The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
dawn. And Julius March, after reciting the prayer in which the Anglican
Church commends the souls of her departing children to the merciful
keeping of the God who gave them, had followed him. The doctor was
acutely distressed. He hated to lose a patient. He also hated to feel
emotion. It made him angry. Moreover, he was intolerant of the presence
of the clergy and of their ministrations in sick rooms. He greeted poor
Julius rather snarlingly.
"So your work's through as well as mine," he said. "No disrespect to
your cloth, Mr. March, but I'm not altogether sorry. I dare say I'm a
bit of a heathen; but I can't help fancying the dying know more of
death and the way to meet it, than any of us can teach them."
A group of men-servants stood about the open door, at the further end
of the room, with Iles, the steward, and Mr. Tom Chifney, the trainer
from the racing stables. The latter advanced a little and, clearing his
throat, inquired huskily--
"No hope at all, doctor?"
"Hope?" he returned impatiently.--The lamp on the great bare
dining-table burned low, and John Knott's wide mouth, conical skull and
thick, ungainly person looked ogreish, almost brutal in the uncertain
light.--"There never was a grain of hope from the first, except in Sir
Richard's fine constitution. He is as sound as only a clean-living man
of thirty can be.--I wish there were a few more like him, though your
beastly diseases do put money into my pocket.--That offered us a bare
chance, and we were bound to act on that chance"--his loose lips worked
into a bitterly humorous smile--"and torture him. Well, I've seen a
good many men under the knife before now, and I tell you I never saw
one who bore himself better. Men and horses alike, it's breeding that
tells when it comes to the push. You know that, eh, Chifney?"
In the red drawing-room, where the drama of this sad night centred,
Roger Ormiston had dropped into a chair by the fireside, his head sunk
on his chest and his hands thrust into his pockets. He was very tired,
very miserable. A shocking thing had happened, and, in some degree, he
held himself responsible for that happening. For was it not he who had
been so besotted with the Clown, and keen about its training? Therefore
the young man cursed himself, after the manner of his kind; and cursed
his luck, in that, if this thing was to happen, it had not happened to
him instead of to Richard Calmady.
Mrs. Denny, the housekeeper, had retired to a straight-backed chair
stationed against the wall. She sat there, waiting till the next call
should come for her skilful nursing, upright, her hands folded upon her
silk apron, her attitude a model of discreet and self-respecting
repose. Mrs. Denny knew her place, and had a considerable capacity for
letting other persons know theirs. She ruled the large household with
unruffled calm. But, to-night, even her powers of self-control were
heavily taxed; and though she carried her head high, she could not help
tears coursing slowly down her cheeks, and falling sadly to the
detriment of the goffered frills of her white, lawn cross-over.
And Richard Calmady, meanwhile, lay still and very fairly peaceful upon
the narrow camp-bed in the middle of the room. He had lain there, save
during one hour,--the memory of which haunted Katherine with hideous
and sickening persistence,--ever since Tom Chifney, the head-lad from
the stables, and a couple of grooms had carried him in, on a hurdle,
from the steeple-chase course four days ago.
The crimson-covered chairs and sofas, and other furniture of the large
square room, had been pushed back against the walls in a sort of
orderly confusion, leaving a broad passageway between the doors at
either end, and a wide vacant space round the bed. At the head of this
stood a high, double-shelved what-not, bearing medicine bottles, cups,
basins, rolled bandages, dressings of rag and lint, a spirit-lamp over
which simmered a vessel containing vinegar, and a couple of shaded
candles in a tall, branched, silver candlestick. The light from these
fell, in intersecting circles, upon the white bed, upon the man's
brown, close curled hair, upon his handsome face--drawn and sharpened
by suffering--and its rather ghastly three days' growth of beard.
It fell, too, upon Katherine, as she sat facing her husband, the side
of her large easy-chair drawn up parallel to the side of the bed.
Silently, unlooked for, as a thief in the night, the end of Katherine's
fair world had come. There had been no time for forethought or
preparation. At one step she had been called upon to pass from the
triumph to the terror of mortal life. But she was a valiant creature;
and her natural courage was reinforced by the greatness of her love.
She met the blow standing, her brain clear, her mind strong to help.
Only once had she faltered--during the hideous hour when she waited,
pacing the dining-room in the dusk, four evenings back. For, after
consultation with Dr. Jewsbury and Mr. Thoms of Westchurch, John Knott
had told her--with a gentleness and delicacy a little surprising in so
hard-bitten a man--that, owing to the shattered condition of the bone,
amputation of the right leg was imperative. He added that, only too
probably, the left would have eventually to go too. They must operate,
he said, and operate immediately. Katherine had pleaded to be present;
but Dr. Knott was obdurate.
"My dear lady, you don't know what you ask," he said. "As you love him,
let him be. If you are there it will just double the strain. He'd
suffer for you as well as himself. Believe me he will be far best
alone."
