, and her upper lip shortened and her
+eyes narrowed into a delightful smile--a smile, moreover, which had the
+faintest trace of an asking of pardon in it. And it struck Richard that
+there was in her expression and bearing a transparent sincerity, and
+that her eyes--now narrowed as she smiled--were not the clear, soft
+brown they appeared at a distance to be, but an indefinable colour,
+comparable only to the dim, yet clear, green gloom which haunts the
+under-spaces of an ilex grove upon a summer day. He turned his head
+rather sharply. He did not want to think about matters of that sort. He
+was grateful to this young lady for the devoted care she had bestowed
+on his mother--but, otherwise her presence was only a part of that
+daily discipline which must be cheerfully undertaken in obedience to
+the exigencies of his new and fair idea.
+
+"Probably it is a deer that has broken out of Windsor Great Park and
+traveled," he said. "They do that sometimes, you know."
+
+But here small Dick Ormiston, whose spirits, lately pirouetting on
+giddy heights of felicity, had suffered swift declension bootwards at
+mention of his thrilling adventure in which, alas, he had neither lot
+nor part, projected himself violently into the conversational arena.
+
+"Mother," he piped, his words tumbling one over the other in his
+eagerness--"Mother, I expect it's the same deer that grandpapa was
+talking about when Lord Shotover came over to tea last Friday, and
+wanted to know if Honoria wasn't back at Newlands again. And then he
+and grandpapa yarned, don't you know. Because, Cousin Richard--it must
+have been while you were away last year--the buckhounds met at Bagshot
+and ran through Frimley and right across Spendle Flats----"
+
+"No, they didn't, Cousin Richard," Godfrey interrupted. "They ran
+through the bottom of Sandyfield Lower Wood."
+
+"But they lost--any way they lost, Cousin Richard," the younger boy
+cried.--"You weren't there, Godfrey, so you can't know what grandpapa
+said. He said they lost somewhere just into Brockhurst, and he told
+Lord Shotover how they beat up the country for nearly a week, and how
+they never found it, and had to give it up as a bad job and go home
+again. And--and--Lord Shotover said, rotten bad sport, stag-hunting,
+unless you get it on Exmoor, where they're not carted and they don't
+saw their antlers off. He said meets of the buckhounds ought to be
+called Stockbroker's Parade, that was about all they amounted to. And
+so, Cousin Richard, I think,--don't you, mother--that this must be that
+same deer?"
+
+Whereat the elder Dick's expression, which had grown somewhat dark at
+the mention of Lord Shotover, brightened sensibly again. And, for cause
+unknown, he looked at Honoria, smiling amusedly, before saying to the
+very voluble small sportsman:--
+
+"To be sure, Dick. Your arguments are unanswerable, convincingly sound.
+No reasonable man could have a doubt about it! Of course it's the same
+deer."
+
+And so the luncheon finished gaily enough, though Miss St. Quentin was
+conscious her contributions to the cultivation of that same gaiety were
+but spasmodic. She dreaded the conclusion of the meal, fearing lest
+then she might be called upon to behold Richard Calmady once again, as
+she had beheld him--now just on six years ago--in the half dismantled
+house in Lowndes Square, on the night of Lady Louisa Barking's ball.
+And from that she shrank, not with her former physical repulsion
+towards the man himself, but with the moral repulsion of one compelled
+against his will to gaze upon a pitifully cruel sight, the suffering of
+which he is powerless to lessen or amend. The short, light-made
+crutches, lying on the floor by the young man's chair, shocked her as
+the callous exhibition of some unhappy prisoner's shackling-irons
+might. It constituted an indignity offered to the Richard sitting here
+beside her, so much as to think of, let alone look at, that same
+Richard when on foot. Therefore it was with an oddly mingled relief and
+sense of playing traitor, that she rose with the rest of the little
+company and left him by himself. She was thankful to escape, though all
+the while her inherent loyalty tormented her with accusation of
+meanness, as of one who deserts a comrade in distress.
+
+But here the small Dick, to whom such complex refinements of
+sensibility were as yet wholly foreign, created a diversion by prancing
+round from the far side of the table and forcibly seizing her hand. He
+was jealous of the large share Godfrey had to-day secured of her
+society. He meant to have his innings. So he rubbed his curly head
+against her much braided elbow, butting her lovingly in the exuberance
+of his affection as some nice, little ram-lamb might. But just as they
+reached the door, through which Lady Calmady and the rest of the party
+had already passed, the boy drew up short.
+
+"I say, hold on half a minute, Honoria, please," he said.
+
+And then, turning round, his cheeks red as peonies, he marched back to
+where Richard sat alone at the head of the table.
+
+"In case--in case, don't you know," he began, stuttering in the excess
+of his excitement--"in case, Cousin Richard, mummy didn't quite take in
+what you said at the beginning of luncheon--you did mean for really
+that I was to come and stay here in the summer holidays, and that you'd
+take me out, don't you know, and show me your horses?"
+
+And to Honoria, glancing at them, there was a singular, and almost
+tragic, comment on life in the likeness, yet unlikeness, of those two
+faces.--The features almost identical, the same blue eyes, the two
+heads alike in shape, each with the same close-fitted, bright-brown cap
+of hair. But the boy's face flushed, without afterthought or
+qualification of its eager happiness--the man's colourless, full of
+reserve, almost alarmingly self-contained and still.
+
+Yet, when the elder Richard's answer came, it was altogether gentle and
+kindly.
+
+"Yes, most distinctly _for really_, Dick," he said. "Let there be no
+mistake about it. Let it be clearly understood I want to have you here
+just as long, and just as often, as your mother and father will spare
+you. I'll show you the horses, never fear, and let you ride them too."
+
+"A--a--a real big one?"
+
+"Just as big a one as you can straddle." Richard paused.--"And I'll
+show you other things, if all goes well, which I'm beginning to
+think--and perhaps you'll think so too some day--are more important
+even than horses."
+
+He put his hand under the boy's chin, tipped up the ruddy, beaming,
+little face and kissed it.
+
+"It's a compact," he said.--"Now cut along, old chap. Don't you see
+you're keeping Miss St. Quentin waiting?"
+
+Whereupon the small Richard started soberly enough, being slightly
+impressed by something--he knew not quite what--only that it made him
+feel awfully fond, somehow, of this newly discovered cousin and
+namesake. But, about half-way down the room, that promise of a horse, a
+thorough-bred, and just as big as he could straddle, swept all before
+it, rendering his spirits uncontrollably explosive. So he made a wild
+rush and flung himself headlong upon the waiting Honoria.
+
+"Oh! you want to bear-fight, do you? Two can play at that game," she
+cried, "you young rascal!"
+
+Then without apparent effort, or diminution of her lazy grace, the
+elder Richard saw her pick the boy up by his middle, and,
+notwithstanding convulsive wrigglings on his part, throw him across her
+shoulder and bear him bodily away through the lobby, into the hall, and
+out of sight.
+
+Hence it fell out that not until quite late that evening did the moment
+so dreaded by Miss St. Quentin actually arrive. In furtherance of delay
+she practised a diplomacy not altogether flattering to her
+self-respect, coming down rather late for dinner, and retiring
+immediately after that meal to the Gun-Room, under plea of
+correspondence which must be posted at Farley in time for to-morrow's
+day mail. She was even late for prayers in the chapel, so that, taking
+her accustomed place next to Lady Calmady in the last but one of the
+stalls upon the epistle-side, she found all the members of the
+household, gentle and simple alike, already upon their knees. The
+household mustered strong that night, a testimony, it may be supposed,
+to feudal as much as to religious feeling. In the seats immediately
+below her were an array of women-servants, declining from the high
+dignities of Mrs. Reynolds the housekeeper, the faithful Clara, and her
+own lanky and loyal north-country woman Faulstich, to a very youthful
+scullery maid, sitting just without the altar rails at the end of the
+long row. Opposite were not only Winter, Bates the steward, Powell,
+Andrews, and the other men-servants, but Chaplin, heading a detachment
+from the house stables, and--unexampled occurrence!--Gnudi the Italian
+_chef_, with his air of gentle and philosophic melancholy and his
+anarchic sentiments in theology and politics, liable,--these last--when
+enlarged on, to cause much fluttering in the dove-cote of the
+housekeeper's room.--"To hear Signer Gnudi talk sometimes made your
+blood run cold. It seemed as if you couldn't be safe anywhere from
+those wicked foreign barricades and massacres," as Clara put it. And
+yet, in point of fact, no milder man ever larded a woodcock or stuffed
+it with truffles.
+
+Alone, behind all these, in the first of the row of stalls with their
+carven spires and dark vaulted canopies, sat Richard Calmady, whom all
+his people had thus come forth silently to welcome. But, through prayer
+and psalm and lesson alike, as Miss St. Quentin noted, he remained
+immovable, to her almost alarmingly cold and self-concentrated. Only
+once he turned his head, leaning a little forward and looking towards
+the purple, and silver, and fair, white flowers of the altar, and the
+clear shining of the altar lights.
+
+"Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an
+hungered and fed thee? or thirsty and gave thee drink? When saw we thee
+a stranger, and took thee in? or naked and clothed thee? Or when saw we
+thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer
+and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it
+unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
+
+The words were given out by Julius March, not only with an exquisite
+distinctness of enunciation, but with a ring of assurance, of
+sustaining and thankful conviction. Richard leaned back in his stall
+again, looking across at his mother. While Honoria, taken with a
+sensitive fear of inquiring into matters not rightfully hers to inquire
+into, hastily turned her eyes upon her open prayer-book. They must have
+many things to say to one another, that mother and son, as she divined,
+to-day,--far be it from her to attempt to surprise their confidence!
+
+She rose from her knees, cutting her final petitions somewhat short,
+directly the last of the men-servants had filed out of the chapel, and,
+crossing the Chapel-Room, a tall, pale figure in her trailing, white,
+evening dress, she pulled back the curtain of the oriel window, opened
+one of the curved, many-paned casements and looked out. She was
+curiously moved, very sensible of a deeper drama going forward around
+her, going forward in her own thought--subtly modifying and transmuting
+it--than she could at present either explain or place. The night was
+cloudy and very mild. A soft, sobbing, westerly wind, with the smell of
+coming rain in it, saluted her as she opened the casement. The last of
+the frost must be gone, by now, even in the hollows--the snow wholly
+departed also. The spring, though young and feeble yet, puling like
+some ailing baby-child in the voice of that softly-complaining,
+westerly wind, was here, very really present at last. Honoria leaned
+her elbows on the stone window-ledge. Her heart went out in strong
+emotion of tenderness towards that moist wind which seemed to cry, as
+in a certain homelessness, against her bare arms and bare
+neck.--"Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my
+brethren----"
+
+But just then Katherine Calmady called to her, and that in a sweet, if
+rather anxious, tone.
+
+"Honoria, dear child, come here," she said. "Richard is putting me
+through the longer catechism regarding those heath fires in August
+year, and the state of the woods."
+
+Then, as the young lady approached her, Lady Calmady laid one hand on
+her arm, looking up in quick and loving appeal at the serious and
+slightly troubled face.
+
+"My answers only reveal the woeful greatness of my ignorance. My
+geography has run mad. I am planting forests in the midst of
+corn-fields, so Dickie assures me, and making hay generally--as you, my
+dear, would say--of the map."
+
+Still her eyes dwelt upon Honoria's in insistent and loving appeal.
+
+"Come," she said, "explain to him, and save me from further exposition
+of my own ignorance."
+
+Thus admonished the young lady sat down on the low sofa beside Richard
+Calmady. As she did so Katherine rose and moved away. Honoria
+determined to see only the young man's broad shoulders, his
+irreproachable dress clothes, his strangely still and very handsome
+face. But, since there was no concealing rug to cover them, it was
+impossible that she should long avoid also seeing his shortened and
+defective limbs and oddly shod feet. And at that she winced and shrank
+a little, for all her high spirit and inviolate, maidenly strength.
+
+"Oh yes! those fires!" she said hurriedly. "There were several--you
+remember, Cousin Katherine?--or I dare say you don't, for you were ill
+all the time. But the worst was on Spendle Flats. You know that long
+three-cornered bit"--she looked Richard bravely in the face
+again--"which lies between the Portsmouth Road and our crossroad to
+Farley? It runs into a point just at the top of Star Hill."
+
+"Yes, I know," Dickie said.
+
+He had seen her wince.--Well, that wasn't wonderful! She could not very
+well do otherwise, if she had eyes in her head. He did not blame her.
+And then, though it was not easy to do so with entire serenity, this
+was precisely one of those small unpleasant incidents which, in
+obedience to his new code, he was bound to accept calmly,
+good-temperedly, just as part of the day's work, in fact. He had done
+with malingering. He had done with the egoism of sulking and
+hiding--even to the extent of a _couvre-pieds_. All right, here it
+was!--Richard settled his shoulders squarely against the straight,
+stuffed back of the Chippendale sofa, and talked on.
+
+"It's a pity that bit is burnt," he said. "I haven't been over that
+ground for nearly six years, of course. But I remember there were very
+good trees there--a plantation at the top end, just before you come to
+the big gravel-pits, and the rest self-sown. Are they all gone?"
+
+"Licked as clean as the back of your hand," Honoria replied, warming to
+her subject. "They hardly repaid felling for firewood. It made me
+wretched. Some idiot threw down a match, I suppose. There had been
+nearly a month's drought, and the whole place was like so much tinder.
+There was an easterly breeze too. You can imagine the blaze! We hadn't
+the faintest chance. Poor, old Iles lost his head completely, and sat
+down with his feet in a dry ditch and wept. There must be over two
+hundred acres of it. It's a dreadful eyesore, perfectly barren and
+useless, but for a little sour grass even a gipsy's donkey has to be
+hard up before he cares to eat!"--Miss St. Quentin shifted her position
+with a certain impatience. "I can't bear to see the land doing no
+work," she said.
+
+"Doing no work?" Dickie inquired. He began to be interested in the
+conversation from other than a purely practical and local standpoint.
+
+"Of course," she asserted. "The land has no more right to lie idle than
+any of the rest of us--unless it's a bit of tilth sweetening in fallow
+between two crops. That is reasonable enough. But for the rest," she
+said, a certain brightness and self-forgetting gaining on her--"let it
+contribute its share all the while, like an honest citizen of the
+universe. Let it work, most decidedly let it work."
+
+"And what about such trifles as the few hundred square miles of desert
+or mountain range?" Richard inquired, half amused, half--and that
+rather unwillingly--charmed. "They are liable to be a thorn in the side
+of the--well, socialist."
+
+"Oh, I've no quarrel with them. They come under a different
+head."--Honoria's manner had ceased to be in any degree embarrassed,
+though a slight perplexity came into her expression. For just then she
+remembered, somehow, her pacings of the station platform at Culoz, the
+salutation of the bleak, pure, evening wind from out the fastnesses of
+the Alps, and all her conversation there with her faithful admirer,
+Ludovic Quayle. And it occurred to her what singular contrast in
+sentiment that bleak evening wind offered to the mild, moist, westerly
+wind--complaint of the homeless baby, Spring--which had just now cried
+against her bosom! And again Honoria became conscious of being in
+contact, both in herself and in her surroundings, with more coercing,
+more vital drama than she could either interpret or place. Again
+something of fear invaded her, to combat which she hurried into
+speech.--"No, I haven't any quarrel with deserts and so on," she
+repeated. "They're uncommonly useful things for mankind to knock its
+head against--invincible, unnegotiable, splendidly competent to teach
+humanity its place. You see we've grown not a little conceited--so at
+least it seems to me--on our evolutionary journey up from the
+primordial cell. We're too much inclined to forget we've developed soul
+quite comparatively recently, and, therefore, that there is probably
+just as long a journey ahead of us--before we reach the ultimate of
+intellectual and spiritual development--as there is behind us
+physically from, say the parent ascidian, to you and me. And--and
+somehow"--Honoria's voice had become full and sweet, and she looked
+straight at Dickie with a rare candour and simplicity--"somehow those
+big open spaces remind one of all that. They drive one's
+ineffectualness home on one. They remind one that environment, that
+mechanical civilisation, all the short cuts of applied science, after
+all count for little and inevitably come to the place called _stop_.
+And that braces one. It makes one the more eager after that which lies
+behind the material aspects of things, and to which these merely act as
+a veil."
+
+Honoria had bowed herself together. Her elbows were on her knees, her
+chin in her two hands, her charming face alight with a pure enthusiasm.
+And Richard watched her curiously. His acquaintance with women was
+fairly comprehensive, but this woman represented a type new to his
+experience. He wanted to tolerate her merely, to regard her as an
+element in his scheme of self-discipline. And it began to occur to him
+that, from some points of view, she knew as much about that, as much
+about the idea inspiring it, as he did. He leaned himself back in the
+angle of the sofa, and clasped his hands behind his head.
+
+"All the same," he said, "I am afraid those burnt acres on Spendle
+Flats are hardly extensive enough to afford an object for me to knock
+my head against, and so enforce salutary remembrance of the limitations
+of human science. Possibly that has already been sufficiently brought
+home to me in other ways."
+
+He paused a minute.
+
+Honoria straightened herself up. Again she saw--whether she would or
+no--those defective shortened limbs and oddly shod feet. And again,
+somehow, that complaint of the moist spring wind seemed to cry against
+her bare arms and neck, begetting an overwhelming pitifulness in her.
+
+"So, since it's not necessary we should reserve it as an object lesson
+in general ineffectualness, Miss St. Quentin, what shall we do with
+it?"
+
+"Oh, plant," she said.
+
+"With the ubiquitous Scotchman?"
+
+"It wouldn't carry anything else, except along the boundaries. There
+you might put in a row of horn-beam and oak. They always look rather
+nice against a background of firs.--Only the stumps of the burnt trees
+ought to be stubbed."
+
+"Let them be stubbed," Richard said.
+
+"Where are you going to find the labour? The estate is very much
+under-manned."
+
+"Import it," Richard said.
+
+"No, no," Honoria answered, again warming to her subject. "I don't
+believe in imported labour. If you have men by the week, they must
+lodge. And the lodger is as the ten plagues of Egypt in a village. If a
+man comes by the day, he is tired and slack. His heart is not in his
+work. He does as little as he can. Moreover, in either case, the wife
+and children suffer. He's certain to take them home short money. He's
+pretty safe, being tired in the one case, or, in the other, on the
+loose, to drink."
