The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
feared her complexion was too bright, and then not bright enough. And,
all the while, a certain shame possessed her that she should care at
all about such trivial matters; for life had grown suddenly larger and
more august. Books she had read, faces she had watched a hundred times,
the vast horizon looking eastward over the unquiet sea, all these
gained a new value and meaning which at once enthralled and agitated
her thought.
Sir Richard Calmady stayed a fortnight at Ormiston. And the two ladies
crossed to Paris earlier, that autumn, than was their custom. Katherine
was not in her usual good health, and Mrs. St. Quentin desired change
of air and scene on her account. She took Mademoiselle de Mirancourt
into her confidence, hinting at causes for her restlessness and wayward
little humours unacknowledged by the girl herself. Then the two elder
women wrapped Katherine about with an atmosphere of--if
possible--deeper tenderness than before; mingling sentiment with their
gaiety, and gaiety with their sentiment, and the delicate respect which
refrains from question with both.
One keenly bright October afternoon Richard Calmady called in the rue
de Rennes. It appeared he had come to Paris with the intention of
remaining there for an indefinite period. He called again and yet
again, making himself charming--a touch of deference tempering his
natural suavity--alike to his hostesses and to such of their guests as
he happened to meet. It was the fashion of fifty years ago to conduct
affairs, even those of the heart, with a dignified absence of
precipitation. The weeks passed, while Sir Richard became increasingly
welcome in some of the very best houses in Paris.--And Katherine? It
must be owned Katherine was not without some heartaches, which she
proudly tried to deny to herself and conceal from others. But
eventually--it was on the morning after the ball at the British
Embassy--the man spoke and the maid answered, and the old order
changed, giving place to new in the daily life of the pretty apartment
of the rue de Rennes.
About five months later the marriage took place in London; and Sir
Richard and Lady Calmady started forth on a wedding journey of the
old-fashioned type. They traveled up the Rhine, and posted, all in the
delicious, early summer weather, through Northern Italy, as far as
Florence. They returned by Paris. And there, Mrs. St. Quentin
watching--in almost painful anxiety--to see how it fared with her
recovered darling, was wholly satisfied, and gave thanks. For she
perceived that, in this case, at least, marriage was no legal,
conventional connection leaving the heart emptier than it found it--the
bartering of precious freedom for a joyless bondage, an obligation,
weary in the present, and hopeless of alleviation in the future, save
by the reaching of that far-distant, heavenly country, concerning which
it is comfortably assured us "that there they neither marry nor are
given in marriage." For the Katherine who came back to her was at once
the same, and yet another, Katherine--one who carried her head more
proudly and stepped as though she was mistress of the whole fair earth,
but whose merry wit had lost its little edge of sarcasm, whose sympathy
was quicker and more instinctive, whose voice had taken fuller and more
caressing tones, and in whose sweet eyes sat a steady content good to
see. And then, suddenly, Mrs. St. Quentin began to feel her age as she
had never, consciously, felt it before; and to be very willing to fold
her hands and recite her _Nunc Dimittis_. For, in looking on the faces
of the bride and bridegroom, she had looked once again on the face of
Love itself, and had stood within the court of the temple of that
Uranian Venus whose unsullied glory is secure here and hereafter, since
to her it is given to discover to her worshippers the innermost secret
of existence, thereby fencing them forever against the plagues of
change, delusion, and decay. Love began gently to loosen the cords of
life, and to draw Lucia St. Quentin home--home to that dear
dwelling-place which, as we fondly trust--since God Himself is Love--is
reserved for all true lovers beyond the grave and Gates of Death. Thus
one flower falls as another opens; and to-day, however sweet, is only
won across the corpse of yesterday.
And it was some perception of just this--the ceaseless push of event
following on event, the ceaseless push of the yet unborn struggling to
force the doors of life--which moved Katherine to seriousness, as she
stood alone on the smooth expanse of the troco-ground, in the soft,
all-covering twilight, at the close of the day's hospitality.
On her right the house, and its delicate twisted chimneys, showed dark
against the fading rose of the western sky. The air, rich with the
fragrance of the red-walled gardens behind her,--with the scent of
jasmine, heliotrope and clove carnations, ladies-lilies and
mignonette,--was stirred, now and again, by wandering winds, cool from
the spaces of the open moors. While, as the last roll of departing
wheels died out along the avenues, the voices of the woodland began to
reassert themselves. Wild-fowl called from the alder-fringed Long
Water. Night-hawks churred as they beat on noiseless wings above the
beds of bramble and bracken. A cock pheasant made a most admired stir
and keckling in seeing his wife and brood to roost on the branches of
one of King James's age-old Scotch firs.
