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 railwaybuffet. 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 muchgrande dametoo—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, à 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."