+
+Dickie's face gave. He laughed a little.
+
+"We seem to have come to a fine _impasse_!" he remarked. "Though
+humiliatingly small, that tract of burnt land must clearly be kept to
+knock one's head against."
+
+Honoria rose to her feet.
+
+"Richard, I wish you'd build," she said, in her earnestness unconscious
+of the unceremonious character of her address. "Iles ought to have done
+that before now. But he is old and timid, and his one idea has been to
+save. You know this Brockhurst property alone would carry eight or ten
+more families. There's plenty of work. It needn't be made. It is there
+ready to hand. Give them good gardens, allotments if you can, and leave
+to keep a pig. That's infinitely better than extravagant wages. Root
+them down in the soil. Let them love the place--tie them up to it----"
+
+"Your socialism is rather quaintly crossed with feudalism, isn't it?"
+Dickie remarked.
+
+He drew himself forward, slipped down off the sofa, stood upright. And
+then, indeed, the cruel disparity between his stature and her own--for
+tall though she was, he, by right of make and length of arm, should
+evidently have been by some two or three inches the taller--and all the
+grotesqueness of his deformity, were fully disclosed to Honoria. For
+the second time that day, her tact, her presence of mind, her ready
+speech, deserted her. She backed a little away from him.
+
+And Richard perceived that. It is not easy to be absolutely
+philosophic. Something of his old anger revived towards Miss St.
+Quentin. He shuffled forward a step or two, and, steadying himself with
+one hand on the arm of the sofa, reached down to pick up his crutches.
+But his grasp was not very sure just then. He secured one. To his
+intense annoyance the other escaped him, falling back on the floor with
+a rattle. Then, instantly, before he could make effort to recover it,
+Honoria's white figure swept down on one knee in front of him. She laid
+hold of the crutch, gave it him silently, and rose to her full height
+again, pale, gallant, stately, but with a quivering of her lips and
+nostrils, and an amazement of regret and pity in her eyes, which very
+certainly had never found place there heretofore.
+
+"Thanks," Richard said.--He waited just a minute. He too was amazed
+somehow. He needed to revise the position. "About those eight or ten
+happy families whom you wish to root so firmly in the soil, and the
+housing of them--are you busy to-morrow morning?"
+
+"Oh no--no"--Honoria declared, with rather unnecessary emphasis.
+
+Generosity should surely be met by generosity. Dickie leaned his arm
+against the arm of the sofa, and looked up at the speaker. Her
+transparent sincerity, her superb chastity--he could call it by no
+other word--of manner and movement, even of outline--the slight
+angularity of strong muscle as opposed to soft roundness of cushioned
+flesh--these arrested and impressed him.
+
+"I had Chifney up from the stables this afternoon and made my peace
+with him," he said. "He was very full of your praises, Honoria--for the
+cousinship may as well be acknowledged between us, don't you think? You
+have supplemented my lapses in respect of him, as of a good deal
+else."--Richard looked away to the door of Lady Calmady's bedroom. It
+stood open, and Katherine came from within with some books, and a
+silver candlestick, in her hands.
+
+"My dears," she said, "do you know it grows very late?"
+
+"All right," he answered, "we're making out some plans for
+to-morrow."--He looked at Honoria again. "Chifney engaged he and
+Chaplin would find a horse, between them, which could be trusted
+to--well--to put up with me," he said. "I promised to go down and have
+breakfast with dear Mrs. Chifney at the stables, but I can be back here
+by eleven. Would you be inclined to come out with me then? We could
+ride over to that burnt land and have a poke round for sites for your
+cottages."
+
+"Oh yes, indeed, I can come," Honoria answered. Her delightful smile
+beamed forth, and it had a new and very delicate charm in it. For it so
+happened that the woman in her whom--to use her own phrase--she had
+condemned to solitary confinement in the back attic, beat very
+violently against her prison door just then in attempt to escape.
+
+"Dear Cousin Katherine, good-night. Good-night, Richard," she said
+hurriedly.--She went out of the room, lazily, slowly, down the black,
+polished staircase, across the great, silent hall, and along the
+farther lobby. But she let the Gun-Room door bang to behind her and
+flung herself down in the armchair--in which, by the way, the old
+bull-dog had died a year ago, broken-hearted by over long waiting for
+the homecoming of his absent master. And then Honoria, though the least
+tearful of women, wept--not in petulant anger, or with the easy,
+luxuriously sentimental overflow common to feminine humanity, but
+reluctantly, with hard, irregular sobs which hurt, yet refused to be
+stifled, since the extreme limit of emotional and mental endurance had
+been reached.
+
+"Oh, it's fine!" she said, half aloud. "I can see that it's fine--but,
+dear God, is there no way out of it? It's so horribly, so unspeakably
+sad."
+
+And Richard remained on into the small hours, sitting before the dying
+fire of the big hearth-place, at the eastern end of the gallery.
+Mentally he audited his accounts, the profit and loss of this day's
+doing, and, on the whole, the balance showed upon the profit side.
+Verily it was only a day of small things, of very humble ambitions, of
+far from world-shaking successes! Still four persons, he judged, he had
+made a degree or so happier.--His mother rejoiced, though with
+trembling as yet, at his return to the ordinary habits of the ordinary
+man.--Sweet, dear thing, small wonder that she trembled! He had led her
+such a dance in the past, that any new departure must give cause for
+anxious questionings. Dickie sunk his head in his hands.--God forgive
+him, what a dance he had led her!--And Julius March was happier--he,
+Richard, was pretty certain of that--since Julius could not but
+understand that, in the present case at all events, neither fulfilment
+of prophecy nor answer to prayer had been disregarded.--And the
+hard-bitten, irascible, old trainer, Tom Chifney, was happier--probably
+really the happiest of the lot--since he demanded nothing more
+recondite and far-reaching than restoration to favour, and due
+recognition of the importance of his calling and of the merits of his
+horses.--And nice, funny, voluble, little Dick Ormiston was happier
+too. Richard's heart went out strangely to the dear little lad! He
+wondered if it would be too much to ask Mary and Roger to give him the
+boy altogether? Then he put the thought from him, judging it savoured
+of the selfishness, the exclusiveness, and egoism, with which he had
+sworn to part company forever.
+
+He stretched his hand out over the arm of the chair, craving for some
+creature, warm, sentient, dumbly sympathetic, to lay hold of.--He
+remembered there used to be a man down near Alton, a hard-riding
+farmer, who bred bull-dogs--white ones with black points, like Camp and
+Camp's forefathers. He would tell Chifney to go down there and bespeak
+the two best of the next litter of puppies.--Yes--he wanted a dog
+again. It was foolish perhaps, but after all one did want something,
+and, since other things were denied, a dog must do--and he wanted one
+badly.--Yet the day had been a success on the whole. He had been true
+to his code. Only--and Richard shrugged his shoulders rather
+wearily--it had got to be begun all over again to-morrow, and next day,
+and next--an endless perspective of to-morrows. And the poor flesh,
+with its many demands, its delicious and iniquitous passions, its
+enchantments, its revelations, its adorable languors, its drunken
+heats, must it have nothing, nothing at all? Must that whole side of
+things be ruled out forever?--He had no more desire for mistresses, God
+forbid--Helen, somehow, had cleansed him of all possibility of that.
+And he would never ask any woman to marry him. The sacrifice on her
+part would be too great.--He thought of little Lady Constance.--Simply,
+it was not right.--So, practically, the emotional joys of life were
+reduced to this--they must consist solely in giving--giving--giving--of
+time, sympathy, thought and money! A far from ignoble programme no
+doubt, but a rather austere one for a man of liberal tastes, of varied
+experience, and of barely thirty.--And he was as strong as a bull now.
+He knew that. He might live to be ninety.--Yes, he thought he would ask
+for little Dick Ormiston. The boy would be an amusement and interest
+him.--And then suddenly the vision of Honoria St. Quentin, in her red
+and black-braided gown, with that air of something ruffling and
+soldierly about it, whipping the small Dick up in her strong arms,
+throwing him across her shoulder and bearing him off bodily, and of
+Honoria later, her sensitive face all alight, as she discoursed of the
+ultimate aim and purpose of life and of living, came before him. Above
+her white dress, he could see her white and finely angular shoulders as
+she swept down to pick up that wretched crutch.--Yes, she was a being
+of singular contrasts, of remarkable capacity, both mental and
+practical! And she might have a heart--she might. Once or twice it had
+looked rather like it.--But, after all, what did that matter? The
+feminine side of things was excluded. Besides he supposed she was half
+engaged to Ludovic Quayle.
+
+Dickie yawned. He was sleepy. His meditations became unprofitable. He
+had best go to bed.
+
+"And the devil fly away with all women, saving and excepting my well
+beloved mother," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+CONCERNING THE BROTHERHOOD FOUNDED BY RICHARD CALMADY, AND OTHER
+MATTERS OF SOME INTEREST
+
+
+It was still very sultry. All the windows of the red drawing-room
+stood wide open. Outside the thunder rain fell, straight as ramrods,
+in big globular drops, which spattered upon the gray quarries and
+splashed on the pink and lilac, lemon-yellow, scarlet and orange
+of the pot plants,--hydrangeas, pelargoniums, and early-flowering
+chrysanthemums,--set, three deep, along the base of the house wall, the
+whole length of the terrace front. The atmosphere was thick. Masses of
+purple cloud, lurid light crowning their summits, boiled up out of the
+southeast. But the worst of the storm was already over, and the parched
+land, grateful for the downpour of rain, exhaled a whiteness of
+smoke--as in thanksgiving from off some altar of incense. On the grass
+slopes of the near park a flight of rooks had alighted. They stalked
+and strode over the withered turf with a self-important, quaintly
+clerical air, seeking provender, but, so far, finding none, since the
+moisture had not yet sufficiently penetrated the hardened soil for
+earth-worms and kindred creeping-things to move surfacewards.
+
+Within, the red drawing-room had suffered conspicuous change. For, on
+Richard moving down-stairs to his old quarters in the southwestern wing
+of the house, Lady Calmady had judged it an act of love, rather than of
+desecration, to restore this long-disused apartment to its former
+employment. Adjoining the dining-room,--connecting this last with the
+billiard-room, summer-parlour, and garden-hall,--this room was
+convenient to assemble in before, and sit in for a while after, meals.
+Richard would thereby be saved superfluous journeys up-stairs. And this
+act of restitution, which was also in a sense an act of penitence, once
+decided upon, Katherine carried it forward with a certain gentle
+ardour, renewing crimson carpets and hangings and disposing the
+furniture according to its long-ago positions. The memory of what had
+once been should remain forever here enshrined, but with the glad
+colours of life, not the faded ones of unforgiven death upon it. It
+satisfied her conscience to do this. For it appeared to her that so
+very much of good had been granted her of late, so large a measure of
+peace and hope vouchsafed to her, that it was but fitting she should
+bear testimony to her awareness of all that by obliteration of the last
+outward sign of the rebellion of her sorrowful youth. The Richard of
+to-day, homestaying, busy with much kindness, thoughtful of her
+comfort, honouring her with delicate courtesies--which to whoso
+receives them makes her womanhood a privilege rather than a burden--yet
+teasing her not a little, too, in the security of a fair and equal
+affection, bore such moving resemblance to that other Richard, first
+master of her heart, that Katherine could afford to cancel the cruelty
+of certain memories, retaining only the lovelier portion of them, and
+could find a peculiar sweetness in frequentation of this room, formerly
+devoted wholly to a sense of injury and blackness of hate.
+
+And on the day in question, Katherine's presence exhaled a specially
+tender brightness, even as the thirsty earth, refreshed by the thunder
+rain, sent up a rare whiteness as of incense smoke. For she had been
+somewhat anxious about Dickie lately. To her sensitive observation of
+him, his virtue, his evenness of temper, his reasonableness, had come
+to have in them a pathetic element. He was lovely and pleasant in his
+ways. But sometimes, when tired or off his guard, she had surprised an
+expression on his face, a constrained patience of speech, even of
+attitude, which made her fear he had given her but that half of his
+confidence calculated to cheer, while he kept the half calculated to
+sadden rather rigorously to himself. And, in good truth, Richard did
+suffer somewhat at this period. The first push of enthusiastic
+conviction had passed, while his new manner of conduct and of thought
+had not yet acquired the stability of habit. The tide was low. Shallows
+and sand-bars disclosed themselves. He endured the temptations arising
+from the state known to saintly writers as "spiritual dryness," and
+found those temptations of an inglorious and wholly unheroic sort. And,
+though he held his peace, Katherine feared for him--feared that the way
+he elected to walk in was over-strait, and that, though resolution
+would hold, health might be overstrained.
+
+"My darling, you never grumble now," she had said to him a few days
+back.
+
+To which he answered:--
+
+"Poor, dear mother, have I cheated you of one of your few, small
+pleasures? Was it so very delightful to listen to that same grumbling?"
+
+"I begin to believe it was," Katherine declared. "It conferred a unique
+distinction upon me, you see, because I had a comfortable conviction
+you grumbled to nobody else. One is jealous of distinction. Yes--I
+think I miss it, Dickie."
+
+Whereupon he laughed and kissed her, and swore he'd grumble fast enough
+if there was anything--which positively there wasn't--to grumble about.
+All of which, though it charmed Katherine, appeased her anxiety but
+moderately. The young man worked too hard. His opportunities of
+amusement were too scant. Katherine cast about in thought, and in
+prayer, for some lightening of his daily life, even if such lightening
+should lessen the completeness of his dependence upon herself. And it
+was just at this juncture that Miss St. Quentin wrote proposing to come
+to Brockhurst for a week. She had not been there since the Whitsuntide
+recess. She wrote from Ormiston, where she was staying on her way
+south, after paying a round of country-house visits in Scotland. It was
+now late September. She would probably go to Cairo for the winter with
+young Lady Tobermory--grandniece by marriage of her late godmother and
+benefactress--whose lungs were pronounced to be badly touched. Might
+she, therefore, come to Brockhurst to say good-bye?
+
+And to this proposed visit Richard offered no opposition, though he
+received the announcement of it without any marked demonstration of
+pleasure.--Oh, by all means let her come! Of course it must be a
+pleasure to his mother to have her. And he'd got on very well with her
+in the spring--unquestionably he had.--Richard's expression was
+slightly ironical.--But he did really like her?--Oh dear, yes, he liked
+her exceedingly. She was quite curiously clever, and she was sincere,
+and she was rather beautiful too, in her own style--he had always
+thought that. By all means have her.--After which conversation Richard
+went for a long ride, inspected cottages in building at Sandyfield,
+visited a house, undergoing extensive, internal alterations, which
+stands back from Clerke's Green, about a hundred yards short of
+Appleyard, the saddler's shop at Farley Row. He came in late. Unusual
+silence held him during dinner. And Lady Calmady took herself to task,
+reproaching herself with selfishness. Honoria was very dear to her, and
+so, only too probably, she had overrated the friendliness of Dickie's
+attitude towards the young lady. But they had seemed to get on so
+extremely well in the spring, and very fairly well at Whitsuntide! Yet,
+perhaps, in that, as in so much else, Richard put a constraint upon
+himself, obeying conscience rather than inclination. Katherine was
+perturbed. Nor had her perturbations suffered diminution yesterday,
+upon Miss St. Quentin's arrival. Richard remained unexpansive. To-day,
+however, matters had improved. Something--possibly the thunderstorm--seemed
+to have thawed his coldness, broken up his reticence of manner. Therefore
+Katherine gave thanks and moved with a lighter heart.
+
+As for Miss St. Quentin herself, an innate gladsomeness pervaded her
+aspect not easy to resist. Lady Calmady had been sensible of it when
+the young lady first greeted her that morning. It remained by her now,
+as she stood after luncheon at one of the open windows, watching the
+up-rolling thunder-cloud, the spattering raindrops, the quaintly solemn
+behaviour of the stalking, striding rooks. Honoria was easily
+entertained to-day. She felt well-disposed towards every living
+creature. And the rooks diverted her extremely. Profanely they reminded
+her of certain archiepiscopal garden-parties, with this improvement on
+the human variant, that here wives and daughters also were condemned to
+decent sables instead of being at liberty to array themselves according
+to self-invented canons of remarkably defective taste. But, though
+diverted, it must be owned she gave her attention the more closely to
+all that outward drama of storm and rain and to the antics of the
+rooks, because she was very conscious of the fact that Richard Calmady
+had followed her and his mother into the red drawing-room, and it hurt
+her--though she had now, of necessity, witnessed it many times--it
+hurt, it still very shrewdly distressed her, to see him walk. As she
+heard the soft thud and shuffle of his onward progress, followed by the
+little clatter of the crutches as he laid them upon the floor beside
+his chair, the brightness died out of Honoria's face. She registered
+sharp annoyance against herself, for she had not anticipated that this
+would continue to affect her so much. She supposed she had grown
+accustomed to it during her last two visits to Brockhurst, and that,
+this time, it would occasion her no shock. But the sadness of the young
+man's deformity remained present as ever. The indignity of it offended
+her. The desire by some, by any, means to mitigate the woeful
+circumscription of liberty and opportunity which it inflicted, wrought
+upon her almost painfully. And so she looked very hard at the hungry
+anticking rooks, both to secure time for recovery of her equanimity,
+and also to spare Richard smallest suspicion that she avoided beholding
+his advance and installation.
+
+"We needn't start until four, mother," she heard him say. "But I'm
+afraid it is clearing."
+
+Honoria turned from the window.
+
+"Yes, it is clearing," she remarked, "incontestably clearing! You won't
+escape the Grimshott function after all."
+
+"It's a nuisance having to go," Richard replied. "But you see this is
+an old engagement. People are wonderfully civil and kind. I wish they
+were less so. They waste one's time. But it doesn't do to be
+ungracious, and we needn't stay more than half an hour, need we,
+mother?"
+
+He looked up at Honoria.
+
+"Don't you think, on the whole, you'd better come too?" he said.
+
+But the young lady shook her head smilingly. She stood close beside
+Lady Calmady.
+
+"Oh dear, no," she answered. "I am quite absolutely certain I hadn't
+better come too."
+
+Richard continued to look up at her.
+
+"Half the county will be there. Everything will be richly,
+comprehensively dull. Think of it. Do come," he repeated, "it would be
+so good for your soul."
