The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
But the young man held up his hands and cried out feelingly:--
"Don't, pray don't, my dear Louisa. Let us walk delicately as Agag--my
father's morning ministrations to the maids again! For how, as I
pointed out just now, do we know what insidious little tales may not be
in circulation regarding yourself and those nearest and dearest to
you?"
Ludovic Quayle turned his head and once again looked out of the window,
his beautiful mouth visited by a slightly malicious smile. The train
was sliding onward above crowded, sordid courts and narrow alleys,
festering, as it seemed, with a very plague of poverty-stricken and
unwholesome humanity. Here the line runs parallel to the river--sullen
to-day, blotted with black floats and lines of grimy barges, which
straining, smoke-vomiting steam-tugs towed slowly against a strong
flowing tide. On the opposite bank the heavy masses of the Abbey, the
long decorated facade and towers of the Houses of Parliament, stood out
ghostly and livid in a gleam of frail, unrelated sunshine against the
murk of the smoky sky.
"I should have supposed Sir Richard Calmady was steady," Lady Louisa
remarked, inconsequently and rather stiffly. Ludovic really was
exasperating.
"Steady? Oh! perfectly. Poor, dear chap, he hasn't had much chance of
being anything else as yet."
"Still, of course, Lady Calmady would prefer his being settled. Clearly
it would be much better in every way. All things considered, he is
certainly one of the people who should marry young. And Connie would be
an excellent marriage for him, excellent--thoroughly suitable, better,
really, than on the face of it he could hope for. Ludovic, just look
out please and see if the carriage is here. Pocock always loses her
head at a terminus, and misses the men-servants. Yes, there is
Frederic--with his back to the train, looking the wrong way, of course.
He really is too stupid."
Mr. Quayle, however, succeeded in attracting the footman's attention,
and, assisted by that functionary and the lean and anxious Pocock--her
arms full of bags and umbrellas--conveyed his sister out of the railway
carriage and into the waiting brougham. She graciously offered to put
him down at his rooms, in St. James's Place, on her way to the Barking
mansion in Albert Gate, but the young man declined that honour.
"Good-bye, Louisa," he said, leaning his elbows on the open window of
the brougham and thereby presenting the back view of an irreproachably
cut overcoat and trousers to the passers-by. "I have to thank you for a
most interesting and instructive journey. Your efforts to secure the
prosperity of the family are wholly praiseworthy. I commend them. I
have a profound respect for your generalship. Still, pauper though I
am, I am willing to lay you a hundred to one in golden guineas that you
will never square papa."
Subsequently the young man bestowed himself in a hansom, and rattled
away in the wake of the Barking equipage down the objectionably steep
hill which leads from the roar and turmoil of the station into the
Waterloo Bridge road.
"I might have offered heavier odds," he said to himself, "for never,
never will she square papa."
And, not without a light sense of shame, he was conscious that he made
this reflection with a measure of relief.
CHAPTER XI
CONTAINING SAMPLES BOTH OF EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY LOVE
Katherine stood in the central space of the great, state bedroom. It
was just upon midnight, yet she still wore her jewels and her handsome,
trailing, black, velvet dress. She was very tired. But that tiredness
proceeded less from physical than mental weariness. This she
recognised, and foresaw that weariness of this character was not likely
to find relief and extinction within the shelter of the curtains of the
stately bed, whereon the ancient Persian legend of the flight of the
Hart through the tangled Forest of This Life was so deftly and quaintly
embroidered. For, unhappily to-night, the leopard, Care, followed very
close behind. And Katherine, taking the ancient legend as very
literally descriptive of her existing state of mind feared that, should
she undress and seek the shelter of the rose-lined curtains the leopard
would seek it also, and, crouching at her feet, his evil yellow eyes
would gaze into her own, wide open, all through that which remained of
the night. The night, moreover, was very wild. A westerly gale, with
now and again tumultuous violence of rain, rattled the many panes of
the windows, wailed in every crevice of door and casement, roared
through the mile-long elm avenue below, and roared in the chimneys
above. The Prince of the Power of the Air was let loose, and announced
his presence as with the shout of battle. Sleep was out of the question
under present conditions and in her present humour. Therefore Lady
Calmady had dismissed Clara--now promoted to the dignified office of
lady's-maid--and that bright-eyed and devoted waiting-woman had
departed reluctant, almost in tears, protesting that:--"it was quite
too bad, for her ladyship was being regularly worn out with all the
talking and company. And she, for her part, should be heartily glad
when the entertaining was over and they were all comfortably to
themselves again."
