The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
"Eh! so you've heard that story too, have you?"--and John Knott drew
the lash gently across the hollow of the mare's back.
"This 'ere Sir Richard's the third baronet I've a-seen, and I bean't so
very old neither."
The doctor looked down at the spare little man with a certain snarling
affection, as he said:--"Oh no! I'm not kept awake o' nights by the
fear of losing you, Timothy. Your serviceable old carcass'll hang
together for a good while yet."--Then his rough eyebrows drew into a
line and he stared thoughtfully down the long space of the clean gravel
road under the meeting branches of the lime trees.
The Whitney _char a bancs_ had driven off but a few minutes later, to
the admiration of all beholders; yet not, it must be admitted, without
a measure of inward perturbation on the part of that noble charioteer,
Lord Fallowfeild. Her Ladyship was constitutionally timid, and he was
none too sure of the behaviour of his leaders in face of the string of
very miscellaneous vehicles waiting to take up. However, the
illustrious party happily got off without any occasion for Lady
Fallowfeild's screaming. Then the ardour of departure became universal,
and in broken procession the many carriages, phaetons, gigs, traps,
pony-chaises streamed away from Brockhurst House, north, south, east
and west.
Lady Calmady had bidden her guests farewell at the side-door opening on
to the terrace, before they passed through the house to the main
entrance in the south front. Last to go, as he had been first to come,
was that worthy person, Thomas Caryll, the rector of Sandyfield. Mild,
white-haired, deficient in chin, he had a natural leaning towards women
in general, and towards those of the upper classes in particular.
Katherine Calmady's radiant youth, her courtesy, her undeniable air of
distinction, and a certain gracious gaiety which belonged to her, had,
combined with unaccustomed indulgence in claret cup, gone far to turn
the good man's head during the afternoon. Regardless of the slightly
flustered remonstrances of his wife and daughters, he lingered,
expending himself in innocently confused compliment, supplemented by
prophecies regarding the blessings destined to descend upon Brockhurst
and the mother parish of Sandyfield in virtue of Lady Calmady's advent.
But at length he also was gone. Katherine waited, her eyes full of
laughter, until Mr. Caryll's footsteps died away on the stone quarries
of the great hall within. Then she gently drew the heavy door to, and
stepped out on to the centre of the terrace. The grass slopes of the
park--dotted with thorn trees and beds of bracken,--the lime avenue
running along the ridge of the hill, the ragged edge of the fir forest
to the east, and the mass of the house, all these were softened to a
vagueness--as the landscape in a dream--by the deepening twilight. An
immense repose pervaded the whole scene. It affected Katherine to a
certain seriousness. Her social excitements and responsibilities, the
undoubted success that had attended her maiden essay as hostess during
the past week, shrank to trivial proportions. Another order of emotion
arose in her. She became sensible of a necessity to take counsel with
herself.
She moved slowly along the terrace; paused in the arcaded garden-hall
at the end of it--the carven stone benches and tables of which showed
somewhat ghostly in the dimness--to put off her bonnet and push back
the lace scarf from her shoulders. An increasing solemnity was upon
her. There were things to think of, things deep and strange. She must
needs place them, make an effort, anyhow, to do so. And, in face of
this necessity, came an instinct to rid herself of all small impeding
conventionalities, even in the matter of dress. For there was in
Katherine that inherent desire of harmony with her surroundings, that
natural sense of fitness, which--given certain technical
aptitudes--goes to make a great dramatic artist. But, since in her
case, such technical aptitudes were either non-existent, or wholly in
abeyance, it followed that, save in nice questions of private honour,
she was quite the least self-conscious and self-critical of human
beings. Now, as she passed out under the archway on to the square lawn
of the troco-ground, bare-headed, in her pale dress, a sweet
seriousness filling all her mind, even as the sweet summer twilight
filled all the valley and veiled the gleaming surface of the Long Water
far below, she felt wholly in sympathy with the aspect and sentiment of
the place. Indeed it appeared to her, just then, that the four months
of her marriage, the five months of her engagement, even the twenty-two
years which made up all the sum of her earthly living, were a prelude
merely to the present hour and to that which lay immediately ahead.
Yet the prelude had, in truth, been a pretty enough piece of music.
Katharine's experience had but few black patches in it as yet.
Furnished with a fair and healthy body, with fine breeding, with a
character in which the pride and grit of her North Country ancestry was
tempered by the poetic instincts and quick wit which came to her with
her mother's Irish blood, Katherine Ormiston started as well furnished
as most to play the great game that all are bound to play, whether they
will or no, with fate. Mrs. Ormiston, still young and beloved, had died
in bringing this, her only daughter, into the world; and her husband
had looked somewhat coldly upon the poor baby in consequence. There was
an almost misanthropic vein in the autocratic land-owner and
iron-master. He had three sons already, and therefore found but little
use for this woman-child. So, while pluming himself on his clear
judgment and unswerving reason, he resented, most unreasonably, her
birth, since it took his wife from him. Such is the irony of things,
forever touching man on the raw, proving his weakness in that he holds
his strongest point! In point of fact, however, Katherine suffered but
slightly from the poor welcome that greeted her advent in the gray,
many-towered house upon the Yorkshire coast. For her great-aunt, Mrs.