+
+"Oh, my soul's in the humour to be nobly careless of personal
+advantage," Honoria replied. "It's in a state of almost perilously
+full-blown optimism regarding the security of its own salvation to-day,
+somehow."--Her glance rested very sweetly upon Lady Calmady.--"And then
+all the rest of me--and not impossibly my soul has a word to say in
+that connection too--cries out to go and tramp over the steaming turf
+and breathe the scent of the fir woods again."
+
+Honoria sat down lazily on the arm of a neighbouring easy-chair,
+against the crimson cover of which her striped blue-and-white, shirting
+dress showed excellently distinct and clear. Richard's prolonged and
+quiet scrutiny oppressed her slightly, necessitating change of attitude
+and place.
+
+"And then," she continued, "I want to go down to the paddocks and have
+a look at the yearlings. How are they coming on? Have you anything
+good?"
+
+"Two or three promising fillies. They're in the paddock nearest the
+Long Water. You'll find them as quiet as sheep. But I'll ask you not to
+go in among the brood-mares and foals unless Chifney is with you. They
+may be a bit savage and shy, and it is not altogether safe for a lady."
+
+He stretched out his hand, taking Lady Calmady's hand for a moment.
+
+"Dear mother, you look tired. You'll have to put up with Grimshott. The
+weather's not going to let us off. Go and rest till we start."
+
+And when, a few minutes later, Katharine, departing, closed the door
+behind her, he addressed Miss St. Quentin again.
+
+"How do you think my mother is?"
+
+"Beautifully well."
+
+"Not worried?"
+
+"No," Honoria said.
+
+"You are really quite contented about her, then?"
+
+The question both surprised and touched his hearer as a friendly and
+gracious admission that she possessed certain rights.
+
+"Oh dear, yes," she said. "I am more than contented about her. No one
+can fail to be so who, loving her, sees her now. There was just one
+thing she wanted. Now she has it, and so all is well."
+
+"What one thing?" Dickie asked, with a hint of irony in his manner and
+his voice.
+
+"Why, you--you, Richard," Honoria said.
+
+She drew herself up proudly, a little alarmed by, a little defiant of,
+the directness of her own speech, perceiving, so soon as she had
+uttered it, that it might be construed as indirect reproach. And to
+administer reproach had been very far from her purpose. She fixed her
+eyes upon the domes of the great oaks, crowning an outstanding knoll at
+the far end of the lime avenue. The foliage of them, deep green shading
+to russet, was arrestingly solid and metallic, offering a rather
+magnificent scheme of stormy colour taken in connection with the hot
+purple of the uprolling cloud. Framed by the stone work of the open
+window, the whole presented a fine picture in the manner of Salvator
+Rosa. A few, bright raindrops splashed and splattered, and the thunder
+growled far away in the north. The atmosphere was heavy. For a time
+neither spoke. Then Honoria said, gently, as one asking a favour:--
+
+"Richard, will you tell me about that home of yours? Cousin Katherine
+was speaking of it to me last night."
+
+And it seemed to her his thought must have journeyed to some far
+distance, and found difficulty in returning thence, it was so long
+before he answered her, while his face had become set, and showed
+colourless as wax against the surrounding crimson of the room.
+
+"Oh, the home!" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders just perceptibly.
+"It doesn't amount to very much. My mother in her dear unwisdom of
+faith and hope magnifies the value of it. It's just an idle man's fad."
+
+"A fad with an uncommon amount of backbone to it, apparently."
+
+"That depends on its eventual success. It's a thing to be judged not by
+intentions but by results."
+
+"What made you think of it?"
+
+Richard looked full at her, spreading out his hands, and again
+shrugging his shoulders, slightly. Again Miss St. Quentin accused
+herself of a defect of tact.
+
+"Isn't it rather obvious why I should think of it?" he asked. "It
+seemed to me that, in a very mild and limited degree, it was calculated
+to meet a want."--He smiled upon her, quite sweet-temperedly, yet once
+more there was a flavour of irony in his tone.--"Of course hideous
+creatures and disabled creatures are an eyesore. We pity, but we look
+the other way. I quite accept that. They are a nuisance, since they are
+a standing witness to the fact that things, here below, very far from
+always work smoothly and well, and that there are disasters beyond the
+power of applied science to put right. The ordinary human being doesn't
+covet to be forcibly reminded of that by means of a living object
+lesson."
+
+Richard shifted his position, clasped his hands behind his head. He had
+begun speaking without idea of self-revelation, but the relief of
+speech, after long self-repression, took him, goading him on. Old
+strains of feeling, kept under by conscious exercise of will, asserted
+themselves. He asked neither sympathy nor help. He simply called from
+off those shallows and sand-bars laid bare by the ebbing tide of his
+first enthusiasm. He protested, wearied by the spiritual dryness which
+had caused all effort to prove so joyless of late. To have sought
+relief in words before his mother would have been unpardonable, he
+held. She had borne enough from him in the past, and more than enough.
+But to permit it himself in the presence of this young, strong, capable
+woman of the world, was very different. She came out of the swing of
+society and of affairs, of large interests in politics and in thought.
+She would go back into those again very shortly, so what did it matter?
+She captivated him and incensed him alike. His relation to her had been
+so fertile of contradictions--at once singularly superficial and
+fugitive, and singularly vital. He did not care to analyse his own
+feelings in respect of her. He had, so he told himself, never quite
+cared to do that. She had wounded his pride shrewdly at times, still he
+had unquestioning faith in her power of comprehending his meaning as
+she sat there, graceful, long-limbed, indolent, in her pale dress,
+looking towards the window, the light on her face revealing the fine
+squareness of the chiselling of her profile, of her jaw, her nostril,
+and brow. She appeared so free of spirit, so untrammeled, so
+excellently exalted above all that is weak, craven, smirched by
+impurity, capable of baseness and deceit!
+
+"But naturally with me the case is different," he went on, his voice
+growing deeper, his utterance more measured. "It is futile to resent
+being reminded of that which, in point of fact, you never forget. It's
+childish for the pot to call the kettle black. And so I came to the
+conclusion, a few months ago, to put away all such childishness, and
+set myself to gain whatever advantage I could from--well--from my own
+blackness."
+
+Honoria turned her head, averting her face yet further. Richard could
+only see the outline of her cheek. She had never before heard him make
+so direct allusion to his own deformity, and it frightened her a
+little. Her heart beat curiously quick. For it was to her as though he
+compelled her to draw near and penetrate a region in which, gazing
+thitherward questioningly from afar, she had divined the residence of
+stern and intimate miseries, inalienable, unremittent, taking their
+rise in an almost alarming distance of time and fundamentally of cause.
+
+"You see, in plain English," he said, "I look at all such unhappy
+beings from the inside, not, as the rest of you do, merely from the
+out. I belong to them and they to me. It is not an altogether
+flattering connection. Only recently, I am afraid, have I had the
+honesty to acknowledge it! But, having once done so, it seems only
+reasonable to look up the members of my unlucky family and take care of
+them, and if possible put them through--not on the lines of a
+charitable institution, which must inevitably be a rather mechanical,
+stepmother kind of arrangement at best, but on the lines of family
+affection, of personal friendship."
+
+He paused a moment.
+
+"Does that strike you as too unpractical and fantastic, contrary to
+sound, philanthropic principle and practice?"
+
+Honoria shook her head.
+
+"It is based on a higher law than any of modern organised
+philanthropy," she said, and her voice had a queer unsteadiness in it.
+"It goes back to the Gospels--to the matter of giving your life for
+your friend."
+
+As she spoke, Honoria rose. She went across and stood at the window.
+Furtively she dabbed her pocket handkerchief against her eyes.
+
+"Well, after all, one must give one's life for something or other, you
+know," Dickie remarked, "or the days would become a little too
+intolerably dull, and then one might be tempted to make short work of
+life altogether."
+
+Honoria returned to her chair and sat down--this time not on the arm of
+it but in ordinary conventional fashion. She faced Richard. He observed
+that her eyelids were slightly swollen, slightly red. This gave an
+extraordinary effect of gentleness to her expression.
+
+"How do you find them--the members of your sad family?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, in all sorts of ways and of places! Knott swears it is contrary to
+reason, an interfering with the beneficent tendency of nature to kill
+off the unfit. Yet he works like a horse to help me--even talks of
+giving up his practice and moving to Farley Row, so as to be near the
+headquarters of my establishment. The lease of a rather charming, old
+house there fell in this year. Fortunately the tenant did not want to
+renew, so I am having that made comfortable for them."
+
+Richard smiled. A greater sense of well-being animated him. Out of the
+world she had come, back into the world she would go again. Meanwhile
+she was nobly fair to look upon, she was pure of heart, intercourse
+with her made for the justification of high purposes and unselfish
+experiment--so he thought.
+
+"I am growing as keen on bagging a fine cripple as another man might on
+bagging a fine tiger," he said. "The whole matter at bottom, I suspect,
+turns on the instinct of sport.--Only the week before last I acquired a
+rather terribly superior specimen. A lad of eighteen, a factory hand in
+Westchurch. He was caught by some loose gearing and swept into the
+machinery. What is left of him--if it survives, which it had much
+better not, and I can't help hoping it will, he is such a plucky,
+sweet-natured fellow--will require a nurse for the rest of its life. So
+I am pushing on the work at Farley, that the home may be ready when we
+get him out of hospital.--By the way, I must go to-morrow and stir up
+the workmen. Do you care to come and see it all, if the afternoon is
+fine and not too hot?"
+
+And Honoria agreed. Nor did she shrink when Richard slipping out of his
+chair picked up his crutches.--"I suppose it is about time to get ready
+for the Grimshott function," he said.--She walked beside him to the
+door, opened it and passed into the neutral-tinted, tapestry-hung
+dining-room. There the young man waited a moment. He looked not at her
+but straight before him.
+
+"Honoria," he said suddenly, almost harshly, "you and Helen de
+Vallorbes used to be great friends. For more than a year I have held no
+communication with her, except through my lawyers. Can you tell me
+anything about her?"
+
+Miss St. Quentin hesitated.
+
+"Nothing very direct--I heard from de Vallorbes about three months ago.
+I don't think I am faithless--indeed I held on to her as long as I
+could, Richard! I am not squeamish, and then I always prefer to stand
+by the woman. But whatever de Vallorbes may have been, he pulled
+himself together rather admirably from the time he went into the army.
+He wanted to keep straight and to live respectably. And--I hate to say
+so--but she treated him a little too flagrantly. And then--and
+then----"
+
+Honoria put her hands over her eyes and shook back her head angrily.
+
+"It wasn't one man, Richard."
+
+Dickie went white to the lips.
+
+"I know that," he said.
+
+He moved forward a few steps.
+
+"Who is it now? Destournelle?"
+
+"Oh no--no"--Honoria said. "Some Russian--from the extreme east--Kazan,
+I think--prince, millionaire, drunken savage. But he adores her. He
+squanders money upon her, surrounds her with barbaric state. This is de
+Vallorbes' version of the affair. The scandal is open and notorious.
+But she and her prince together have great power. Something will
+eventually be arranged in the way of a marriage. She will not come
+back."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+TELLING HOW LUDOVIC QUAYLE AND HONORIA ST. QUENTIN WATCHED THE TROUT
+RISE IN THE LONG WATER
+
+
+Some hour and a half later Miss St. Quentin passed down the flight of
+stone steps, leading from the southern end of the terrace to the grass
+slopes of the park. Arrived at the lowest step she gathered the skirt
+of her dress up over one arm, thereby securing greater freedom of
+movement, and displaying a straight length of pink and white petticoat.
+Thus prepared she fared forth over the still smoking turf. The storm
+had passed, but the atmosphere remained thick and humid. A certain
+opulence of colour obtained in the landscape. The herbs in the grass,
+wild-thyme, wild-balm, and star-flowered camomile, smelt strongly
+aromatic as she trod them under foot, while the beds of bracken, dried
+and yellowed by the drought, gave off a sharp, woody scent.
+
+Usually, when thus alone and in contact with nature, such matters
+claimed Honoria's whole attention, ministering to her love of
+earth-lore and of Mother Earth--producing in her silent worship of
+those primitive deities who at once preside over and inhabit the
+waste-land and the tilth, the untamed forest and the pastures where
+heavy-uddered, sweet-breathed cows lie in the deep, meadow grass, the
+garden ground, all pleasant, orchard places, and the broad promise of
+the waving crops. But this afternoon, although the colour, odour,
+warmth, and all the many voices praising the refreshment of the rain,
+were sensibly present to her, Honoria's thought failed to be engrossed
+by them. For she was in process of worshipping younger and more
+compassionate deities, sadder, because more human, ones, whose office
+lies not with Nature in her eternal repose and fecundity but with man
+in his eternal failure and unrest. Not august Ceres, giver of the
+golden harvest-fields, or fierce Cybele, the goddess of the many paps,
+but spare, brown-habited St. Francis, serving his brethren with
+bleeding hands and feet, held empire over her meditations.--In
+imagination she saw--saw with only too lively realisation of
+detail--that eighteen-year-old lad, in the factory at Westchurch, drawn
+up--all the unspent hopes and pleasures of his young manhood active in
+him--by the loose gearing, into the merciless vortex of revolving
+wheels, and there, without preparation, without pause of warning,
+without any dignity of shouting multitude, of arena or of stake,
+martyred--converted in a few horrible seconds from health and wholeness
+into a formless lump of human waste. And up and down the land, as she
+reflected, wherever the great systems of trade and labour, which build
+up the mechanical and material prosperity of our day, go forward,
+kindred things happen--let alone question of all those persons who are
+born into the world already injured, or bearing the seeds of foul and
+disfiguring diseases in their organs and their blood.--Verily Richard
+Calmady's sad family was a rather terribly large one, well calculated
+to maintain its numbers, even to increase! For neither the age of human
+sacrifice nor of cannibalism is really over, nor is the practice of
+these limited to savage peoples in distant lands or far-away isles of
+the sea. They form the basis actually, though in differing of outward
+aspect, of all existing civilisations, just as they formed the basis of
+all past civilisations--a basis, moreover, perpetually recemented and
+relaid. And, as she considered--being courageous and fair-minded--it
+was inevitable that this should be so, unthinkable that it should be
+otherwise, since it made, at least indirectly, for the prosperity of
+the majority and development of the race.--Considering which--the
+apparently cruel paradox and irony of it--Honoria swung down past the
+scattered hawthorns, thick with ruddy fruit, across the fragrant herbs
+and short, sweet turf, through the straggling fern-brakes, which
+impeded her progress, plucking at her skirts, careless of the rich
+colour and ample beauty outspread before her.
+
+But soon, as a bird after describing far-ranging circles drops at last
+upon the from at-first-determined spot, so her thought settled down,
+with relief yet in a way unwillingly--and that not out of any lingering
+repulsion, but rather from a certain proud modesty and self-respect--upon
+Richard Calmady himself. Not only did he apprehend all this, far more
+clearly, more intimately, than she could.--Had he not spoken of the
+advantages of a certain blackness?--Honoria's vision became somewhat
+indistinct.--But he set out to deal with it in a practical manner. And
+in this connection she began to understand how it had come about that
+through years of ingratitude and neglect, and of loose-living, on his
+part, his mother could still remain patient, could endure, and
+supremely love. For behind the obvious, the almost coarse, tragedy and
+consequent appeal of the man's deformity, there was the further appeal
+of something very admirable in the man himself, for the emergence and
+due blossoming of which it would be very possible, very worth while,
+for whoso once recognised its existence to wait. John Knott had been
+right in his estimate of Richard. Ludovic Quayle had been right. Lady
+Calmady had been right.--Honoria had begun to believe that, even before
+Richard had come forth from his self-imposed seclusion, in the spring.
+The belief had increased during her subsequent intercourse with him,
+had been reinforced during her few days' visit at Whitsuntide. Yet,
+until now, she had never freely and openly admitted it. She wondered
+why? And then hastily she put such wondering from her. Again a certain
+proud modesty held her back. She did not want to think of herself in
+relation to him, or of him in relation to herself. She wished, for a
+reason she refused to define, to exclude the personal element. Doing
+that she could permit herself larger latitude of admiration. His
+acknowledgment of fellowship with, and obligation of friendship
+towards, all victims of physical disaster kindled her enthusiasm. She
+perceived that it was contrary to the man's natural arrogance, natural
+revolt against the humiliation put upon him--a rather superb
+overcoming, in short, of nature by grace. Nor was it the outgrowth of
+any morbid or sentimental emotion. It had no tincture of the hysteric
+element. It took its rise in conviction and in experiment. For Richard,
+though still young, struck her as remarkably mature. He had lived his
+life, sinned his sins--she did not doubt that--suffered unusual
+sorrows, bought his experience in the open market and at a sufficiently
+high price. And this was the result! It pleased her imagination by its
+essential unworldliness, its idealism and individuality of outlook. She
+went back on her earlier judgment of him, first formulated as a
+complaint,--he was strong, whether for good or evil--now unselfishly
+for good--and Honoria, being herself among the strong, supremely valued
+and welcomed strength. And so it happened that the tone of her
+meditations altered, being increasingly attuned to a serious, but very
+real congratulation. For she perceived that the tragedy of human life
+also constitutes the magnificence of human life, since it affords, and
+always must afford, supreme opportunity of heroism.
+
+She had traversed the open space of turf, and come to the tall, iron
+hurdles enclosing the paddock. She folded her arms on the topmost bar
+of the iron gate and stood there. She wanted to rest a little in these
+thoughts that had come to her. She was not quite sure of them as yet.
+But, if they meant anything, if they were other than mere rhetoric,
+they must mean a very great deal, into harmony with which it would be
+necessary to bring her thought upon many other subjects. She was
+conscious of an excitement, a reaching out towards some
+but-half-disclosed glory, some new and very exquisite fulness of life.
+But was it new, after all? Was it not rather the at-last-permitted
+activity of faculties and sensibilities hitherto refused development,
+voluntarily, perhaps cowardly, held in check and repressed? She
+appeared to be making acquaintance with unexpected depths of
+apprehension and emotion in herself. And this, for cause unknown,
+brought her into more lively commerce with her immediate surroundings
+and the sentiment of them. Her eyes rested on them questioningly, as
+though they might afford a tally to, perhaps an explanation of, the
+strange, yet lovely emotion which had invaded her.
