The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
needs bring, and which is so richly, so preciously, ours if we had but
the wit to understand and lay hold of it."
Whereupon Richard smiled again.
"Yes," he said, "very probably Julius did speak out of personal
experience, or rather vicarious experience. However, I don't think he
need worry this time, at least I hope not. The answer to prayer and
fulfilment of prophecy, when they're good enough to come along, don't
always get the cold shoulder."--Then his expression changed, hardened a
little, his lips growing thin and his jaw set.--"Look here, mother," he
added, "I think perhaps I have been rather playing the fool lately,
since we came home. I propose to take to the ordinary habits of
civilised, Christian man again. If it doesn't bother you, would you
kindly let the servants know that I'm coming down to luncheon?"
"Oh! my dearest, how stupid of me, I'm so grieved!" Katherine cried.
She sat down beside him on the cushioned bench, dropping service books,
handkerchief, and violets, in the extremity of her gentle and
apologetic distress.--"It never occurred to me that you might like to
come down. The Newlands people came over to church, and I brought Mary
and the two boys back. Godfrey is over from Eton for the Sunday, and
little Dick has had a cold and has not gone back to school yet. What
can we do? It would be lovely to have you, and yet I don't quite know
how I can send them away again."
"But why on earth should they be sent away?" Richard said, touched and
amused by her earnestness. "Mary's always a dear, And I've been
thinking lately I shouldn't mind seeing something of that younger boy.
He is my godson, isn't he? And Knott tells me he is curiously like you
and Uncle Roger. You see it's about time to select an heir-apparent for
Brockhurst. Luckily I've a free hand. My life's the last in the
entail."
Then, looking at him, Lady Calmady's lips trembled a little. Health had
returned and with it his former good looks, but matured, spiritualised,
as it seemed to her just now. The livid line of the scar had died out
too, and was nearly gone. And all this, taken in connection with his
words just uttered, affected her to so great and poignant a love, so
great and poignant a fear of losing him, that she dared not trust
herself to make any comment on those same words lest the flood-gates of
emotion should be opened and she should lose her self-control.
"Very well, Dickie," she said, bowing her head.--Then she added
quickly, with a little gasp of renewed distress and apology:--"But--but,
oh! dear me, Honoria is here too!"
Whereat Richard laughed outright. He could not help it, she was so
vastly engaging in her distress.
"All right," he said, "I am equal to accepting Honoria St. Quentin into
the bargain. In short, mother dear, I take over the lot, and if anybody
else turns up between now and two o'clock I'll take them over as
well.--Why, why, you dear sweet, don't look so scared! There's nothing
to trouble about. I'm not too good to live, never fear. On the
contrary, I am prepared to do quite a fine amount of living--only on
new and more modest lines perhaps. But we won't talk about that just
yet, please. We'll wait to give it a name until we're a little more
sure how it promises to work out."
CHAPTER VII
WHEREIN TWO ENEMIES ARE SEEN TO CRY QUITS
Godfrey Ormiston scudded along the terrace, past the dining-room
windows, at the top of his speed, and Miss St. Quentin followed him at
a hardly less unconventional pace. Together they burst, by the small,
arched side-door, into the lobby. There ensued discussion lively though
brief. Then, Winter setting wide the dining-room door in invitation,
sight of Honoria was presented to the company assembled within.--She,
in brave attire of dark, red cloth, black braided and befrogged, heavy,
silk cords and knotted, dangling tassels--head-gear to match, dark red
and black, a tall, stiff aigrette set at the side of it--in all
producing a something delightfully independent, soldierly, ruffling
even, in her aspect, as she pushed the black-haired, bright-faced,
slim-made lad, her two hands on his shoulders, before her into the
room.
"May we come to luncheon as we are, Cousin Katherine?" she cried.
"We're scandalously late, but we're also most ferociously hungry
and----"
But here, although Lady Calmady turned on her a welcoming and far from
unjoyful countenance, she stopped dead, while Godfrey incontinently
gave vent to that which his younger brother--sitting beside his mother,
Mary Ormiston, at table, on Richard Calmady's right--described mentally
as "the most awful squawk." Which squawk, it may be added--whatever its
effect upon other members of the company--as denoting involuntary and
unceremonious descent from the high places of thirteen-year-old,
public-school omniscience on the part of his elder, produced in
eight-year-old Dick Ormiston such overflowings of unqualified rapture
that, for a good two minutes, he had to forego assimilation of
chocolate _soufflet_, and, slipping his hands beneath the table,
squeeze them together just as hard as ever he could with both knees, to
avoid disgracing himself by emission of an ecstatic giggle. For once he
had got the whip hand of Godfrey!--Having himself, for the best part of
an hour now, been conversant with interesting developments, he found it
richly diverting to behold his big brother thus incontinently bowled
over by sudden disclosure of them. He repressed the giggle, with the
help of squeezing knees and a certain squirming all down his neat,
little back, but his blue eyes remained absolutely glued to Godfrey's
person, as the latter, recovering his presence of mind and good
manners, proceeded solemnly up to the head of the table to greet his
unlooked-for host.