St. Quentin, speedily gathered the small creature into her still
beautiful arms, and lavished upon it both tenderness and wealth,
along--as it grew to a companionable age--with the wisdom of a mind
ripened by wide acquaintance with men and with public affairs. Mrs. St.
Quentin--famous in Dublin, London, Paris, as a beauty and a wit--had
passed her early womanhood amid the tumult of great events. She had
witnessed the horrors of the Terror, the splendid amazements of the
First Empire; and could still count among her friends and
correspondents, politicians and literary men of no mean standing. A
legend obtains that Lord Byron sighed for her--and in vain. For, as
Katherine came to know later, this woman had loved once, daringly,
finally, yet without scandal--though the name of him whom she loved
(and who loved her) was not, it must be owned, St. Quentin. And perhaps
it was just this, this hidden and somewhat tragic romance, which kept
her so young, so fresh; kept her unworldly, though moving so freely in
the world; had given her that exquisite sense of relative values and
that knowledge of the heart, which leads, as the divine Plato has
testified, to the highest and most reconciling philosophy.
Thus, the delicately brilliant old lady and the radiant young lady
lived together delightfully enough, spending their winters in Paris in
a pretty apartment in the rue de Rennes--shared with one Mademoiselle
de Mirancourt, whose friendship with Mrs. St. Quentin dated from their
schooldays at the convent of the Sacre Coeur. Spring and autumn found
Katherine and her great-aunt in London. While, in summer, there was
always a long visit to Ormiston Castle, looking out from the cliff edge
upon the restless North Sea. Lovers came in due course. For over and
above its own shapeliness--which surely was reason enough--Katherine's
hand was well worth winning from the worldly point of view. She would
have money; and Mrs. St. Quentin's influence would count for much in
the case of a great-nephew-by-marriage who aspired to a parliamentary
or diplomatic career. But the lovers also went, for Katherine asked a
great deal--not so much of them, perhaps, as of herself. She had taken
an idea, somehow, that marriage, to be in the least satisfactory, must
be based on love; and that love worth the name is an essentially
two-sided business. Indirectly the girl had learnt much on this
difficult subject from her great-aunt; and with characteristic
directness had agreed with herself to wait till her heart was touched,
if she waited a lifetime--though of exactly in what either her heart,
or the touching of it, consisted she was deliciously innocent as yet.
And then, in the summer of 1841, Sir Richard Calmady came to Ormiston.
He and her brother Roger had been at Eton together. Katherine
remembered him, years ago, as a well-bred and courteously contemptuous
schoolboy, upon whose superior mind, small female creatures--busy about
dolls, and victims of the athletic restrictions imposed by
petticoats--made but slight impression. Latterly Sir Richard's name had
come to be one to conjure with in racing circles, thanks to the
performances of certain horses bred and trained at the Brockhurst
stables; though some critics, it is true, deplored his tendency to
neglect the older and more legitimate sport of flat-racing in favour of
steeple-chasing. It was said he aspired to rival the long list of
victories achieved by Mr. Elmore's Gaylad and Lottery, and the
successes of Peter Simple the famous gray. This much Katherine had
heard of him from her brother. And having her haughty turns--as what
charming woman has not?--set him down as probably a rough sort of
person, notwithstanding his wealth and good connections, a kind of
gentleman jockey, upon whom it would be easy to take a measure of
pretty revenge for his boyish indifference to her existence. But the
meeting, and the young man, alike, turned out quite other than she had
anticipated. For she found a person as well furnished in all polite and
social arts as herself, with no flavour of the stable about him. She
had reckoned on one whose scholarship would carry him no further than a
few stock quotations from Horace, and whose knowledge of art would
begin and end with a portrait of himself presented by the members of a
local hunt. And it was a little surprising--possibly a little
mortifying to her--to hear him talking over obscure passages in
Spencer's _Faerie Queene_ with Mrs. St. Quentin, before the end of the
dinner, and nicely apprising the relative merits of the water-colour
sketches by Turner, that hung on either side the drawing-room
fireplace.
Nor did Katherine's surprises end here. An unaccountable something was
taking place within her, that opened up a whole new range of emotion.
She, the least moody of young women, had strange fluctuations of
temper, finding herself buoyantly happy one hour, the next pensive,
filled with timidity and self-distrust--not to mention the little fits
of gusty anger, and purposeless jealousy which took her, hurting her
pride shrewdly. She grew anxiously solicitous as to her personal
appearance. This dress would not please her nor that. The image of her
charming oval face and well-set head ceased to satisfy her. Surely a
woman's hair should be either positively blond or black, not this
indeterminate brown, with warm lights in it? She feared her mouth was
not small enough, the lips too full and curved for prettiness. She
wished her eyes less given to change, under their dark lashes, from
clear gray-blue to a nameless colour like the gloom of the pools of a
woodland stream, as her feelings changed from gladness to distress. She