+
+Here in the valley, notwithstanding the recent drought, the grass was
+lush. Across the paddock, just within the circuit of the far railings,
+a grove of large beech trees broke the expanse of living green. Beyond,
+seen beneath their down-sweeping branches, the surface of the Long
+Water repeated the hot purple, the dun-colour and silver-pink, of the
+sky. On the opposite slope, extending from the elm avenue to the
+outlying masses of the woods and upward to the line of oaks which run
+parallel with the park palings, were cornlands. The wheat, a red-gold,
+was already for the most part bound in shocks. A company of women,
+wearing lilac and pink sunbonnets and all-round, blue, linen aprons
+faded by frequent washing to a fine clearness of tone, came down over
+the blond stubble. They carried, in little baskets and shining tins,
+tea for the white-shirted harvesters who were busy setting up the
+storm-fallen sheaves. They laughed and talked together, and their
+voices came to Honoria with a pleasant quality of sound. Two stumbling
+baby-children, hand in hand, followed them, as did a small,
+white-and-tan, spotted dog. One woman was bareheaded and wore a black
+bodice, which gave a singular value to her figure amid the
+all-obtaining yellow of the corn.
+
+The scene in its simple and homely charm held the poetry of that
+happier side of labour, of that most ancient of all industries--the
+husbandman's--and of the generous giving of the soil. Set in a frame of
+opulently coloured woodland and sky, the stately red-brick and
+freestone house crowning the high land and looking forth upon it all,
+the whole formed, to Honoria's thinking, a very noble picture. And
+then, of a sudden, in the midst of her quiet enjoyment of it and a
+tenderness which the sight of it somehow begot in her, Honoria was
+seized by sharp, unreasoning regret that she must so soon leave it.
+Unreasoning regret that she had engaged to go abroad this winter, with
+poor, pretty, frivolous, young Lady Tobermory--spoilt child of society
+and of wealth--now half-crazed, rendered desperate, by the fear that
+disease, which had laid a threatening finger on her, might lay its
+whole hand cutting short her playtime and breaking her many toys. Of
+anything other than toys and playtime she had no conception.--"Those
+brutes of doctors tell Tobermory I must give up low gowns," she wrote.
+"And I adore my neck and shoulders. Every one always has admired them.
+It makes me utterly miserable to cover them up. And now that I am
+thinner I could have my gowns cut lower than ever, nearly down to my
+waist, which makes it all the more intolerable. I went to Dessaix about
+it, went over to Paris on purpose, though Tobermory was wild at my
+traveling in the heat. He--Dessaix, I mean, not poor T.--was just as
+nice as possible, and promised to invent new styles. Still, of course,
+I must look dowdy at night in a high gown. Everybody does. I shall feel
+exactly like our clergyman's wife at Ellerhay, when she comes to dine
+with us at Christmas and Easter and once in the summer. I refuse to
+have her oftener than that. She has a long back and about fourteen
+children, which she seems to think a great credit to her. I don't, as
+they are ugly, and she is dreadfully poor. She wears her Sunday silk
+with lace _wound_ about, don't you know, but wound _tight_. That means
+full dress. I am buying some lace, Duchesse at three and a half guineas
+a yard. I suppose I shall come to _winding_ that of an evening. Then I
+shall look like her. It makes me cry dreadfully, and, as I tell
+Tobermory, that is worse for me than any number of lungs. Darling H.,
+if you really love me in the least, bring nothing but high gowns.
+Perhaps I mayn't mind quite so much if I never see you in a low
+one."--There had been much more to the same effect, pathetic in its
+inadequacy and egoism. Only, as Honoria reflected, that is a style of
+pathos dangerously liable to pall upon one. She sighed, for the
+prospect of spending the winter participating in the frivolities, and
+striving to restrain the indiscretions of this little, damaged
+butterfly, did not smile upon her. She might have stayed on here,
+stayed on at Brockhurst, worked over the dear place as she had so often
+done before--helping Lady Calmady. Why had she promised?--Well--because
+she had been rather restless, unsettled, and at loose ends of late----
+
+Whereupon the young lady bent down and unfastened the padlock with a
+certain decision of movement, closed the gate, relocking it carefully
+behind her, and started off across the deep grass of the paddock, her
+pale face very serious, her small head held high. She would keep faith
+with Evelyn Tobermory. Of course she would keep faith with her. It was
+not only a matter of honour, but of expediency. It was much, very much
+better to go. Yet whence this sudden heat proceeded, and why the
+Egyptian journey assumed suddenly such paramount desirability, she
+carefully did not stay to inquire--an omission not, perhaps, without
+significance.
+
+The half-dozen dainty fillies, meanwhile, who had eyed her shyly from
+their station beneath the beech trees, trotted gently towards her with
+friendly whinnyings, their fine ears pricked, their long tails carried
+well away in a sweeping curve. Honoria went on to meet them. She was
+glad of something to occupy her hands, some outside, concrete thing to
+occupy her thought. She took the foremost, a dark bay, by the nose
+strap of its leather head-stall, patted the beast's sleek neck, looked
+into its prominent, heavy-lidded eyes,--the blue film over the
+velvet-like iris and pupil of them giving a singular softness of
+effect,--drew down the fine, aristocratic head, and kissed the little
+star where the hair turned in the centre of the smooth, hard forehead.
+It was as perfectly bred as she was herself--so clean, so fresh, that
+to touch it was wholly pleasant! Then she backed away from it, holding
+it at arm's-length, noting how every line of its limbs and body was
+graceful and harmonious, full of the purpose of easy strength, easy
+freedom of movement. That it was a trifle blown out in barrel, from
+being at grass, only gave its contours an added suavity. It was a
+lovely beast, a delicious beast! Honoria smiled upon it, talked to,
+patted and coaxed it. While another young beauty, waxing brave, pushed
+its black muzzle under her arm, and lipped at her jacket pockets in
+search of bread and of apples. And, these good things once discovered,
+the rest of the drove came about her, civilly, a trifle proudly, as
+befitted such fine ladies, with no pushings and bustlings of vulgar
+greed. And they charmed her. She was very much at one with them. She
+fed them fearlessly, thrusting one aside in favour of another, giving
+each reward in due turn. She passed her hands down over their slender
+limbs. The warm colours and the gloss of them were pleasant to her
+eyes. And they smelt sweet, as did the trampled grass beneath their
+unshod hoofs. For a while the human problem--its tragedy, magnificence,
+inadequacy alike--ceased to trouble her. The poetry of these beautiful,
+innocent, clean-feeding beasts was, for the moment, sufficient in and
+by itself.
+
+But, even while she thus played with and rejoiced in them, remembrance
+of their owner came back to her, his maiming, as against their
+perfection of finish, the lamentable disparity between his physical
+equipment and theirs. Honoria's expression lost its nonchalant gaiety.
+She pushed her gentle, equine comrades away to left and right, not that
+they ceased to please but that the human problem and the tragedy of it
+once more became dominant. She walked on across the paddock rapidly,
+while the fillies, forming up behind her, followed in single file
+treading a sinuous pathway through the grass, the foremost one still
+pushing its black muzzle, now and again, under her elbow and nibbling
+insinuatingly at her empty jacket pockets.--If only that horrible
+misfortune had not befallen Richard Calmady! If--if---- But then, had
+it not befallen him, would he ever have been excited to so admirable
+effort, would he ever have attained so absorbing and vigorous a
+personality as he actually had? Again her thought turned on itself, to
+provocation of momentary impatience.--Honoria unfastened the second
+padlock with a return of her former decision.--There were conclusions
+she wished instinctively to avoid, from which she instinctively desired
+escape. She forced aside the all-too-affectionate, bay filly who
+crowded upon her, shot back the bar of the gate and relocked it. Then,
+once again, she kissed the pretty beast on the forehead as it stretched
+its neck over the top of the gate.
+
+"Good-bye, dear lass," she said. "Win your races and, when the time
+comes, drop foals as handsome as yourself, and thank your stars you're
+under orders, and so have small chance to muddle your affairs--as with
+your good looks, my dear, you most assuredly would--like all the rest
+of us."
+
+With which excellent advice she swung away down the last twenty yards
+of the avenue and out on to the roadway of the red-brick and freestone
+bridge. Here, in the open above the water, the air was sensibly
+fresher. From the paddock the deserted fillies whinnied to her. The
+voices of the harvesters came cheerily from the cornland. The men sat
+in the blond stubble, backed by a range of upstanding sheaves. The
+women, bright in those frail blues, clear pinks, and lilacs, knelt
+serving their meal. She of the black bodice stood apart, her hands upon
+her hips, looking towards the bridge and its solitary occupant. The
+tan-and-white, spotted dog ran to and fro chasing field-mice and
+yapped. The baby children staggered after it, uttering excited
+squeakings and cries. The lower cloud had parted in the west,
+disclosing an upper stratum of pale gold, which widened upward and
+outward as the minutes passed. Save immediately below, in the shadow of
+the bridge, this found reflection in the water, overlaying it as with
+the blond of the stubble and warmer tones of the sheaves. Honoria sat
+down sideways on the coping of the parapet. She watched the moor-hens,
+dark of plumage, a splash of fiery orange on their jaunty, little
+heads, swim out with restless, jerky motion from the edge of the
+reed-beds and break up the shining surface with diverging lines of
+rippling, brown shadow. In the shade cast by the bridge, trout rose at
+the dancing gnats and flies. She could see them rush upward through the
+brown water. Sometimes they leapt clear of it, exposing their silver
+bellies, pink-spotted sides, and the olive-green of their backs. They
+dropped again with a flop, and rings circled outward from the place of
+their disappearing.
+
+All this Honoria saw, but dreamily, pensively. She realised, as never
+before, that, much as she might love this place and the life of it, she
+was a guest only, a pilgrim and sojourner. The completeness of her own
+independence ceased to please.--"Me this unchartered freedom tires." As
+she quoted the line, Honoria smiled. These were, indeed, new aspects of
+herself! Where would they carry her, both in thought and in action? It
+was a little alarming to contemplate that. And then her pensiveness
+increased, a strange nostalgia taking her--amounting almost to physical
+pain--for that same but-half-disclosed glory, that same new and very
+exquisite fulness of life, apprehension of which had lately been
+vouchsafed to her. If she could remain very still and undisturbed, if
+she could empty her consciousness of all else, bend her whole will to
+an act at once of determination and of reception, perhaps, it would be
+given her clearly to see and understand. The idealist, the mystic, were
+very present in Honoria just then. She fixed her eyes upon the shining
+surface of the water. A conviction grew upon her that, could she
+maintain a certain mental and emotional equilibrium, something of
+permanent and very vital importance must take place.
+
+Suddenly she heard footsteps upon the gravel of the roadway. She
+started, turned deliberately, holding in check the agitation which
+possessed her, to find herself confronted by the tall, preeminently
+modern and mundane, figure of Ludovic Quayle. Honoria gave herself a
+little shake of uncontrollable impatience. For less than
+twopence-halfpenny she could have given the very gentlemanlike intruder
+a shake too! He let her down with a bump, so to speak, from regions
+mysterious and supernal, to regions altogether social and of this world
+worldly. And yet she knew that such feelings were not a little hard and
+unjust as entertained towards poor Mr. Quayle.
+
+The young man, in any case, was happily ignorant of having offended. He
+sauntered out on to the bridge, hat in hand, his head a trifle on one
+side, his long neck directed slightly forward, his expression that of
+polite and intimate amusement--but whether amusement at his own, or his
+fellow-creatures' expense, it would have been difficult to declare.
+
+"At last, I find you, my dear Miss St. Quentin," he said. "And I have
+sought for you as for lost treasure. Forgive a biblical form of
+address--a reminiscence merely of my father's morning ministrations to
+my unmarried sisters, the footmen, and the maids. He reads them the
+most surprising little histories at times, which make me positively
+blush--but that's a detail. To account for my invasion of your idyllic
+solitude--I learned incidentally you proposed coming here from Ormiston
+this week. I thought I would venture on an early attempt to find you.
+But I drew the house blank, though assisted by Winter--the terrace also
+blank. Then from the troco-ground I beheld that which looked promising,
+coquetting with Dickie's yearlings. So I followed on to know--my father
+and the maids again--followed on to--to my reward."
+
+Mr. Quayle stood directly in front of her. He spoke with admirable
+urbanity, yet with even greater rapidity than usual. His beautifully
+formed mouth pursed itself up between the sentences, with that effect
+of indulgent superiority which was at once so attractive and so
+excessively provoking. But, for all that, Honoria perceived that, for
+once in his life, the young man was distinctly, not to say acutely,
+nervous.
+
+"The reward will be limited I'm afraid," she replied, "for my temper is
+unaccountably out of sorts this afternoon."
+
+"And, if one may make bold to inquire, why out of sorts, dear Miss St.
+Quentin?"
+
+He sat down on the parapet near her, crossed his legs, and fell to
+nursing his left knee. The woman of the black bodice went up across the
+pale stubble to her companions. She talked to them, nodding her head in
+the direction of the bridge.
+
+"I have promised to do a certain thing, and having promised, of course
+I must do it."
+
+Honoria looked away towards the harvesters up there among the gold of
+the corn.
+
+"And yet, now I have committed myself, thinking it over I find I
+dislike doing it warmly."
+
+"The statement of the case is just a trifle vague," Mr. Quayle
+remarked. "But--if one may brave a suggestion--supersede a first duty
+by a second and, of course, a greater. With a little exercise of
+imagination, a little good-will, a little assistance from a true friend
+thrown in perhaps, it is generally quite possible to manage that, I
+think."
+
+"And you are prepared to play the part of the true friend?"
+
+"Undoubtedly."
+
+"Then go to Cairo for the winter with Evelyn Tobermory. You must take
+no low gowns--ah! poor little soul, it is pathetic, though--she's
+forbidden to wear them. And--let me stay here!" Honoria said.
+
+Ludovic gazed at his hands as they clasped his knee, then he looked
+sideways at his companion.
+
+"Here, meaning--meaning Brockhurst, dear Miss St. Quentin?" he asked
+very sweetly.
+
+"Meaning England," she declared.
+
+"England?--ah! really. That pleases me better. Patriotism is an
+excellent virtue. The remark is not a wholly original one, but it comes
+in handy just now, all the same."
+
+The young lady's head went up. Her face straightened. She was
+displeased. Turning sideways, she leaned both hands on the stonework
+and stared down into the water. But speedily she repented.
+
+"See how the fish rise," she said. "It really is a pity one hasn't a
+fly-rod."
+
+"I was under the impression you once told me that you objected to
+taking life, except in self-defense or for purposes of commissariat.
+The trout would almost certainly be muddy. And I am quite unconscious
+of being exposed to any danger--at least from the trout."
+
+Miss St. Quentin kept her eyes fixed upon the water.
+
+"I told you my temper was out of sorts," she said.
+
+"Is that a warning?" Ludovic inquired, with the utmost mildness.
+
+Honoria was busy feeling in her jacket pockets. At the bottom of them a
+few crumbs remained. She emptied these on to the surface of the water,
+by the simple expedient of turning the pockets inside out.
+
+"I know nothing about warnings," she said. "I state a plain fact. You
+can make of it what you please."
+
+The young man rose leisurely from his place, sauntered across the
+roadway, and stood with his back to her, looking down the valley. The
+harvesters, their meal finished, moved away towards the further side of
+the great corn-field. The women followed them slowly, gleaning as they
+went. It was very quiet. And again there came to Honoria that ache of
+longing for the but-half-disclosed glory and fulness of life. It was
+there, an actuality--could she but find it, had she but the courage and
+the wit. Then, from the open moorland beyond the park palings, came the
+sound of horses trotting sharply. Ludovic Quayle turned and recrossed
+the road. He smiled, but his superfine manner, his effect of slight
+impertinence were, for the moment, in abeyance.
+
+"Miss St. Quentin," he said, "what is the use of fencing any longer? I
+have done that which I engaged to do, namely, displayed the patience of
+innumerable asses. And--if I may be pardoned mentioning such a
+thing--the years pass. Really they do. And I seem to get no forwarder!
+My position becomes slightly ludicrous."
+
+"I know it, I know it!" Honoria cried penitently.
+
+"That I am ludicrous?"
+
+"No, no," she protested, "that I have been unreasonable and traded on
+your forbearance, that I have done wrong in allowing you to wait."
+
+"That you could not very well help," he said, "since I chose to wait.
+And, indeed, I greatly preferred waiting as long as there seemed to be
+a hope there was something--anything, in short--to wait for."
+
+"Ah! but that is precisely what I have never been sure about
+myself--whether there really was anything to wait for or not."
+
+She sat straight on the coping of the parapet again. Her face bore the
+most engaging expression. There was a certain softness in her aspect
+to-day. She was less of a youth, a comrade, so it seemed to Mr. Quayle,
+more distinctly, more consciously a woman. But now, to the sound of
+trotting horse-hoofs was added that of wheels. With a clang the park
+gates were thrown open.
+
+"And are you still uncertain? In the back of your mind is there still a
+trifle of doubt?--If so, give me the benefit of it," the young man
+pleaded, half laughingly, half brokenly.
+
+A carriage passed under the gray archway of the red-brick and freestone
+lodges. Rapidly it came on down the wide, smooth, string-coloured
+road--a space of neatly kept turf on either side--under the shade of
+the heavy-foliaged elm trees. Mr. Quayle glanced at it, and paused with
+raised eyebrows.
+
+"I call you to witness that I do not swear, dear Miss St. Quentin,
+though men have been known to become blasphemous on slighter provocation
+than this," he said. "However, the rather violently-approaching
+interruption will be soon over, I hope and believe; since the driving
+is that of Richard Calmady of Brockhurst when his temper--like your
+own--being somewhat out of sorts, he, as Jehu the son of Nimshi of
+old--my father's morning ministrations to the maids again--driveth
+furiously."
+
+Then, with an air of humorous resignation, his mouth working a little,
+his long neck directed forward as in mildly-surprised inquiry, he stood
+watching the approaching mail-phaeton. The wheels of it made a hollow
+rumbling, the tramp of the horses was impetuous, the pole-chains
+rattled, as it swung out on to the bridge and drew up. The grooms
+whipped down and ran round to the horses' heads. And these stood, a
+little extended, still and rigid as of bronze, the red of their open
+nostrils and the silver mounting of their harness very noticeable. Lady
+Calmady called to Mr. Quayle. The young man passed round at the back of
+the carriage, and, standing on the far side of the roadway, talked with
+her.