It must be remembered that in 1842 anaesthetics had not robbed the
operating-room of half its horrors. The victim went to execution
wide-awake, with no mercy of deadened senses and dulled brain. And so
Katherine had paced the dining-room, hearing at intervals, through the
closed doors, the short peremptory tones of the surgeons, fearing she
heard more and worse sounds than those. They were hurting him, sorely,
sorely, dismembering and disfiguring the dear, living body which she
loved. A tempest of unutterable woe swept over her. Breaking fiercely
away from her brother and Denny--who strove to comfort her--she beat
her poor, lovely head against the wall. But that, so far, had been her
one moment of weakness. Since then she had fought steadily, with a
certain lofty cheerfulness, for the life she so desired to save. The
horror of the second operation had been spared her; but only because it
might but too probably hasten, rather than retard, the approaching
footsteps of death. Mortification had set in, in the bruised and
mangled limb forty-eight hours ago. And now the scent of death was in
the air. The awful presence drew very near. Yet only when doctor and
priest alike rose and went, when her brother moved away, and even the
faithful housekeeper stepped back from the bedside, did Katherine's
mind really grasp the truth. Her well-beloved lay dying; and human
tenderness, human skill, be they never so great, ceased to avail.
She was worn by the long vigil. Her face was colourless. Yet perhaps
Katherine's beauty had never been more rare and sweet than as she sat
there, leaning a little forward in the eagerness of her watchfulness.
The dark circles about her eyes made them look very large and sombre.
The corners of her mouth turned down and her under-lip quivered now and
then, giving her expression a childlike piteousness of appeal. There
was no trace of disorder in her appearance. Her white dressing-gown and
all its pretty ribbons and laces were spotlessly fresh. Her hair was
carefully dressed as usual--high at the back, showing the nape of her
neck, her little ears, and the noble poise of her head. Katherine was
not one of those women who appear to imagine that slovenliness is the
proper exponent of sorrow.
Still, for all her high courage, as the truth came home to her, her
spirit began to falter for the second time. It is comparatively easy to
endure while there is something to be done; but it is almost
intolerable, specially to the young when life is strong in them, merely
to sit by and wait. Katherine's overwrought nerves began to play cruel
tricks upon her, carrying her back in imagination to that other hideous
hour of waiting, in the dining-room, four evenings ago. Again she
seemed to hear the short peremptory tones of the surgeons, and those
worse things--the stifled groan of one in the extremity of physical
anguish, and the grate of a saw. These maddened her with pity, almost
with rage. She feared that now, as then, she might lose her
self-mastery and do some wild and desperate thing. She tried to keep
her attention fixed on the quick irregular rise and fall of the linen
sheet expressing the broad, full curve of the young man's chest, as he
lay flat on his back, his eyes closed, but whether in sleep or in
unconsciousness she did not know. As long as the sheet rose and fell he
was alive at all events, still with her. But she was too exhausted for
any sustained effort of will; and her glance wandered back to, and
followed with agonised comprehension, the formless, motionless
elevation and depression of that same sheet towards the foot of the
bed.
The air of the room seemed to grow more oppressive, the silence to
deepen, and with it the terrible tension of her mind increased.
Suddenly she started to her feet. The logs burning in the grate had
fallen together with a crash, sending a rush of ruddy flame and an
innumerable army of hurrying sparks up the wide chimney. All the
mouldings of the ceiling--all the crossing bars and sinuous lines of
the richly-worked pattern, all the depending bosses and roses of it,
all the foliations of the deep cornice--sprang into bold relief,
outlined, splashed, and stained with living scarlet. And this universal
redness of carpet, curtains, furniture, and now of ceiling, even of
white-draped bed, suggested to Katherine's distracted fancy another
thing--unseen, yet known during her other hour of waiting--namely
blood.
Roused by the crash of the falling logs and the rustle of Katherine's
garments as she sprang up, Richard Calmady opened his eyes. For a few
seconds his glance wavered in vague distress and perplexity. Then as
fuller consciousness returned of how it all was with him, with a slight
lifting of the eyebrows his glance steadied upon Katherine and he
smiled.
"Ah! my poor Kitty," he whispered, "it takes a long time, doesn't it,
this business of dying?"
Katherine's evil fancies vanished. As soon as the demand for action
came she grew calm and sane. The ceiling and sheets were white again
and her mind was clear.
"Are you easy, my dearest?" she asked; "in less pain?"
"No," he said, "no, I'm not in pain. But everything seems to sink away
from me, and I float right out. It's all dream and mist--except--except
just now your face."
Katherine's lips quivered too much for speech. She moved swiftly across
to the what-not at the head of the bed. If he did not suffer, there
could be no selfishness, surely, in trying to keep death at bay for a
little space yet? But, alas, with what grotesquely paltry and
inadequate weapons are all--even the most gallant--reduced to fighting
death at the last! Here, on the one hand, a half wine-glass of
champagne in a china feeding-cup, with a teapot-like spout to it, or a
few spoonfuls of jelly, backed by the passion of a woman's heart. And,
on the other hand, ranged against this pitiful display of absurdly
limited resources,--as the hosts of the Philistines against the little
army of Israel,--resistless laws of nature, incalculably far-reaching
forces, physical and spiritual, the interminable progression of cause
and effect.
Denny joined Lady Calmady at the table. The two women held brief