IV. DEALING WITH MATTERS OF HEARSAY AND MATTERS OF SPORT…

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."

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."

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."