+
+Honoria St. Quentin remained sitting on the parapet of the bridge.
+
+A singular disinclination to risk any movement had come upon her. Not
+the present situation in relation to Ludovic Quayle, but that other
+situation of the but-half-disclosed glory, the new and exquisite
+fulness of life oppressed her, penetrating her whole being to the point
+of physical weakness. Questioningly, yet with entire unself-consciousness,
+she looked up at Richard Calmady. And he, from the exalted height of
+the driving-seat, looked down at her. A dark, cloth rug was wrapped
+tight round him from the waist downward. It concealed the high
+driving-iron against which his feet rested. It concealed the strap
+which steadied him in his place. His person appeared finely proportioned.
+His head and face were surprisingly handsome seen thus from below--though
+it must be conceded the expression of the latter was very far from angelic.
+
+"You were well advised to stay at home, Honoria," he said. There was a
+grating tone in his voice.
+
+"The function was even more distinguished for dulness than you
+expected?"
+
+"On the contrary, it was not in the least dull. It was actively
+objectionable, ingeniously unpleasant. Whereas this----"
+
+His face softened a little. He glanced at the golden water and
+cornland, the lush green of the paddock, the rich, massive colouring of
+woodland and sky. Honoria glanced at it likewise, and, so doing, rose
+to her feet. That nostalgia of things new and glorious ached in her.
+Yet the pain of it had a strange and intimate charm, making it unlike
+any pain she had ever yet felt. It hurt her very really, it made her
+weak, yet she would not have had it cease.
+
+"Yes, it is all very lovely, isn't it?" she said.
+
+She laid her hand on the folded leather of the carriage hood. Again she
+looked up.
+
+"It is a good deal to have this--always--your own, to come back to,
+Richard."
+
+She spoke sadly, almost unwillingly. Dickie did not answer, but he
+looked down, a certain violence and energy very evident in him, his
+blue eyes hard, and, in the depth of them, desolate as the sky of a
+winter night. Calmly, yet in a way desperately, as those who dare
+inquiry beyond the range of permitted human speech, the young man and
+woman looked at one another. Lady Calmady's sweet voice, meanwhile,
+went on in kindly question. Ludovic Quayle's in well-placed, slightly
+elaborate answer. The near horse threw back its head and the
+pole-chains rattled smartly.--Honoria's lips parted, but the words, if
+words indeed there were, died in her throat. She raised her hands, as
+though putting a tangible and actual presence away from her. She did
+not change colour, but for the moment her delicate features appeared
+thickened, as by a rush of blood. She was almost plain. Yet the effect
+was inexpressibly touching. It was as though she had received some
+mysterious injury which she was dumb, incapable to express. She let her
+hands drop at her sides, turned away and walked to the far end of the
+bridge.
+
+Suddenly Richard's voice came to her, aggressive, curt.
+
+"Look out, Ludovic--stand clear of the wheel."
+
+The horses sprang forward, the grooms scrambled up at the back, and the
+carriage swung away from the brightness of the open to the gloom of the
+avenue and up the long hill to the house.
+
+Mr. Quayle contemplated it for a minute or so and then, with an air of
+amused toleration, he followed Miss St. Quentin across the bridge.
+
+"Poor, dear Dickie Calmady, poor, dear Dickie!" he said. "He attempts
+the impossible. Fails to attain it--as a matter of course, and,
+meanwhile, misses the possible--equally as a matter of course. It is
+all very magnificent, no doubt, but it is also not a little
+uncomfortable, at times, for other people.--However that trifle of
+criticism is, after all, beside the mark. Now that the whirlwind has
+ceased, Miss St. Quentin, may the still, small voice of my own affairs
+presume to make itself----"
+
+But there he stopped abruptly.
+
+"My dear friend," he asked in quick anxiety, "what is the matter?
+Pardon me, but what on earth has happened to you?"
+
+For Honoria leaned both elbows on the low, carved pillar terminating
+the masonry of the parapet. She covered her face with her hands. And,
+incontestably, she shuddered queerly from head to foot.
+
+"Wait half a second," she said, in a stifled voice. "It's nothing--I'm
+all right."
+
+Slowly she raised herself, and took a long breath. Then she turned to
+her faithful lover, showing him a brave, if somewhat drawn and tired
+countenance.
+
+"Ludovic," she said gently, "don't, don't please let us talk any more
+about all that. And don't, I entreat you, wait any longer. If there was
+any uncertainty, if there was a doubt in the back of my mind, it's
+gone. Forgive me--this must sound brutal--but there is no more doubt. I
+can't marry you. I am sorry, horribly sorry--for you have been as
+charming to me as a man could be--but I shall never be able to marry
+you."
+
+Mr. Quayle's expression retained its sweetness, even its effect of
+amusement, though his lips quivered, and his eyelids were a little red.
+
+"I do not come up to the requirements of the grand passion?" he said.
+"Alas! poor me----"
+
+"No, no, it isn't that," Honoria protested.
+
+"Ah, then,"--he paused, with an air of extraordinary
+intelligence--"Perhaps some one else does?"
+
+"Yes," she said simply, "I don't like it, but it's there, and so I've
+got to go through with it--some one else does."
+
+"In that case it is indeed hopeless! I give it up," he cried.
+
+He moved aside and stood gazing at the rising trout in the golden-brown
+water. Then he raised his head sharply, as in obedience to a thought
+suddenly occurring to him, and gazed at Brockhurst House. The
+brightness of the western sky found reflection in its many windows. A
+noble cheerfulness seemed to pervade it, as it crowned the hillside,
+amid its gardens and far-ranging woods.
+
+"By all that's"--Mr. Quayle began. But he repressed the exclamation,
+and his expression was wholly friendly as he returned to Miss St.
+Quentin.
+
+"Good-bye," he said.--"I am glad, honestly glad, you have found the
+grand passion, though the object of it can't, in the first blush of the
+affair be altogether _persona grata_ to myself. But, to show that
+really I have a little root of magnanimity in me, I am quite prepared
+to undertake a winter at Cairo, plus Evelyn Tobemory and minus low
+dresses, if that will enable you to stay on here--I mean in
+England,--of course."
+
+He pursed up his beautiful mouth, he carried his head on one side with
+the liveliest effect of provocation, as he held the young lady's hand
+while bidding her farewell.
+
+"Out of my heart I hope you will be very happy," he said.
+
+"I shall never be anything but Honoria St. Quentin," she answered
+rather hastily. Then she softened, forgiving him.--"Oh! why," she said,
+"why will you make me quarrel with you just now, just at the last?"
+
+"Because--because--" Mr. Quayle's voice broke, though his superior
+smile remained to him.--"I think I will not prolong the interview," he
+said. "To be frank with you, dear Miss St. Quentin, I am about as
+miserable as is consonant with complete sanity and excellent health. I
+do not propose to blow my brains out, but I think--yes, thanks--you
+appreciate the desirability of that course of action too?--I think it
+is about time I went."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CONCERNING A DAY OF HONEST WARFARE AND A SUNSET HARBINGER NOT OF THE
+NIGHT BUT OF THE DAWN
+
+
+That episode, upon the bridge spanning the Long Water, brought Richard
+would-be saint, Richard pilgrim along the great white road which leads
+onward to Perfection, into lively collision with Richard the natural
+man, not to mention Richard the "wild bull in a net." These opposing
+forces engaged battle, with the consequence that the carriage horses
+took the hill at a rather breakneck pace. Not that Dickie touched them,
+but that, he being vibrant, they felt his mood down the length of the
+reins and responded to it.
+
+"Ludovic need hardly have been in such a prodigious hurry," he broke
+out. "He might have allowed one a few days' grace. It was a defect of
+taste to come over immediately--but then all that family's taste is
+liable to lapses."
+
+Promptly he repented, ashamed both of his anger and such self-revealing
+expression of it.
+
+"I dare say it's all for the best though. Better a thing should be
+nipped in the bud than in the blossom. And this puts it all on a right
+footing. One might easily drift into depending too much upon Honoria. I
+own I was dangerously near doing that this spring. I don't mind telling
+you so now, mother, because this, you see, disposes finally of the
+matter."
+
+His voice contended oddly with the noise of the wheels, rattle of the
+pole-chains, pounding of the hoofs of the pulling horses. The sentences
+came to Lady Calmady's ears disjointed, difficult to follow and
+interpret. Therefore she answered slightly at random.
+
+"My dearest, I could have kept her longer in the spring if I had only
+known," she said, a disquieting suspicion of lost opportunity assailing
+her. "But, from certain things which you said, I thought you preferred
+our being alone."
+
+"So I did. I wanted her to go because I wanted her to stay. Do you
+see?"
+
+"Ah, yes! I see," Katherine replied. And at that moment, it must be
+conceded, her sentiments were not conspicuously pacific towards her
+faithful adherent, Mr. Quayle.
+
+"We've a good many interests in common," Dickie went on, "and there
+seemed a chance of one's settling down into a rather charming
+friendship with her. It was a beguiling prospect. And for that very
+reason, it was best she should depart. The prospect, in all its
+beguilingness, renewed itself to-day after luncheon."--He paused,
+handling the plunging horses.--"And so after all Ludovic shall be
+reckoned welcome. For, as I say, I might have come to depend on her.
+And one's a fool--I ought to have learnt that salutary lesson by this
+time--a rank fool, to depend on anybody, or anything, save oneself,
+simply and solely oneself"--his tone softened--"and upon you, most dear
+and long-suffering mother.--Therefore the dream of friendship goes
+overboard after all, along with the rest of one's little illusions. And
+every illusion one rids oneself of is so much to the good. It lightens
+the ship. It lessens the chances of sinking. Clearly it is so much pure
+gain."
+
+That evening, pleading--unexampled occurrence in her case--a headache
+as excuse, Miss St. Quentin did not put in an appearance at dinner. Nor
+did Richard put in an appearance at breakfast next morning. At an early
+hour he had received a communication earnestly requesting his presence
+at the Westchurch Infirmary. His mission promised to be a melancholy
+one, yet he was not sorry for the demand made by it upon his time and
+thought. For, notwithstanding the philosophic tone he had adopted with
+Lady Calmady in speaking of that friendship which, if not nipped in the
+bud, might have reached perils of too luxuriant blossoming, the
+would-be saint and the natural man, the pilgrim on the highroad to
+Perfection and that very inconvenient animal "the wild bull in a net,"
+kept up warfare within Richard Calmady. They were hard at it even yet,
+when, in the fair freshness of the September morning--the grasses and
+hedge-fruit, the wild flowers, and the low-growing, tangled coppices by
+the roadside, still heavy with dew--he drove over to Westchurch. The
+day was bright, with flying cloud and a westerly breeze. The dust was
+laid, and the atmosphere, cleared by the storm of the preceding
+afternoon, had a smack of autumn in it. It was one of those delicious,
+yet distracting, days when the sea calls, and when whosoever loves
+seafaring grows restless, must seek movement, seek the open, strain his
+eyes towards the margin of the land--be the coast-line never so far
+distant--tormented by desire for sight of the blue water, and the
+strong and naked joys of the mighty ridge and furrow where go the
+gallant ships.
+
+With the upspringing of the wind at dawn, that calling of the sea had
+made itself heard to Richard. At first it suggested only the practical
+temptation of putting the _Reprieve_ into commission, and engaging Lady
+Calmady to go forth with him on a three or four months' cruise. But
+that, as he speedily convinced himself, was but a pitifully cheap
+expedient, a shirking of voluntarily assumed responsibility, a childish
+cheating of discontent, rather than an honestly attempted cure of it.
+If cure was to be achieved, the canker must be excised, boldly cut out,
+not overlaid merely by some trifle of partially concealing plaster. For
+he knew well enough--as all sea-lovers know--and, as he drove through
+the dappled sunlight and shadow, frankly admitted--that though the sea
+itself very actually and really called, yet its calling was the voice
+and symbol of much over and above itself. For in it speaks the eternal
+necessity of going forward, that hunger and thirst for the absolute and
+ultimate which drives every human creature whose heart and soul and
+intellect are truly animate. And to him, just now, it spoke more
+particularly of the natural instincts of his manhood--of ambition, of
+passion, of headlong desire of sensation, excitement, adventure, of
+just all that, in fact, which he had forsworn, had agreed with himself
+to cast aside and forget. And, thinking of this, suspicion assailed him
+that forswearing had been slightly insincere and perfunctory. He
+accused himself of nourishing the belief that giving, he would also
+receive,--and that in kind,--while that any sacrifice which he offered
+would be returned to him doubled in value. Casting his bread upon the
+waters, he accused himself of having expected to find it, not "after
+many days," but immediately--a full baker's dozen ready to hand in his
+pocket. His motives had not been wholly pure. Actually, though not at
+the time consciously, he had assayed to strike a bargain with the
+Almighty.
+
+Just as he reached the top of the long, straight hill leading down into
+Westchurch, Richard arrived at these unflattering conclusions. On
+either side the road, upon the yellow surface of which the sunlight
+played through the tossing leaves of the plane trees, were villas of
+very varied and hybrid styles of architecture. They were, for the most
+part, smothered in creepers, and set in gardens gay with blossom. Below
+lay the sprawling, red-brick town blotted with purple shadow. A black
+canal meandered through the heart of it, crossed by mean, humpbacked
+bridges. The huge, amorphous buildings of its railway station--engine
+sheds, goods warehouses, trailing of swiftly dispersed white smoke--the
+grime and clamour of all that, its factory buildings and tall chimneys,
+were very evident, as were the pale towers of its churches. And beyond
+the ugly, pushing, industrial commonplace of it, striking a very
+different note, the blue ribbon of the still youthful Thames, backed by
+high-lying chalk-lands fringed with hanging woods, traversed a stretch
+of flat, green meadows. Richard's eyes rested upon the scene absently,
+since thought just now had more empire over him than any outward
+seeing. For he perceived that he must cleanse himself yet further of
+self-seeking. Those words, "if thou wilt be perfect sell that thou hast
+and give to the poor, and follow thou Me," have not a material and
+objective significance merely. They deal with each personal desire,
+even the apparently most legitimate--with each indulgence of personal
+feeling, even the apparently most innocent--with the inward attitude
+and the atmosphere of the mind even more closely than with outward
+action and conduct. And so Richard reached the conclusion that he must
+strip himself yet nearer to the bone. He must digest the harsh truth
+that virtue is its own reward in the sense that it is its only reward,
+and must look for nothing beyond that. He had grown slack of late,
+seduced by visions of pleasant things permitted most men but to him
+forbidden, and wearied, too, by the length of the way and inevitable
+monotony of it now first heat of enthusiasm had evaporated. Well--it
+was all very simple. He must just re-dedicate himself. And in this
+stern and chastened frame of mind he drove through the bustle of the
+country town--Saturday, market day, its streets unusually
+alive--nodding to an acquaintance here and there in passing, two or
+three of his tenant farmers, Mr. Cathcart of Newlands in on county
+business, Goodall the octogenarian miller from Parson's Holt, and
+Lemuel Image, the brewer, bursting out of an obviously new suit of very
+showy tweeds. Then, at the main door of the Infirmary, helped by the
+stalwart, hospital porter, he got down from the dog-cart, and
+subsequently--raked by curious eyes, saluted by hardly repressed
+tittering from the out-patients waiting _en queue_ for admission to the
+dispensary--he made his slow way along the bare, vault-like, stone
+passage to the accident ward, in the far corner of which a bed was shut
+off from the rest by an arrangement of screens and of curtains.
+
+And it was in the same chastened frame of mind that, some four or five
+hours later, Dickie entered the dining-room at Brockhurst. The two
+ladies had nearly finished luncheon and were about to rise from the
+table. Lady Calmady greeted him very gladly, but abstained from inquiry
+as to his doings or from comment on the lateness of the hour, since
+experience had long ago taught her that of all known animals man is the
+one of whom it is least profitable for woman to ask questions. He was
+here at home, alive, intact, her eyes were rejoiced by the sight of
+him, that was sufficient. If he had anything to tell her, no doubt he
+would tell it later. For the rest, she had something to tell him, but
+that too must wait till time and circumstance were propitious, since
+the conveying of it involved delicate diplomacies. It must be handled
+lightly. For the life of her she must avoid all appearance of
+eagerness, all appearance of attaching serious importance to the
+communication. Lady Calmady had learned, this morning, that Honoria St.
+Quentin did not propose to marry Ludovic Quayle. The young lady, whose
+charming nonchalance was curiously in eclipse to-day, had given her to
+understand so much, but very briefly, the subject evidently being
+rather painful to her. She was silent and a little distrait; but she
+was also very gentle, displaying a disposition to follow Katherine
+about wherever she went and a pretty zeal in doing small, odd jobs for
+her. Katherine was touched and tenderly amused by her manner, which was
+as that of a charming child coveting assurance that it need not be
+ashamed of itself, and that it has not really done anything naughty!
+But Katherine sighed too, watching this strong, graceful, capable
+creature; for, if things had been otherwise with Dickie, how thankfully
+she would have given the keeping of his future into this woman's hands!
+She had ceased to be jealous even of her son's love. Gladly,
+gratefully, would she have shared that love, accepting the second
+place, if only--but all that was beyond possibility of hope. Still the
+friendship of which he had spoken somewhat bitterly yesterday--poor
+darling--remained. Ludovic Quayle's pretensions--she felt very
+pitifully towards that accomplished gentleman, all his good qualities
+had started into high relief!--but, his pretensions no longer barring
+the way to that friendship, she pledged herself to work for the
+promotion of it. Dickie was too severe in self-repression, was
+over-strained in stoicism; and, ignoring the fact that in his fixity of
+purpose, his exaggerations of self-abnegation, he proved himself very
+much her own son, she determined secretly, cautiously, lovingly, to
+combat all that.
+
+It was, therefore, with warm satisfaction that, as Honoria was about to
+rise from the table, she observed Richard emerge, in a degree, from his
+abstraction, and heard him say:--
+
+"You told me you'd like to ride over to Farley this afternoon and see
+the home for my crippled people. Are you too tired after your headache,
+or do you still care to go?"
