The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
lower leg exist in a contracted form or not."
Ormiston poured himself out a glass of port. His hand shook so that the
lip of the decanter chattered against the lip of the glass. He gulped
down the wine and, getting up, walked the length of the room and back
again.
"God in heaven," he murmured, "how horrible! Poor Kitty, how utterly
horrible!--Poor Kitty."
For the baby, in his own fine completeness, he had as yet no feeling
but one of repulsion.
"Can nothing be done, Knott?" he asked at last.
"Obviously nothing."
"And it will live?"
"Oh! bless you, yes! It'll live fast enough if I know a healthy infant
when I see one. And I ought to know 'em by now. I've brought them into
the world by dozens for my sins."
"Will it be able to walk?"
"Umph--well--shuffle," the doctor answered, smiling savagely to keep
back the tears.
The young man leaned his elbows on the table, and rested his head on
his hands. All this shocked him inexpressibly--shocked him almost to
the point of physical illness. Strong as he was he could have fainted,
just then, had he yielded by ever so little. And this was the boy whom
they had so longed for then! The child on whom they had set such fond
hopes, who was to be the pride of his young mother, and restore the so
rudely shaken balance of her life! This was the boy who should go to
Eton, and into some crack regiment, who should ride straight, who was
heir to great possessions!
"The saviour has come, you see, Mr. March, in as thorough-paced a
disguise as ever saviour did yet," John Knott said cynically.
"He had better never have come at all!" Ormiston put in fiercely, from
behind his hands.
"Yes--very likely--I believe I agree," the doctor answered. "Only it
remains that he has come, is feeding, growing, stretching, and
bellowing too, like a young bull-calf, when anything doesn't suit him.
He is here, very much here, I tell you. And so we have just got to
consider how to make the best of him, both for his own sake and for
Lady Calmady's. And you must understand he is a splendid, little
animal, clean skinned and strong, as you would expect, being the child
of two such fine young people. He is beautiful,--I am old-fashioned
enough, perhaps scientific enough, to put a good deal of faith in that
notion,--beautiful as a child only can be who is born of the passion of
true lovers."
He paused, looking somewhat mockingly at Julius.
"Yes, love is an incalculably great, natural force," he continued. "It
comes uncommonly near working miracles at times, unconscious and rather
deplorable miracles. In this case it has worked strangely against
itself--at once for irreparable injury and for perfection. For the
child is perfect, is superb, but for the one thing."
"Does my sister know?" Ormiston asked hoarsely.
"Not yet; and, as long as we can keep the truth from her, she had
better not know. We must get her a little stronger, if we can, first.
That woman, Mrs. Denny, is worth her weight in gold, and her weight's
not inconsiderable. She has her wits about her, and has contrived to
meet all difficulties so far."
Ormiston sat in the same dejected attitude.
"But my sister is bound to know before long."
"Of course. When she is a bit better, she'll want to have the baby to
play with, dress and undress it and see what the queer little being is
made of. It's a way young mothers have, and a very pretty way too. If
we keep the child from her she will grow suspicious, and take means to
find out for herself, and that won't do. It must not be. I won't be
responsible for the consequences. So as soon as she asks a definite
question, she must have a definite answer."
The young man looked up quickly.
"And who is to give the answer?" he said.
"Well, it rests chiefly with you to decide that. Clearly she ought not
to hear this thing from a servant. It is too serious. It needs to be
well told--the whole kept at a high level, if you understand me. Give
Lady Calmady a great part and she will play it nobly. Let this come
upon her from a mean, wet-nurse, hospital-ward sort of level, and it
may break her. What we have to do is to keep up her pluck. Remember we
are only at the beginning of this business yet. In all probability
there are many years ahead. Therefore this announcement must come to
Lady Calmady from an educated person, from an equal, from somebody who
can see all round it. Mrs. Ormiston tells me she leaves here to-morrow
morning?"
"Mrs. Ormiston is out of the question anyhow," Roger exclaimed rather
bitterly.
Here Julius March, who had so far been silent, spoke; and in speaking
showed what manner of spirit he was of. The doctor agitated him,
treated him, moreover, with scant courtesy. But Julius put this aside.
He could afford to forget himself in his desire for any possible
mitigation of the blow which must fall on Katherine Calmady. And,
listening to his talk, he had, in the last quarter of an hour, gained
conviction not only of this man's ability, but of his humanity, of his
possession of the peculiar gentleness which so often, mercifully, goes
along with unusual strength. As the coarse-looking hand could soothe,
touching delicately, so the hard intellect and rough tongue could, he
believed, modulate themselves to very consoling and inspiring
tenderness of thought and speech.
"We have you, Dr. Knott," he said. "No one, I think, could better break
this terrible sorrow to Lady Calmady, than yourself."
"Thank you--you are generous, Mr. March," the other answered cordially;
adding to himself,--"Got to revise my opinion of the black coat. Didn't
quite deserve that after the way you've badgered him, eh, John Knott?"
He shrugged his big shoulders a little shamefacedly.