Honoria, meanwhile, if guiltless of an audible squawk, had been--as she
subsequently reflected--potentially alarmingly capable of some such
primitive expression of feeling. For the shock of surprise which she
suffered was so forcible, that it induced in her an absurd unreasoning
instinct of flight. Indeed, that had happened, or rather was in process
of happening, which revolutionised all her outlook. For that the unseen
presence, consciousness of which had come to be so constant a quantity
in her action and her thought, should thus declare itself in visible
form, be materialised, become concrete, and that instantly, without
prologue or preparation, projecting itself wholesale--so to speak--into
the comfortable commonplaces of a Sunday luncheon--after her slightly
uproarious race home with a perfectly normal schoolboy, from morning
church too--affected her much as sudden intrusion of the supernatural
might. It modified all existing relations, introducing a new and, as
yet, incalculable element. Nor had she quite yet realised what power
the unseen Richard Calmady, these many years, had exercised over her
imagination, until Richard Calmady seen, was there evident, actually
before her. Then all the harsh judgments she had passed upon him, all
the disapproval of, and dislike she had felt towards, him, flashed
through her mind. And that matter too of his cancelled engagement!--The
last time she had seen him was in the house in Lowndes Square, on the
night of Lady Louisa Barking's great ball, standing--she could see all
that now--it was as if photographed upon her brain--always would
be--and it turned her a little sick.--Nevertheless it was impossible to
pause any longer. It would be ridiculous to fly, so she must stick it
out. That best of good Samaritans, Mary Ormiston, began talking to
Julius March across the length of the table.
"Oh dear, yes, of course," she was saying. "But I never realised she
was a sister of your old Oxford friend. I wish I had. It would have
been so pleasant to talk about you and about home in that far country!
Her husband is in the Rifle Brigade, and she really is a nice, dear
woman. I saw a great deal of her while we were at the Cape."
And so, under cover of Mary's kindly conversation, Miss St. Quentin
settled down into her lazy, swinging stride. Her small head carried
high, her pale, sensitive face very serious, her straight eyebrows
drawn together by concentration of purpose, concentration of thought,
she followed the boy up the long room.
As she came towards him, Richard Calmady looked full at her. His head
was carried somewhat high too. His face was very still. His eyes--with
those curiously small pupils to them--were very observant, in effect
hiding rather than revealing his thought. His manner, as he held out
his hand to her, was courteous, even friendly, and yet, notwithstanding
her high and fearless spirit, Honoria--for the first time in her life
probably--felt afraid. And then she began to understand how it came
about that, whether he behaved well or ill, whether he was good or bad,
cruel or kind, seen or unseen even, Richard, of necessity, could not
but occupy a good deal of space in the lives of all persons brought
into close contact with him. For she recognised in him a rather
tremendous creature, self-contained, not easily accessible, possessed
of a larger portion than most men of energy and resolution, possessed
too--and this, as she thought of it, again turned her a trifle sick--of
an unusual capacity of suffering.
"I am ashamed of being so dreadfully late," she said as she slipped
into the vacant place on his left.--Godfrey Ormiston was beyond her,
next to Julius March.--Honoria was aware that her voice sounded
slightly unsteady, in part from her recent scamper, in part from a
queer emotion which seemed to clutch at her throat.--"But we walked
home over the fields and by the Warren, and just in that boggy bit
where you cross the Welsh-road, Godfrey found the slot of a red-deer in
the snow, and naturally we both had to follow it up."
"Naturally," Richard said.
"I'm not so sure it was a red-deer, Honoria," the boy broke in.
"Oh yes, it was," she declared as she helped herself to a cutlet. "It
couldn't have been anything else."
"Why not?" Richard asked. He was interested by the tone of assurance in
which she spoke.
"Oh, well, the tracks were too big for a fallow-deer to begin with. And
then there's a difference, you can't mistake it if you've ever compared
the two, in the cleft of the hoof."
"And you have compared the two?"
"Oh, certainly," Honoria answered.--She was beginning to recover her
nonchalance of manner and indolent slowness of speech. "I lose no
opportunity of acquiring odds and ends of information. One never knows
when they may come in handy."
She looked at him as she spoke, and her upper lip shortened and her
eyes narrowed into a delightful smile--a smile, moreover, which had the
faintest trace of an asking of pardon in it. And it struck Richard that
there was in her expression and bearing a transparent sincerity, and
that her eyes--now narrowed as she smiled--were not the clear, soft
brown they appeared at a distance to be, but an indefinable colour,
comparable only to the dim, yet clear, green gloom which haunts the
under-spaces of an ilex grove upon a summer day. He turned his head
rather sharply. He did not want to think about matters of that sort. He
was grateful to this young lady for the devoted care she had bestowed
on his mother--but, otherwise her presence was only a part of that
daily discipline which must be cheerfully undertaken in obedience to
the exigencies of his new and fair idea.
"Probably it is a deer that has broken out of Windsor Great Park and
traveled," he said. "They do that sometimes, you know."
But here small Dick Ormiston, whose spirits, lately pirouetting on
giddy heights of felicity, had suffered swift declension bootwards at
mention of his thrilling adventure in which, alas, he had neither lot