+
+"Oh! I'm not tired, thanks," Honoria answered. Then she hesitated, and
+Richard, looking at her, was aware, as on the bridge yesterday, of a
+sudden and singular thickening of her features, which, while marring
+her beauty, rendered her aspect strangely pathetic, as of one who
+sustains some mysterious hurt. And to him it seemed, for the moment, as
+though both that hurt and the infliction of it bore subtle relation to
+himself. Common sense discredited the notion as unpermissibly
+fantastic, still it influenced and softened his manner.
+
+"But you know you are looking frightfully done up yourself, Richard,"
+she went on, with a charming air of half-reluctant protest. "Isn't he,
+Cousin Katherine? Are you sure you want to ride this afternoon? Please
+don't go out just on my account."
+
+"Oh! I'm right enough," he answered. "I'd infinitely rather go out."
+
+He pushed back his chair and reached down for his crutches. Still the
+fantastic notion that, all unwittingly, he had been guilty of doing
+Honoria some strange injury, clung to him. He was sensible of the
+desire to offer reparation. This made him more communicative than he
+would otherwise have been.
+
+"I saw a man die this morning--that's all," he said. "I know it's
+stupid, but one can't help it--it knocks one about a bit. You see he
+didn't want to die, poor fellow, though, God knows, he'd little enough
+to live for--or to live with, for that matter."
+
+"Your factory hand?" Honoria asked.
+
+Richard slipped out of his chair, and stood upright.
+
+"Yes, my factory hand," he answered. "Dear, old Knott was fearfully
+savage about it. He was so tremendously keen on the case, and made sure
+of pulling him through. But the poor boy had been sliced up a little
+too thoroughly."--Richard paused, smiling at Honoria. "So all one could
+do was to go with him just as far as is permitted out into the great
+silence, and then--then come home to luncheon. The home at Farley loses
+its point, rather, now he is dead. Still there are others, plenty of
+others, enough to satisfy even Knott's greed of riveting broken human
+crockery.--Oh yes! I shall enjoy riding over, if you are still good to
+come. Four o'clock--that'll suit you? I'll order the horses."
+
+And so, in due time, the two rode forth together into the brightness of
+the September afternoon. The sea still called, but Dickie's ears were
+deaf to all dangerous allurements and excitations resident in that
+calling. It had to him, just now, only the pensive charm of a far-away
+melody, which, though no doubt of great and immediate import to others,
+had ceased to be any concern of his. Beside the death-bed in the
+hospital-ward he had renewed his vows, and the efficacy of that renewal
+was very present with him. It made for repose. It laid the evil spirit
+of defiance, of self-consciousness, of humiliation, so often obtaining
+in his intercourse with women--a spirit begotten by the perpetual prick
+of his deformity, and in part, too, by his determined adoption of the
+ascetic attitude in regard to the affections. He was spent by the
+emotions of the morning, but that also made for repose. For the time
+being devils were cast out. He was tranquil, yet exalted. His eyes had
+a smile in them, as though they looked beyond the limit of things
+transitory and material into the regions of the Pure Idea, where the
+eternal values are disclosed and Peace has her dwelling. And, precisely
+because of all this, he could take Honoria's presence lightly, be
+chivalrously solicitous of her entertainment and well-being, and talk
+to her with greater freedom than ever heretofore. He ceased to be on
+his guard with her because, in good truth, it seemed to him there
+ceased to be anything to guard against. For the time being, at all
+events, he had got to the other side of all that, and so she and his
+relation to her, had become part of that charming but faraway melody
+which was no concern of his--though mighty great and altogether worthy
+concern of others, of Ludovic Quayle, for example.--And in his present
+tranquil humour he could listen to the sweetness of that melody
+ungrudgingly. It was pleasant. He could enjoy it without envy--though
+it was none of his.
+
+But to Honoria's seeing, it must be owned, matters shaped themselves
+very differently. For the usually unperturbed, the chaste and gallant
+soul of her endured violent assaults, violent commotions, the origin of
+which she but partially understood. And these Richard's frankness, his
+courteous, in some sort brotherly, good-fellowship, served to intensify
+rather than allay. The feeling of the noble horse under her, the cool,
+westerly wind in her face, went to steady her nerves, and restore the
+self-possession, courage of judgment, and clearness of thought, which
+had been lacking to her during the past twenty-four hours. Nevertheless
+she rode as through a but-newly-discovered country, familiar objects
+displaying alien aspects, familiar phrases assuming unlooked-for
+significance, a something challenging and fateful meeting her
+everywhere. The whole future seemed to hang in the balance, and she
+waited, dreading yet longing, to see the scale turn.
+
+This afternoon the harvesters were carrying the corn. Red-painted
+waggons, drawn by sleek, heavy-made cart-horses, crawled slowly across
+the blond stubble. It was pretty to see the rusty-gold sheaves tossed
+up from the shining prongs of the pitchforks on to the mountainous
+load. Honoria and Richard watched this, a little minute, from the
+grass-ride bordering the roadway beneath the elms. Next came the
+high-lying moorland, beyond the lodges. The fine-leaved heath was thick
+with red-purple blossom. Patches of dusky heather were frosted with
+dainty pink. Spikes of genista and beds of needle-furze showed sharply
+yellow, vividly green, and a fringe of blue campanula, with frail,
+quivering bells, outlined all open spaces. The face of the land had
+been washed by the rain. It shone with an inimitable cleanliness, as
+though consciously happy in relief from all soil of dust. And it was
+here, the open country stretching afar on all sides, that Dickie began
+talking, not, as at first, in desultory fashion, but of matters nearly
+pertaining and closely interesting to himself.
+
+"You know," he said, as they walked the horses quietly, neck to neck,
+along the moorland road, "I don't go in for system-making or for
+reforms on any big scale. That doesn't come within my province. I must
+leave that to politicians and to men who are in the push of the world.
+I admire it. I rejoice in the hot-headed, narrow-brained, whole-hearted
+agitator, who believes that his system adopted, his reform carried
+through, the whole show will instantly be put straight. Such faith is
+very touching."
+
+"And the reformer has sometimes done some little good after all,"
+Honoria commented.
+
+"Of course he has!" Dickie agreed. "Only, as a rule, poor dear, he
+can't be contented but that his special reform should be the final one,
+that his system should be the universal panacea. And in point of fact
+no reform is final this side of death, and no panacea is universal,
+save that which the Maker of the Universe chooses to work out--is
+working out now, if we could any way grasp it--through the slow course
+of unnumbered ages. Let the reformer do all he can, but don't let him
+turn sour because his pet reform, his pet system, sinks away and is
+swallowed up in the great sea of things--sea of human progress, if you
+like. Every system is bound to prove too small, every reform
+ludicrously inadequate--be it never so radical--because material
+conditions are perpetually changing, while man in his mental, emotional
+and physical aspects remains always precisely the same."
+
+They passed from the breezy upland into the high-banked lane which,
+leading downwards, joins the great London and Portsmouth Road just
+beyond Farley Row.
+
+"And--and that is where I come in!" Richard said, turning a little
+in the saddle and smiling sweet-temperedly, yet with a suggestion
+of self-mockery, upon his companion. "Just because, in essential
+respects, mankind remains--notwithstanding modifications of his
+environment--substantially the same, from the era of the Pentateuch
+to the era of the Rougon-Macquarts, there must always be a lot of
+wreckage, of waste, and refuse humanity. The inauguration of each
+new system, each new reform--religious, political, educational,
+economic--practically they're all in the same boat--let alone the
+inevitable breakdown or petering out of each, necessarily produces a
+fresh crop of such waste and refuse material. And in that a man like
+myself, who does not aspire to cure or to construct, but merely to
+alleviate and to pick up the pieces, finds his chance."
+
+And Honoria listened musing--approved, enthusiasm gaining her; yet
+protested--since, even while she admired, she rebelled a little on his
+account, and for his sake.
+
+"But it is rather a hard life, surely Richard," she said, "which you
+propose to yourself? Always the pieces, the thing broken and spoiled,
+never the thing in its beauty, full of promise, and whole!"
+
+"It is less hard for me than for most," he answered, "or should be so.
+After all, I am to the manner born--a bit of human wreckage myself,
+with which, but for the accident of wealth, things would have gone
+pretty badly. I used to be horribly scared sometimes, as a small boy,
+thinking to what uses I might be put if the kindly, golden rampart ever
+gave."
+
+He became silent. As for Honoria, she had neither courage to look at,
+nor answer, him just then.
+
+"And you see, I'm absolutely free," he added presently.--"I am alone,
+always shall be so. If the life is hard, I ask no one to share it, so I
+may make it what I like."
+
+"Oh! no, no--you misunderstand, Richard! I didn't mean that," Honoria
+cried quickly, half under her breath.
+
+Again he looked at her, smiling.
+
+"Didn't you? All the kinder of you," he said.
+
+Thereupon regret, almost intolerable in its poignancy, invaded Miss St.
+Quentin that she would have to go away, to go back to the world and all
+the foolish obtaining fashions of it; that she would have to take that
+preeminently well-cushioned and luxurious winter's journey to Cairo.
+She longed inexpressibly to remain here, to assist in these experiments
+made in the name of Holy Charity. She longed inexpressibly to---- And
+there Honoria paused, even in thought. Yet she glanced at the young man
+riding beside her--at the handsome profile, still and set in outline,
+the suggestion--it was no more--of a scar running downward across the
+left cheek, at the well-made, upright, broad-shouldered figure, and
+then at the saddle, peaked, back and front, with oddly-shaped
+appendages to it resembling old-fashioned holsters.--And, as yesterday
+upon the bridge, the ache of a pain at once sweet and terrible laid
+hold of her, making her queerly faint. The single street, sun-covered,
+sleepy, empty save for a brewer's dray and tax-cart or two standing
+before the solid Georgian portals of the White Lion Inn, for a
+straggling tail of children bearing home small shoppings and jugs of
+supper beer, for a flock of gray geese proceeding with suggestively
+self-righteous demeanour along the very middle of the roadway and
+lowering long necks to hiss defiance at the passer-by, and for an old
+black retriever dozing peacefully beneath one of the rustling sycamores
+in front of Josiah Appleyard, the saddler's shop--all these, as she
+looked at them, became uncertain in outline, reeled before Honoria's
+eyes. For the moment she experienced a difficulty in keeping steady in
+the saddle. But the horses still walked quietly, neck to neck, their
+shadows, and those of their riders growing longer, narrower,
+outstretched before them as the sun declined in the west. All the
+future hung in the balance, but the scale had not turned as yet.
+
+Then Richard's voice took up its parable again.
+
+"Perhaps it's a rather fraudulently comfortable doctrine, yet it does
+strike one that the justification of disaster, in all its many forms,
+is the opportunity it affords the individualist. He may use it for
+self-aggrandisement, or for self-devotion--though I rather shy at so
+showy a word as that last. However, the use he makes of it isn't the
+point. What is the point, to my mind at least, is this--though it
+doesn't sound magnificent, it hardly indeed sounds cleanly--that
+whatever trade fails, whatever profession, thanks to the advance of
+civilisation, becomes obsolete, that of the man with the dust-cart, of
+the scavenger, of the sweeper, won't."
+
+Once more Richard smiled upon his companion charmingly, yet with
+something of self-mockery.
+
+"And so, you see, having knocked about enough to grow careless of
+niceties of prejudice, and to acquire immense admiration for any
+vocation which promises permanence, I join hands with the dustman. In
+the light of science, and in that of religion alike, nothing really is
+common or unclean. And then--then, if you are outcasted in any case as
+some of us are, it's a little too transparently cheap to be afraid of
+soiling----" He broke off.--"Away there to the left, Honoria," he said.
+"You see the house? The yellow-washed one, with the gables and tiled
+roofs--there, back on the slope.--Bagshaw, the Bond Street poulterer,
+had it for years. His lease ran out in the spring, and happily he
+didn't care to renew. Had bought himself an up-to-date, villa residence
+somewhere in the suburbs--Chistlehurst, I believe. So I took the place
+over. It will do for a beginning--the small end of the wedge of my
+scavenger's business. There are over five acres of garden and orchard,
+and plenty of rooms on each floor, which gives good range for the
+disabled to move about in--and the stairs, only one flight, are easy.
+One has to think of these details. And--well, the house commands a
+magnificent view of Clerke's Green, and the geese on it, than which
+nothing clearly can be more exciting!"
+
+The groom rode forward and opened the gate. Before the square,
+outstanding porch Richard drew up.
+
+"I should like to come in with you," he said. "But you see it's rather
+a business getting off one's horse, and I can't very well manage the
+stairs. So I'll wait about till you are ready. Don't hurry. I want you
+to see all the arrangements, if it doesn't bore you, and make
+suggestions. The carpenters are there, doing overtime. They'll let you
+through if the caretaker's out."
+
+Thus admonished, Miss St. Quentin dismounted and made her way into the
+house. A broad passage led straight through it. The open door at the
+farther end disclosed a vista of box-edged paths and flower-borders
+where, in gay ranks, stood tall sunflowers, hollyhocks,
+Michaelmas-daisies, and such like. Beyond was orchard, the round-headed
+apple-trees, bright with polished fruit, rising from a carpet of grass.
+The rooms, to left and right of the passage, were pleasantly sun-warmed
+and mellow of aspect, the ceilings of them crossed by massive beams.
+Honoria visited them, dutifully observant. She encountered the head
+carpenter, an acquaintance and ally during those four years so great
+part of which she had spent at Brockhurst. She talked with him, making
+inquiries concerning wife, children and trade, incident to such a
+meeting, her face very serious all the while, the skirt of her habit
+gathered up in one hand, her gait a trifle stiff and measured owing to
+her high riding-boots. But, though she acquitted herself in all
+kindliness of conversation, though she conscientiously inspected each
+separate apartment, and noted the cheerful comeliness of orchard and
+garden, it must be owned all these remained singularly distant from her
+actual emotion and thought. She was glad to be alone. She was glad to
+be away from Richard Calmady, though zealously obedient to his wishes
+in respect of this inspection. For his presence became increasingly
+oppressive from the intensity of feeling it produced in her, and which
+she was, at present, powerless to direct towards any reasonable and
+definite end. This rendered her tongue-tied, and, as she fancied,
+stupid. Her unreadiness mortified her. She, usually indifferent enough
+to the impression she produced on others, was sensible of a keen desire
+to appear at her best. She did in fact, so she believed, appear at her
+worst, slow of understanding and of sympathy.--But then all the future
+hung in the balance. The scale delayed to turn. And the strain of
+waiting became agitating to the point of distress.
+
+At last the course of her so-dutiful survey brought her to a quaint,
+little chamber, situated immediately over the square, outstanding
+porch. It was lighted by a single, hooded window placed in the centre
+of the front wall. It was evidently designed for a linen room, and was
+in process of being fitted with shelves and cupboards of white pine.
+The floor was deep in shavings, long, curly, wafer-coloured,
+semi-transparent. They rustled like fallen leaves when Honoria stepped
+among them. The air was filled with the odour of them, dry and resinous
+as that of the fir forest. Ever after that odour affected Honoria with
+a sense of half-fearful joy and of impending fate. She stood in the
+middle of the quaint, little chamber. The ceiling was low. She had to
+bend her head to avoid violent contact between the central beam of it
+and the crown of her felt hat. But circumscribed though the space, and
+uncomfortable though her posture, she had an absurd longing to lock the
+door of the little room, never to come out, to stay here forever! Here
+she was safe. But outside, on the threshold, stood something she dared
+not name. It drew her with a pain at once terrible and lovely. She
+dreaded it. Yet once close to it, once face to face with it, she knew
+it would have her--that it would not take no for an answer. Her pride,
+her chastity, were in arms. Was this, she wondered, what men and women
+speak of so lightly, laugh and joke about? Was this love?--To her it
+seemed wholly awe-inspiring. And so she clung strangely to the shelter
+of the quaint, little room with its sea of rustling, resinous shavings.
+On the other side the door of it waited that momentous decision which
+would cause the scale to turn. Yet the minutes passed. To prolong her
+absence became impossible.
+
+Just then there was a movement below, a crunching of the gravel, as
+though of a horse growing restless, impatient of standing. Honoria
+moved forward, opened the window, pushing back the casement against a
+cluster of late-blossoming, red roses, the petals of which floated
+slowly downward describing fluttering circles. Richard Calmady was just
+below. Honoria called to him.
+
+"I am coming, Richard, I am coming!" she said.
+
+He turned in the saddle and looked up at her smiling--a smile at once
+courageous and resigned. Yet, notwithstanding that smile, Honoria once
+again discovered in his eyes the chill desolation and homelessness of
+the sky of the winter night. Then the scale turned, turned at last--for
+that same lovely pain grew lovelier, more desirable than any
+possibility of ease, until such time as that desolation should pass,
+that homelessness be cradled to content in some sure harbourage.--Here
+was the thing given her to do, and she must do it! She would risk all
+to win all. And, with that decision, all her serenity and freedom of
+soul returned. The white light of a noble self-devotion, reckless of
+self-spending, reckless of consequence, the joy of a great giving,
+illuminated her face.
+
+As to Richard, he, looking up at her, though ignorant of her purpose,
+misreading the cause of that inspired aspect, still thought he had
+never witnessed so graciously gallant a sight. The nymph whom he had
+first known, who had baffled and crossed him, was here still, strong,
+untamed, elusive, remote. But a woman was here too, of finest fibre,
+faithful and loyal, capable of undying tenderness, of an all-encircling
+and heroic love. Then the desires of the natural man stirred somewhat
+in Richard, just because--paradox though it undoubtedly was--she
+provoked less the carnal, perishing passion of the flesh, than the pure
+and imperishable passion of the spirit. Irrepressible envy of Ludovic
+Quayle, her lover, seized him, irrepressible demand for just all those
+things which that other Richard, the would-be saint, had so sternly
+condemned himself to repudiate, to cast aside and forget. And the
+would-be saint triumphed--beating down thought of all that, trampling
+it under foot--so that after briefest interval he called up to her
+cheerily enough.
+
+"Well, what do you make of the dust-cart? Rather fascinating, isn't it?
+Notwithstanding its uncleanly name, it's really rather sweet."
+
+To which she answered, speaking from out the wide background of her own
+emotion and purpose:--
+
+"Yes, yes--it's sad in a way, Richard, penetratingly, splendidly sad.
+But one wouldn't have it otherwise; for it is splendid, and it is
+sweet, abundantly sweet."--Then her tone changed.--"I won't keep you
+waiting any longer, I'm coming," she said.