"Of course, I'd do my best," he continued. "But you see ten to one I
shan't be here at the moment. As it is I have neglected lingering
sicknesses and sudden deaths, hysterical girls, croupy children, broken
legs, and all the other pretty little amusements of a rather large
practice, waiting for me. Suppose I happen to be twenty miles away on
the far side of Westchurch, or seeing after some of Lady Fallowfeild's
numerous progeny engaged in teething or measles? Lady Calmady might be
kept waiting, and we cannot afford to have her kept waiting in this
crisis."
"I wish to God my aunt, Mrs. St. Quentin, was here!" Ormiston
exclaimed. "But she is not, and won't be, alas."
"Well, then, who remains?"
As the doctor spoke he pressed his fingers against the edge of the
table, leaned forward, and looked keenly at Ormiston. He was extremely
ugly just then, ugly as the weather-worn gargoyle on some mediaeval
church tower; but his eyes were curiously compelling.
"Good heavens! you don't mean that I've got to tell her!" Ormiston
cried.
He rose hurriedly, thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked a
little unsteadily across to the window, crunching the shining pieces of
Mrs. Ormiston's sacrificial wine-glass under foot. Outside the night
was very wild. In the colourless sky stars reeled among the fleets of
racing cloud. The wind hissed up the grass slopes and shouted among the
great trees crowning the ridge of the hill. The prospect was not
calculated to encourage. Ormiston turned his back on it. But hardly
more encouraging was the sombre, gray-blue-walled room. The vision of
all that often returned to him afterwards in very different scenes--the
tall lamps, the two men, so strangely dissimilar in appearance and
temperament, sitting on either side the dinner-table with its fine
linen and silver, wines and fruits, waiting silently for him to speak.
"I can't tell her," he said, "I can't. Damn it all, I tell you, Knott,
I daren't. Think what it will be to her! Think of being told that about
your own child!" Ormiston lost control of himself. He spoke violently.
"I'm so awfully fond of her and proud of her," he went on. "She's
behaved so splendidly ever since Richard's death, laid hold of all the
business, never spared herself, been so able and so just. And now the
baby coming, and being a boy, seemed to be a sort of let up, a reward
to her for all her goodness. To tell her this horrible thing will be
like doing her some hideous wrong. If her heart has to be broken, in
common charity don't ask me to break it."
There was a pause. He came back to the table and stood behind Julius
March's chair.
"It's asking me to be hangman to my own sister," he said.
"Yes, I know it is a confoundedly nasty piece of work. And it's rough
on you, very rough. Only, you see, this hanging has to be put
through--there's the nuisance. And it is just a question whether your
hand won't be the lightest after all."
Again silence obtained, but for the rush and sob of the gale against
the great house.
"What do you say, Julius?" Ormiston demanded at last.
"I suppose our only thought is for Katherine--for Lady Calmady?" he
said. "And in that case I agree with Dr. Knott."
Roger took another turn to the window, stood there awhile struggling
with his natural desire to escape from so painful an embassy.
"Very well, if you are not here, Knott, I undertake to tell her," he
said at last. "Please God, she mayn't turn against me altogether for
bringing her such news. I'll be on hand for the next few days, and--you
must explain to Denny that I am to be sent for whenever I am wanted.
That's all,--I suppose we may as well go now, mayn't we?"
Julius knelt at the faldstool, without the altar rails of the chapel,
till the light showed faintly through the grisaille of the
stained-glass windows and outlined the spires and carven canopies of
the stalls. At first his prayers were definite, petitions for mercy and
grace to be outpoured on the fair, young mother and her, seemingly, so
cruelly afflicted child; on himself, too, that he might be permitted to
stay here, and serve her through the difficult future. If she had been
sacred before, Katherine was rendered doubly sacred to him now. He
bowed himself, in reverential awe, before the thought of her martyrdom.
How would her proud and naturally joyous spirit bear the bitter pains
of it? Would it make, eventually, for evil or for good? And then--the
ascetic within him asserting itself, notwithstanding the widening of
outlook produced by the awakening of his heart--he was overtaken by a
great horror of that which we call matter; by a revolt against the
body, and those torments and shames, mental, moral, and physical, which
the body brings along with it. Surely the dualists were right? It was
unregenerate, a thing, if made by God, yet wholly fallen away from Him
and given over to evil, this fleshly envelope wherein the human soul is
seated, and which, even in the womb, may be infected by disease or
rendered hideous by mutilation? Then, as the languor of his long vigil
overcame him, he passed into an ecstatic contemplation of the state of
that same soul after death, clothed with a garment of incorruptible and
enduring beauty, dwelling in clear, luminous spaces, worshipping among
the ranks of the redeemed, beholding its Lord God face to face.
John Knott, meanwhile, after driving home beneath the reeling stars,
through the roar of the forest and shriek of the wind across the open
moors, found an urgent summons awaiting him. He spent the remainder of
that night, not in dreams of paradise and of spirits redeemed from the
thraldom of the flesh, but in increasing the population of this
astonishing planet, by assisting to deliver a scrofulous, half-witted
shrieking servant-girl of twins--illegitimate--in the fusty atmosphere
of a cottage garret, right up under the rat-eaten thatch.
CHAPTER IX
IN WHICH KATHERINE CALMADY LOOKS ON HER SON
More than a week elapsed before Ormiston was called upon to redeem his