The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance

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