+
+Honoria looked round the quaint, little room, with its half-adjusted
+shelves and cupboards, the floor of it deep in resinous,
+semi-transparent, wafer-coloured shavings, bidding it adieu. For good
+or evil, happiness or sorrow, she was sensible it told for much in her
+life's history. Then, something delicately militant in her carriage,
+she swung away down-stairs and out of the house. She was going forth to
+war indeed, to a war which in no shape or form had she ever waged as
+yet. Many men had wooed her, and their wooing had left her cold. She
+had never wooed any man. Why should she? To her no man had ever
+mattered one little bit.
+
+So she mounted, and they rode away.--A spin across the level turf to
+hearten her up, satisfy the fulness of sensation which held her, and
+shake her nerves into place. It was exhilarating. She grew keen and
+tense, her whole economy becoming reliable and well-knit by the strong
+exercise and sense of the superbly healthy and unperplexed vitality of
+the horse under her. Honoria could have fought with dragons just then,
+had such been there to fight with! But, in point of fact, nothing more
+agressively dangerous presented itself for encounter than the shallow
+ford which divides the parish of Farley from that of Sandyfield and the
+tithing of Brockhurst. Snorting a little, the horses splashed through
+the clear, brown water and entered upon the rough, rutted road, grass
+grown in places, which, ending beneath a broken avenue of ancient,
+stag-headed oaks, leads to the entrance of the Brockhurst woods. These,
+crowned by the dark, ragged line of the fir forest, rose in a soft,
+dense mass against the western sky, in which showed promise of a fair
+pageant of sunset. A covey of partridges ran up the sandy ruts before
+the horses, and, rising at last with a long-drawn whir of wings,
+skimmed the top of the crumbling bank and dropped in the stubble-field
+on the right. A pause, while the keeper's wife ran out to open the
+white gate,--the dogs meanwhile, from their wooden kennels under the
+Spanish chestnuts upon the hillock behind the lodge, pulling at their
+chains and keeping up a vociferous chorus. Thus heralded, the riders
+passed into the mysteriously whispering quiet of the great woods.
+
+The heavy, summer foliage remained as yet untouched by the hectic of
+autumn. Diversity was observable in form rather than in tint, and from
+this resulted a remarkable effect of unity, a singleness of intention,
+and of far-reaching secrecy. The multitudinous leaves and the
+all-pervading green gloom of them around, above, seemed to engulf
+horses and riders. It was as though they rode across the floor of
+ocean, the green tides sweeping overhead. Yet the trees of the wood
+asserted their intelligent presence now and again. Audibly they talked
+together, bent themselves a little to listen and to look, as though
+curious of the aspect and purposes of these wandering mortals. And all
+this, the unity and secrecy of the place, affected both Richard and
+Honoria strangely, circling them about with something of earth-magic,
+removing them far from ordinary conditions of social intercourse, and
+thus rendering it possible, inevitable even, that they should think
+such thoughts and say such words as part company with subterfuge and
+concealment, go naked, and speak uttermost truth. For, with only the
+trees of the wood to listen, with that sibilant whisper of the green
+tide overhead, with strong emotion compelling them--in the one case
+towards death of self, in the other towards giving of self--in the one
+towards austere passivity, in the other towards activity taxing all
+capital of pride, of delicacy, and of tact--developments became
+imminent, and those of the most vital sort.
+
+The conversation had been broken, desultory; but now, by tacit consent,
+the pace became quiet again, the horses were permitted to walk. To have
+gone other than softly through the living heart of the greenwood must
+have savoured of desecration. Yet Richard was not insensible to a
+certain danger. He tried, rousing himself to conversation, to rouse
+himself also to the practical and commonplace.
+
+"I am glad you liked my house," he said. "But I hear the aristocracy of
+the Row laments. It shies at the idea of being invaded by more or less
+frightful creatures. But I remain deaf. I really can't bother about
+that. It is so immeasurably more unpleasant to be frightful than to see
+that which is so, that I'm afraid my sympathies remain rather
+pig-headedly one-sided. I propose to educate the Row in the grace of
+pity. It may lay up merit by due exercise of that."
+
+Richard took off his hat and rode bareheaded, looking away into the
+delicious, green gloom. Here, where the wood was thickest, oak and
+beech shutting out the sky, clasping hands overhead, the ground beneath
+them deep in moss and fern, that gloom was precisely like the colour of
+Honoria's eyes. He wished it wasn't so. He tried to forget it. But the
+resemblance haunted him. Look where he might, still he seemed to look
+into those singular and charming eyes. He talked on determinedly,
+putting a force upon himself--too often saying that which, no sooner
+was it out of his mouth, than, he wished unsaid.
+
+"I don't want to be too hard on the Row, though. It has a right, after
+all, to its little prejudices. Only you see for those who, poor souls,
+are different to other people it becomes of such supreme importance to
+keep in touch with the average. I have found that out in practice. And
+so I refuse to shut my waste humanity away. They must neither hide
+themselves nor be hidden, be spared seeing how much other people enjoy
+from which they are debarred, or grow over-conscious of their own
+ungainliness. That is why I've planted them and their gardens, and
+their pigs and their poultry--we'll have a lot of live stock, a second
+generation, even of chickens, offers remarkable consolations!--on the
+highroad, at the entrance of the little town, where, on a small scale
+at all events, they'll see the world that's straight-backed and has its
+proper complement of limbs and senses, go by. Envy, hatred, and malice,
+and the seven devils of morbidity are forever lying in wait for
+them--well--for us--for me and those like me, I mean. In proportion as
+one's brought up tenderly--as I was--one doesn't realise the
+deprivation and disgust of one's condition at the start. But once
+realised, one's inclination is to kill. At least a man's is. A woman
+may accept it more quietly, I suppose."
+
+"Richard," Honoria said slowly, "are you sure you don't greatly
+exaggerate all--all that?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Thirty years' experience--no, I don't exaggerate! Each time one makes
+a fresh acquaintance, each time a pretty woman is just that bit kinder
+to one than she would dare be to any man who was not out of it, each
+time people are manifestly interested--politely, of course--and form a
+circle, make room for one as they did at that particularly disagreeable
+Grimshott garden party yesterday, each time--I don't want to drivel,
+but so it is--one sees a pair of lovers--oh! well, it's not easy to
+retain one's philosophy, not to obey the primitive instincts of any
+animal when it's ill-used and hurt, and to revenge oneself--to want to
+kill, in short."
+
+"You--you don't hate women, then?" Honoria said, still slowly.
+
+Richard stared at her for a moment.
+
+"Hate them?" he said. "I only wish to goodness I did."
+
+"But in that case," she began bravely, "why----"
+
+"This is why," he broke in.--"You may remember my engagement to Lady
+Constance Quayle, and the part you, very properly, took in the
+canceling of it? You know better than I do--though my imagination is
+pretty fertile in dealing with the situation--what instincts and
+feelings prompted you to take that part."
+
+The young lady turned to him, her arms outstretched, notwithstanding
+bridle-reins and whip, her face, and those strange eyes which seemed so
+integral a part of the fair green-wood, full of sorrowful entreaty and
+distress.
+
+"Richard, Richard," she cried, "will you never forgive me that? She
+didn't love you. It was horrible, yet in doing that which I did, I
+believed--I believe so still--I did what was right by you both."
+
+"Undoubtedly you did right--and that justifies my contention. In doing
+that which you did you gave voice to the opinion of all
+wholesome-minded people. That's exactly where it is. You felt the whole
+business to be outrageous. So it was. I heartily agree."--He paused,
+and the trees talked softly together, bending down a little to listen
+and to look.--"As you say, she wasn't in love. Poor child, how could
+she be? No woman ever will be--at least not in love of the nobler
+sort--of the sort which, if one cannot have it, one had a vast deal
+better have no love at all."
+
+"But I am not so sure of that," Honoria said stoutly. "You rush to
+conclusions. Isn't it rather a reflection on all the rest of us to take
+little Lady Constance as the measure of the insight and sensibility of
+the whole sex? And then she had already lost all her innocent, little
+heart to Captain Decies. Indeed you're not fair to us.--Wait----"
+
+"Like Ludovic Quayle?"
+
+Miss St. Quentin straightened herself in the saddle.
+
+"Oh! dear no, not the least like Ludovic Quayle!" she said.
+
+Which enigmatic reply produced silence for a while on Dickie's part.
+For there were various ways in which it might be interpreted, some
+flattering, some eminently unflattering, to himself. And from every
+point of view it was wisest to accept that last form of interpretation.
+The whole conversation had been perilous in character. It had been too
+intimate, had touched him too nearly, taking place here in the clear
+glooms of the green-wood moreover which bore such haunting kinship to
+those singularly sincere, and yet mysterious, eyes. It is dangerous to
+ride across the floor of ocean with the whispering tide sweeping
+overhead, and in such gallant company, besides, that to ride thus
+forever could hardly come amiss!--Richard, in his turn, straightened
+himself up in the saddle, opened his chest, taking a long breath,
+carried his head high, said a stern "get thee behind me, Satan," to
+encroaching sentiment and emotion, and to those fair visions which his
+companion's presence and her somewhat daring talk had conjured up. He
+defied the earth-magic, defied those sylvan deities who as he divined,
+sought to enthral him. For the moment he confounded Honoria's influence
+with theirs. It was something of a battle, and not the first one he had
+fought to-day. For the great, white road which leads onward to
+Perfection looked dusty and arid enough--no reposeful shadow, no
+mystery, no beguiling green glooms over it! Stark, straight, hard, it
+stretched on endlessly, as it seemed, ahead. To travel it was slow and
+tedious work, in any case; and to travel it on crutches!--But it was
+worse than useless to play with such thoughts as these. He would put a
+stop to this disintegrating talk. He turned to Honoria and spoke
+lightly, with a return of self-mockery.
+
+"Oh! your first instinct was the true one, depend upon it," he said.
+"Though I don't deny it contributed, indirectly, to giving me a pretty
+rough time."
+
+"Oh! dear me!" Honoria cried, almost piteously. Then she added:--"But I
+don't see, why was that?"
+
+"Because, I suppose, I had a sort of unwilling belief in you," he said,
+smiling.--Oh! this accursed conversation, why would it insistently
+drift back into intimacy thus!
+
+"Have I justified that belief?" she asked, with a certain pride yet a
+certain eagerness.
+
+"More than justified it," Dickie answered. "My mother, who has a
+touchstone for all that is of high worth, knew you from the first. Like
+the devils, I--I believed and trembled--at least that is how I see it
+all now. So your action came as a rather searching revelation and
+condemnation. When I perceived all that it involved--oh, well! first I
+went to the dogs, and then----"
+
+The horses walked side by side. Honoria stretched out her hand
+impulsively, laid it on his arm.
+
+"Richard, Richard, for pity's sake don't! You hurt me too much. It's
+terrible to have been the cause of such suffering."
+
+"You weren't the cause," he said. "Lies were the cause, behind which,
+like a fool, I'd tried to shelter myself. You've been right, Honoria,
+from first to last. What does it matter after all?--Don't take it to
+heart. For it's over now--all over, thank God, and I have got back into
+normal relations with things and with people."--He looked at her very
+charmingly, and spoke with a fine courtesy of tone.--"One way and
+another you have taught me a lot, and I am grateful. And, in the
+future, though the conditions will be altered, I hope you'll come back
+here often, Honoria, and just see for yourself that my mother is
+content; and give my schemes and fads a kindly look in at the same
+time. And perhaps give me a trifle of sound advice. I shall need it
+safe enough. You see what I want to get at is temperance--temperance
+all round, towards everything and everybody--not fanaticism, which, in
+some respects, is a much easier attitute of mind."
+
+Richard looked up into the whispering, green tide overhead.
+
+"Yes, one must deny oneself the luxury of fanaticism, if possible," he
+said, "deny oneself the vanity of eccentricity. One must take
+everything simply, just in the day's work. One must keep in touch. Keep
+in touch with your world, the great world, the world which cultivates
+pleasure and incidentally makes history, as well as with the world of
+the dust-cart--I know that well enough--if one's to be quite sane. You
+see loneliness, a loneliness of which I am thankful to think you can
+form no conception, is the curse of persons like myself. It inclines
+one to hide, to sulk, to shut oneself away and become misanthropic. To
+hug one's misery becomes one's chiefest pleasure--to nurse one's grief,
+one's sense of injury. Oh! I'm wary, very wary now, I tell you," he
+added, half laughing. "I know all the insidious temptations, the tricks
+and frauds, and pitfalls of this affair. And so I'll continue to go to
+Grimshott garden parties as discipline now and then, while I gather my
+disabled and decrepit family very closely about me and say words of
+wisdom to it--wisdom derived from a mature and extensive personal
+experience."
+
+There was a pause before Miss St. Quentin spoke. Then she said slowly.
+
+"And you refuse to let any one help? You, you refuse to let any one
+share the cares of that disabled family?"
+
+Again Dickie stared at her, arrested by her speech and doubtful of the
+intention of it. He could have sworn there were tears in her voice,
+that it trembled. But her face was averted, and he could see no more
+than the slightly angular outline of her cheek and chin.
+
+"Isn't that a rather superfluous question?" he remarked. "As you
+pointed out a little while ago, mine is not a super-abundantly cheerful
+programme. No one would volunteer for such service--at least no one
+likely to be acceptable to my mother, or indeed likely to satisfy my
+own requirements. I admit, I'm a little fastidious, a little critical
+and exacting, when it comes to close quarters and--well--permanent
+association, even yet."
+
+"I am very glad to hear that," Honoria said. Her face remained averted,
+but there was a change in her attitude, a decision in the pose of her
+figure, suggestive both of challenge and of triumph.
+
+Richard was nonplussed, but his blood was up. This conversation had
+gone far enough--indeed too far. Very certainly he would make an end of
+it.
+
+"But God forbid," he exclaimed, "that I should ever fall to such a
+depth of selfishness as to invite any person who would satisfy my
+taste, my demands, to share my life! I mayn't amount to very much, but
+at least I have never used my personal ill luck to trade on a woman's
+generosity and pity. What I have had from women, I've paid for, in hard
+cash. In that respect my conscience is clear. It has been a bargain,
+fair and square and above board, and all my debts are settled in full.
+You hardly think at this time of day I should use my proposed schemes
+of philanthropy as a bait?"
+
+Richard sent his horse forward at a sharp trot.
+
+"No, no, Honoria," he said, "let it be understood that side of things
+is over forever."
+
+But here came relief from the green glooms of the green-wood and the
+dangerous magic of them. For the riders had reached the summit of the
+hill, and entered upon the levels of the great table-land at the head
+of which Brockhurst House stands. Here was the open, the fresh breeze,
+the long-drawn, sighing song of the fir forest--a song more austere,
+more courageous, more virile, than ever sung by the trees of the wood
+which drop their leaves for fear of the sharp-toothed winter, and only
+put them forth again beneath the kisses of soft-lipped spring. Covering
+all the western sky were lines of softly-rounded, broken cloud, rank
+behind rank, in endless perspective, the whole shaped like a mighty
+fan. The under side of them was flushed with living rose. The clear
+spaces behind them paved with sapphire at the zenith, and palest topaz
+where they skirted the far horizon.
+
+"How very beautiful it is!" Honoria cried, joyously. "Richard let us
+see this."
+
+She turned her horse at the green ride which leads to the white Temple
+situate on that outstanding spur of hill. She rode on quickly till she
+reached the platform of turf before the Temple. Richard followed her
+with deliberation. He was shaken. His calm was broken up, his whole
+being in tumult. Why had she pressed just all those matters home on him
+which he had agreed with himself to cast aside and forget? It was a
+little cruel, surely, that temptation should assail him thus, and the
+white road towards Perfection be made so difficult to tread, just when
+he had re-dedicated himself and renewed his vows? He looked after her.
+It was here he had met her first, after the time when, as a little
+maid, she had proved too swift of foot, leaving him so far behind that
+it sorely hurt his baby dignity and caused him to see her depart
+without regret. She was still swift of foot. She left him behind now.
+For the moment he was ready to swear that, not only without regret, but
+with actual thankfulness he could again witness her departure.--Yes, he
+wanted her to go, because he so desperately wanted her to stay--that
+was the truth. For not only Dickie the natural man, but Dickie "the
+wild bull in a net," had a word to say just then.--God in heaven, what
+hard work it is to be good!
+
+Miss St. Quentin kicked her left foot out of the stirrup, threw her
+right leg over the pommel, turned, and slipped straight out of the
+saddle. She stood there a somewhat severely tall, dark figure, strong
+and positive in effect, against the immense and reposeful
+landscape--far-ranging, purple distance, golden harvest-fields, silver
+glint of water in the hollows, all the massive grandeur of the woods,
+and that superb pageant of sunset sky.
+
+The groom rode forward, took her horse, led it away to the far side of
+the grass platform behind the Temple. Those ranks of rosy cloud in
+infinite perspective, with spaces of clearest topaz and sapphire light
+between, converged to the glowing glory of the sun, the rim of which
+now touched the margin of the world. They were as ranks of worshippers,
+of blessed souls redeemed and sainted, united by a common act of
+adoration, every form clothed by reflection of His glory, every heart,
+every thought centred upon God.--Richard looked at all that, but it
+failed to speak to him. Then he saw Honoria resolutely turn her back
+upon the glory. She came directly towards him. Her face was very thin,
+her manner very calm. She laid her left hand on the peak of his saddle.
+She looked him full in the eyes.
+
+"Richard," she said, "be patient a minute and listen.--It comes to
+this, that a woman--your equal in position, of your own age, and not
+without money--does volunteer to share your work. It's no forlorn hope.
+She is not disappointed. On the contrary she has, and can have, pretty
+well all the world's got to give. Only--perhaps very foolishly, for she
+doesn't know much about the matter, having been rather coldblooded as
+yet--she has fallen in love."
+
+There was a silence, save that the wind came out of the west, out of
+the majesty of the sunset, and with it came the calling of the sea--not
+only of the blue water, or of those green tides that sweep above
+wandering mortals in the magic green-wood; but of the sea of faith, of
+the sea of love--love human, love divine, love universal--which circles
+not only this, but all possible states of being, all possible worlds.
+
+Presently Richard spoke hoarsely, under his breath.
+
+"With whom?" he said.