And this sense of nature coming back to claim her own, to make known
her eternal supremacy, now that the fret of man's little pleasuring had
past, was very grateful to Katherine Calmady. Her soul cried out to be
free, for a time, to contemplate, to fully apprehend and measure its
own happiness. It needed to stand aside, so that the love given, and
all given with that love--even these matters of house and gardens, of
men-servants and maid-servants, of broad acres, all the poetry, in
short, of great possessions--might be seen in perspective. For
Katherine had that necessity--in part intellectual, in part practical,
and common to all who possess a gift for rule--to resist the confusing
importunity of detail, and to grasp intelligently the whole, which
alone gives to detail coherence and purpose. Her mind was not
one--perhaps unhappily--which is contented to merely play with bricks,
but demands the plan of the building into which those bricks should
grow. And she wanted, just now, to lay hold of the plan of the fair
building of her own life. And to this end the solitude, the evening
quiet, the restful unrest of the forest and its wild creatures should
surely have ministered? She moved forward and sat on the broad stone
balustrade which, topping the buttressed masonry that supports it above
the long downward grass slope of the park, encloses the troco-ground on
the south.
The landscape lay drowned in the mystery of the summer night. And
Katherine, looking out into it, tried to think clearly, tried to range
the many new experiences of the last months and to reckon with them.
But her brain refused to work obediently to her will. She felt
strangely hurried for all the surrounding quiet.
One train of thought, which she had been busy enough by day and
honestly sleepy enough at night, to keep at arm's length during this
time of home-coming and entertaining, now invaded and possessed her
mind--filling it at once with a new and overwhelming movement of
tenderness, yet for all her high courage with a certain fear. She cried
out for a little space of waiting, a little space in which to take
breath. She wanted to pause, here in the fulness of her content. But no
pause was granted her. She was so happy, she asked nothing more. But
something more was forced upon her. And so it happened that, in
realising the ceaseless push of event on event, the ceaseless dying of
dear to-day in the service of unborn to-morrow, her gentle seriousness
touched on regret.
How long she remained lost in such pensive reflections Lady Calmady
could not have said. Suddenly the terrace door slammed. A moment later
a man's footsteps echoed across the flags of the garden-hall.
"Katherine," Richard Calmady called, somewhat imperatively, "Katherine,
are you there?"
She turned and stood watching him as he came rapidly across the turf.
"Yes, I am here," she cried. "Do you want me?"
"Do I want you?" he answered curtly. "Don't I always want you?"
A little sob rose in her throat--she knew not why--for, hearing the
tone of his voice, her sadness was strangely assuaged.
"I could not find you," he went on. "And I got into an absurd state of
panic--sent Roger in one direction, and Julius in another, to look for
you."
"Whereupon Roger, probably, posted down to the stables, and Julius up
to the chapel to search. Where the heart dwells there the feet follow.
Meanwhile, you came straight here and found me yourself."
"I might have known I should do that."
The importunate thought returned upon Katherine and with it a touch of
her late melancholy.
"Ah! one knows nothing for certain when one is frightened," she said.
She moved closer to him, holding out her hand. "Here," she continued,
"you are a little too shadowy, too unsubstantial, in this light, Dick.
I would rather make more sure of your presence."
Richard Calmady laughed very gently. Then the two stood silent, looking
out over the dim valley, hand in hand. The scent of the gardens was
about them. Moving lights showed through the many windows of the great
house. The waterfowl called sleepily. The churring of the night-hawks
was continuous, soothing as the hum of a spinning-wheel. Somewhere,
away in the Warren, a fox barked. In the eastern sky, the young moon
began to climb above the ragged edge of the firs. When they spoke again
it was very simply, in broken sentences, as children speak. The poetry
of their relation to one another and the scene about them were too full
of meaning, too lovely, to call for polish of rhetoric, or pointing by
epigram.
"Tell me," Katherine said, "were you satisfied? Did I entertain your
people prettily?"
"Prettily? You entertained them as they had never been entertained
before--like a queen--and they knew it. But why did you stay out here
alone?"
"To think--and to look at Brockhurst."
"Yes, it's worth looking at now," he said. "It was like a body wanting
a soul till you came."
"But you loved it?" Katherine reasoned.
"Oh yes! because I believed the soul would come some day. Brockhurst,
and the horses, and the books, all helped to make the time pass while I
was waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"Why for you, of course, you dear, silly sweet. Haven't I always been
waiting for you--just precisely and wholly you, nothing more or
less--all through my life, all through all conceivable and
inconceivable lives, since before the world began?"
Katharine's breath came with a fluttering sigh. She let her head fall
back against his shoulder. Her eyes closed involuntarily. She loved
these fond exaggerations--as what woman does not who has had the good
fortune to hear them? They pierced her with a delicious pain;
and--perhaps therefore, perhaps not unwisely--she believed them true.
"Are you tired?" he asked presently.
Katherine looked up smiling, and shook her head.
"Not too tired to be up early to-morrow morning and come out with me to
see the horses galloped? Sultan will give you no trouble. He is
well-seasoned and merely looks on at things in general with intelligent
interest, goes like a lamb and stands like a rock."
While her husband was speaking Katherine straightened herself up, and
moved a little from him though still holding his hand. Her languor
passed, and her eyes grew large and black.
"I think, perhaps, I had better not go to-morrow, Dick," she said
slowly.