The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
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