+
+"With you----"
+
+Dickie went white to the lips. He sat absolutely still for a little
+space, his hands resting on his thighs.
+
+"Tell her to think," he said, at last.--"She proposes to do that which
+the world will condemn, and rightly, from its point of view. It will
+misread her motives. It won't spare disagreeable comment. Tell her to
+think.--Tell--tell her to look.--Cripple, dwarf, the last, as he ought
+to be, of an unlucky race--a man who's carried up and down-stairs like
+an infant, who's strapped to the saddle, strapped to the driving
+seat--who is cut off from most forms of activity and of sport.--A man
+who will never have any sort of career--who has given himself, in
+expiation of past sins, to the service of human beings a degree more
+unfortunate than himself.--No, no, stop--hear me out.--She must know it
+all!--A man who has lived far from cleanly, who has evil memories and
+evil knowledge of life--no--listen!--A man whom you,--yes, you
+yourself, Honoria,--have condemned bitterly, from whom, notwithstanding
+your splendid nerve and pluck, so repulsive is his deformity, you have
+shrunk a hundred times."
+
+"She has thought of all that," Honoria answered calmly. "But she has
+thought of this too,--that, going up and down the world to find the
+most excellent thing in it, she has found this thing, love. And so to
+her, Richard, your crippling has come to be dearer than any other man's
+wholeness. Your wrong-doings--may God forgive her--dearer than any
+other man's virtue. Your virtues so wholly beautiful that--that----"
+
+The tears came into her eyes, her lips quivered, she backed away a
+little from rider and horse.
+
+"Richard," she cried fiercely, "if you don't care for me, if you don't
+want me, be honourable, tell me so straight out and let us have done
+with it! I am strong enough, I am man enough, for that. For heaven's
+sake don't take me out of pity. I would never forgive you. There's a
+good deal of us both, one way and another, and we should give each
+other a hell of a time if I was in love and you were not. But"--she put
+her hand on the peak of that very ugly saddle again--"but, if you do
+care, here I am. I have never failed any one yet. I will never fail
+you. I am yours body and soul. Marry me," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+IN WHICH RICHARD CALMADY BIDS THE LONG-SUFFERING READER FAREWELL
+
+
+The midsummer dusk had fallen, drawing its soft, dim mantle over the
+face of the land. The white light walked the northern sky from west to
+east. A nightingale sang in the big, Portugal laurel at the corner of
+the troco-ground, and was answered by another singer from the coppice,
+across the valley, bordering the trout stream that feeds the Long
+Water. A fox barked sharply out in the Warren. Beetles droned, flying
+conspicuously upright, straight on end, through the warm air. The
+churring of the night-jars, as they flitted hither and thither over the
+beds of bracken and dog-roses, like gigantic moths, on quick, silent
+wings, formed a continuous accompaniment, as of a spinning-wheel, to
+the other sounds. And Dick Ormiston laughed consumedly, doubling
+himself together now and again and holding his slim sides in effort to
+moderate his explosive merriment. He was in uproarious spirits.--Back
+from school to-day, and that nearly a month earlier than could by the
+most favourable process of calculation have been anticipated, thanks to
+development of measles on the part of some much-to-be-commended
+school-fellows. How he blessed those praiseworthy young sufferers! And
+how he laughed, watching the two heavy-headed, lolloping, half-grown,
+bull-dog puppies describe crazy circles upon the smooth turf in the
+deepening dusk. Seen thus in the half-light they appeared more than
+ever gnome-like, humorously ugly and awkward. They trod on their own
+ears, tumbled over one another, sprawled on the grass, panting and
+grinning, until their ecstatic owner incited them to further gyrations.
+To Dick this was a night of unbridled licence. Had he not dined late?
+Had he not leave to sit up till half-past ten o'clock? Was he not going
+out, bright and early, to-morrow morning to see the horses galloped?
+Could life hold greater complement of good for a brave, little,
+ten-year-old soul, and slender, serviceable, little, ten-year-old body
+emulous of all manly virtues and manly pastimes?
+
+So the boy laughed; and the sound of his laughter reached the ears both
+of the elder and the younger Lady Calmady, as they slowly paced the
+straight walk between the gray balustrade and the edge of the turf. On
+their left the great outstretch of valley and wood lay drowned in the
+suave uncertainties of the summer night. Before them was the whole
+terrace-front of the house, its stacks of twisted chimneys clear cut
+against the sky. Bright light shone out from the windows of the red
+drawing-room, and from those of the hall, bringing flowers, sections of
+gray pavement, and like details into sharp relief. There were passing
+lights in the range of windows above, suggesting cheerful movement
+within the great house. At the southern end of the terrace, just below
+the arcade of the garden-hall--which showed pale against the shadow
+within and brickwork above--two men were sitting. Their voices reached
+the ladies now and then in quiet yet animated talk. A spirit of peace,
+of security, of firmly-planted hope, seemed to pervade all the scene,
+all the place. Waking or sleeping, fear was banished. All was strong to
+work to-morrow, so to-night all could calmly yield itself to rest.
+
+And it was a sense of just this, and a tender anxiety lest the fulness
+of the gracious content of it should be in any degree marred to her
+dear companion, which made Honoria Calmady say presently:--
+
+"You don't mind little Dick's racketting with those ridiculous puppies,
+do you, Cousin Katherine? If it bothers you I'll stop him like a shot."
+
+But Katherine shook her head.
+
+"My dearest child, why stop him?" she said. "The foolishnesses of young
+creatures at play are delicious, and laughter, so long as it is not
+cruel, I reckon among the good gifts of God."--She paused a moment.
+"Dear Marie de Mirancourt tried to teach me that long ago, but I was
+culpably dull of hearing in those days where spiritual truth was
+concerned, and I failed to grasp her meaning. I believe we never really
+love, either man or Almighty God, until we can both laugh ourselves and
+let others laugh. Of all false doctrines that of the sour-faced,
+joyless puritan is the falsest. His mere outward aspect is a sin
+against the Holy Ghost."
+
+And Honoria smiled, patting the hand which lay on her arm very
+tenderly.
+
+"How I love your heavenly rage!" she said. They moved on a few steps in
+silence. Then, careless of all the rapture its notification of the
+passing of time might cut short, the clock at the house-stables chimed
+the half-hour. Honoria paused in her gentle walk.
+
+"Bedtime, Dick," she cried.
+
+"All right," the boy returned. He pursued, and laid hold of, the errant
+puppies, stowing them, not without kickings and strugglings on their
+part, one under either arm. They were large and heavy, just as much as
+he could carry, and he staggered across the grass with them, presenting
+the effect of a small, black donkey between a pair of very big, white
+panniers.
+
+"I say, they are awfully stunning though, you know, Honoria," he said
+rather breathlessly as he came up to her.
+
+"Very soul-satisfying, aren't they, Dick?" she replied. "Richard
+foresaw as much. That is why he got them for you."
+
+"If I put them down do you suppose they'll follow? Carrying them does
+make my arms ache."
+
+"Oh, they'll follow fast enough," Honoria said.
+
+He lowered the puppies circumspectly on to the gravel.
+
+"They'll be whoppers when they're grown," he remarked.
+
+"What shall you call them?"
+
+"Adam and Eve I think, because they're the first of my lot. They're
+pedigree dogs--and later I may want to show, don't you see."
+
+"Yes, I see," Honoria said.
+
+He came close to her, putting his face up half shyly to be kissed. Then
+as young Lady Calmady, somewhat ghostly in her trailing, white evening
+dress, bent her charming head, the boy, suddenly overcome with the
+manifold excitements of the day, flung his arms round her.
+
+"Oh! oh!" he gasped, "how awfully ripping it is to be back here again
+with you and Cousin Richard and Aunt Katherine! I wish number-four
+dormitory would get measles the middle of every term!--Only I
+forgot--perhaps I ought not to touch you, Honoria, after messing about
+with the dogs. Do you mind?"
+
+"Not a bit," she said.
+
+"But, Honoria,"--he rubbed his cool cheek against her bare neck--"I
+say, don't you think you might come and see me, just for a little weeny
+while, after I'm in bed to-night?"
+
+And young Lady Calmady, thus coaxed, held the slight figure close. She
+had a very special place in her heart for this small Dick, who in face,
+and as she hoped in nature also, bore such comfortable resemblance to
+that elder, and altogether well-beloved, Dick who was the delight of
+her life.
+
+"Yes, dear, old chap, I'll come," she said. "Only it must really be for
+a little, weeny while, because you must go to sleep. By the way, who's
+going to valet you these holidays? Clara or Faulstich?"
+
+"Oh, neither," the boy answered. "I think I'm rather old for women now,
+don't you know, Honoria."--At which statement she laughed, his cheek
+being again tucked tight into the turn of her neck. "I shall have
+Andrews in future. I asked Cousin Richard about it. He's a very
+civil-mannered fellow, and he knows about yachts and things, and he
+says he likes being up before five o'clock."
+
+"Does he? Excellently veracious young man!" Honoria remarked.
+
+But thereupon, exuberance of joy demanding active expression, the boy
+broke away with a whoop and set off running. The puppies lolloped away
+at his heels. And young Lady Calmady--whom such giddy fancies still
+took at times, notwithstanding nearly three years of marriage--flew
+after the trio, the train of her dress floating out behind her to most
+admired extravagance of length as she skimmed along the path. Fair
+lady, boy, and dogs disappeared, with sounds of merriment, into the
+near garden-hall; reappeared upon the terrace, bearing down, but at
+sobering pace, upon the occupants of the chairs set at the end of it.
+One man rose to his feet, a tall, narrow, black figure. The other
+remained seated. The light shining forth from the great bay-window of
+the hall touched the little group, conferring a certain grandeur upon
+the graceful, white-clad Honoria. Her satin dress shimmered as she
+moved. There was, as of old, a triumph of high purity, of freedom of
+soul, in her aspect. Her voice came, with a fine gladness yet soft
+richness of tone, across that intervening triangular space of sloping
+turf upon which terrace and troco-ground alike looked down. The
+nightingale, who had fallen silent during the skirmish, took up his
+passionate singing again, and was answered delicately, a song not of
+the flesh but of the spirit, by the bird from across the valley.
+
+Katherine Calmady stood solitary, watching, listening, her hands folded
+rather high on her bosom. The caressing suavity of the summer night
+enfolded her. And remembrance came to her of another night, nearly
+four-and-thirty years ago, when, standing in this same spot, she,
+young, untried, ambitious of unlimited delight, had felt the first
+mysterious pangs of motherhood, and told her husband of that new,
+unseen life which was at once his and her own. And of yet another
+night, when, after long experience of sorrow, solitude, and revolt, her
+husband had come to her once again--but come even as the bird's song
+came from across the valley, etherealised, spiritualised, the same yet
+endowed with qualities of unearthly beauty--and how that strange and
+exquisite communion with the dead had fortified her to endure an
+anguish even greater than any she had yet known.--She had prayed that
+night that she might behold the face of her well-beloved, and her
+prayer had been granted. She had prayed that, without reservation, she
+might be absorbed by, and conformed to, the Divine Will. And that
+prayer had, as she humbly trusted, been in great measure granted also.
+But then the Divine Will had proved so very merciful, the Divine
+Intention so wholly beneficent, there was small credit in being
+conformed to either!--Katherine bowed her head in thanksgiving. The
+goodness of the Almighty towards her had been abundant beyond asking or
+fondest hope.
+
+She was aroused from her gracious meditation by the sound of
+footsteps--measured, a little weary perhaps--approaching her. She
+looked up to see Julius March. And a point of gentle anxiety pricked
+Katherine. For it occurred to her that Julius had failed somewhat in
+health and energy of late. She reproached herself lest, in the interest
+of watching those vigorous, young lives so dear to her, participating
+in their schemes, basking in the sunshine of their love, she had
+neglected Julius and failed to care for his comfort as she might. To
+those that have shall be given even of sympathy, even of strength. In
+that there is an ironical as well as an equitable truth; and she was to
+blame perhaps in the ironical application of it. It followed therefore,
+that she greeted him now with a quickening both of solicitude and of
+affection.
+
+"Come and pace, dear Julius, come and pace," she said, "as in times
+past. Yet not wholly as in the past, for then often I must have
+distressed and troubled you, since my pacings were too often the
+outcome of restlessness and of unruly passion, while now----"
+
+Katherine broke off, gazing at the little company gathered upon the
+terrace.
+
+"Surely they are very happy?" she said, almost involuntarily.
+
+And he, smiling at his dear lady's incapacity of escape from her fixed
+idea, replied:--
+
+"Yes, very surely."
+
+Katherine tied the white, lace coif she wore a little tighter beneath
+her chin.
+
+"In their happiness I renew that of my own youth," she said gently, "as
+it is granted to few women, I imagine, to renew it. But I renew it with
+a reverence for them; since my own happiness was plain sailing enough,
+obvious, incontestable, whilst theirs is nobler, and rises to a higher
+plane. For its roots, after all, are planted in very mournful fact, to
+which it has risen superior, and over which it has triumphed."
+
+But he answered, jealous of his dear lady's self-depreciation:--
+
+"I can hardly admit that. To begin in unclouded promise of happiness,
+to decline to searching and unusual experience of sorrow, and then, by
+self-discipline and obedience, to attain your present altitude of
+tranquillity and assurance of faith, is surely a greater trial, a
+greater triumph, than to begin with difficulties, with much, I admit,
+to overcome and resist, but to succeed as they are succeeding and be
+granted the high land of happiness which they even now possess? They
+are young, fortune smiles on them. Above all, they have one
+another----"
+
+"Ah, yes!" she said, "they have one another. Long may that last. It is
+a very perfect marriage of true minds, as well as true hearts. I had,
+and they have, all that love can give,"--Lady Calmady turned at the end
+of the walk. "But it troubles me, as a sort of emptiness and waste,
+dear Julius, that you have never had that. It pains me that you, who
+possess so noble a power of disinterested and untiring friendship,
+should never have enjoyed that other, and nearer relation, which
+transcends friendship even as to-morrow's dawn will transcend in
+loveliness the chastened restfulness of this evening's dusk."
+
+Katherine moved onward with a certain sweet dignity of manner.
+
+"Tell me--is she still alive, Julius, this lady whom you so loved?"
+
+"Yes, thank God," he said.
+
+"And you have never tried to elude that vow which--as you once told
+me--you made long ago before you knew her?"
+
+"Never," he replied. "Without it I could not have served her as I have
+been able to serve her. I am wholly thankful for it. It made much
+possible which must have otherwise been impossible."
+
+"And have you never told her that you loved her--even yet?"
+
+"No," he replied, "because, had I told her, I must have ceased to serve
+her, I must have left her, Katherine, and I did not think God required
+that of me."
+
+Lady Calmady walked on in silence, her head a little bent. At the end
+of the path she stood a moment, listening to the answering songs of the
+two nightingales.
+
+"Ah!" she said softly, "how greatly I have under-rated the beauty of
+the dusk! To submit to dwell in the border-land, to stand on the dim
+bridge, thus, between day and night, demands perhaps the very finest
+courage conceivable. You have shown me, Julius, how exquisite and holy
+a thing it is.--And, as to her whom you have so faithfully loved, I
+think, could she know, she would thank you very deeply for never
+telling her the truth. She would entreat you to keep your secret to the
+end. But to remain near her, to let her seek counsel of you when in
+perplexity or distress, to talk with her both of those you and she
+love, and have loved, and of the promise of fair things beyond and
+above our present seeing--pacing with her at times--even as you and I,
+dear friend, pace together here to-night--amid the restrained and
+solemn beauty of the dusk. Would she not do this?"
+
+"It is enough that you have done it for her, Katherine," he answered.
+"With your ruling I am wholly, unendingly content."
+
+"Perhaps Dickie and Honoria's dear works of mercy and the noonday tide
+of energy which flows through the house, have caused us to see less of
+each other than of old," Lady Calmady continued with a charming
+lightness. "That is a mistake needing correction. The young to the
+young, dear Julius. You and I, who go at a quieter pace, will enjoy our
+peaceful friendship to the full. I shall not tire of your company, I
+promise you, if you do not of mine. Long may you be spared to me. God
+keep you, most loyal friend. Goodnight."
+
+Then Lady Calmady, deeply touched, yet unmoved from her altitude of
+thankfulness and calm, musing of many matters and the working out of
+them to a beneficent and noble end, slowly went the length of the
+terrace to where, at the foot of the steps of the garden-hall, Richard
+still sat. As she came near he held out his hand to her.
+
+"Dear, sweet mother," he said, "how I like to see you walk in that
+stately fashion, the whole of you--body, mind, and spirit, somehow
+evident--gathered up within the delicious compass of yourself! As far
+back as I can remember anything. I remember that. When I watched you it
+always made me feel safe. It seemed more like music heard, somehow,
+than something seen."
+
+"Dickie, Dickie," she exclaimed, flushing a little, "don't make me vain
+in my old age!"
+
+"But it's true," he said. "And why shouldn't one tell the pretty truths
+as well as the plain ones?--Isn't it a positively divine night? Look at
+the moon just clearing the top of the firs there! It is good to be
+alive. Mother--may I say it?--I am very grateful to you for having
+brought me into the world."
+
+"Ah! but, my poor darling----" Katherine cried.
+
+"No, no," he said, "put that out of your dear head once and for all. I
+am grateful, being as I am, grateful for everything, it being as it is.
+I don't believe I would have anything--not anything save those four
+years when I left you--altered, even if I could. I've found my work,
+and it enlarges its borders in all manner of directions; and it
+prospers. And I have money to put it through. And I have that boy. He's
+a dear little chap, and it is wonderfully good of Uncle Roger and Mary
+to give him to me. But he's getting a trifle too fond of horses. I
+can't break poor, old Chifney's heart; but when his days are numbered,
+those of the stables--as far as training racers goes--are numbered
+likewise, I think. I'll keep on the stud farm. But I grow doubtful
+about the rest. I wish it wasn't so, but so it is. Sport is changing
+hands, passing from those of romance into those of commerce.--Well, the
+stables served their turn. They helped to bring me through. But now
+perhaps they're a little out of the picture."
+
+Richard drew her hand nearer and kissed it, leaning back in his chair,
+and looking up at her.
+
+"And I have you--" he said, "you most perfect of mothers.--And--ah!
+here comes Honoria!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The History of Sir Richard Calmady, by Lucas Malet
+
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