Nor could Katherine honestly assert that she would be altogether sorry
when the hour struck, to-morrow, for the departure of her guests. For
it appeared to her that, notwithstanding the courtesy and affection of
her brother and the triumphant charm of her niece, a spirit of unrest
had entered Brockhurst along with their entry. Would that same spirit
depart along with their departing? She questioned it. She was oppressed
by a fear that that spirit of unrest had come to stay. And so it was
that as she walked the length and breadth of the lofty, white-paneled
room, for all the rage and fury of the storm without, she still heard
the soft padding of Care, the leopard, close behind.
Then a singular desolation and sense of homelessness came upon
Katherine. Turn where she would there seemed no comfort, no escape, no
sure promise of eventual rest. Things human and material were emptied
not of joy only, but of invitation to effort. For something had
happened from which there was no going back. A fair woman from a far
country had come and looked upon her son, with the inevitable result,
that youth had called to youth. And though the fair woman in question,
being already wedded wife,--Katherine was rather pathetically
pure-minded,--could not in any dangerously practical manner steal away
her son's heart, yet she would, only too probably, prepare that heart
and awaken in it desires of subsequent stealing away on the part of
some other fair woman, as yet unknown, whose heart Dickie would do his
utmost to steal in exchange. And this filled her with anxiety and
far-reaching fears, not only because it was bitter to have some woman
other than herself hold the chief place in her son's affections, but
because she--as John Knott, even as Ludovic Quayle, though from quite
other causes--could not but apprehend possibilities of danger, even of
disaster, surrounding all question of love and marriage in the strange
and unusual case of Richard Calmady.
And thinking of these things, her sensibilities heightened and
intensified by fatigue and circumstances of time and place, a certain
feverishness possessed her. That bedchamber of many memories--exquisite
and tragic--became intolerable to her. She opened the double doors and
passed into the Chapel-Room beyond, the light thrown by the tall wax
candles set in silver branches upon her toilet-table, passing with her
through the widely open doors and faintly illuminating the near end of
the great room. There was other subdued light in the room as well. For
a glowing mass of coal and wood still remained in the brass basket upon
the hearth, and the ruddy brightness of it touched the mouldings of the
ceiling, glowed on the polished corners and carvings of tables,
what-nots, and upon the mahogany frames of solid, Georgian sofas and
chairs.
At first sight, notwithstanding the roaring of wind and ripping of rain
without, there seemed offer of comfort in this calm and spacious place,
the atmosphere of it sweet with bowls of autumn violets and
greenhouse-grown roses. Katherine sat down in Richard's low armchair
and gazed into the crimson heart of the fire. She made a valiant effort
to put away haunting fears, to resume her accustomed attitude of
stoicism, of tranquil, if slightly defiant, courage. But Care, the
leopard, refused to be driven away. Surely, stealthily he had followed
her out of her bedchamber and now crouched at her side, making his
presence felt so that all illusion of comfort speedily fled. She knew
that she was alone, consciously and bitterly alone, waking in the midst
of the sleeping house. No footstep would echo up the stairs, hot to
find her. No voice would call her name, in anxiety for her well-being
or in desire. It seemed to Katherine that a desert lay outstretched
about her on every hand, while she sat desolate with Care for her sole
companion. She recognised that her existing isolation was, in a measure
at all events, the natural consequence of her own fortitude and
ability. She had ruled with so strong and discreet a hand that the
order she had established, the machinery she had set agoing, could now
keep going without her. Hence her loneliness. And that loneliness as
she sat by the dying fire, while the wind raved without, was dreadful
to her, peopled with phantoms she dared not look upon. For, not only
the accustomed burden of her motherhood was upon her, but that other
unaccustomed burden of admitted middle-age. And this other burden,
which it is appointed a woman shall bear while her heart often is still
all too sadly young, dragged her down. The conviction pressed home on
her that for her the splendid game was indeed over, and that, for very
pride's sake, she must voluntarily stand aside and submit to rank
herself with things grown obsolete, with fashions past and out of date.
Katherine rose to her feet, filled, for the moment, by an immense
compassion for her own womanhood, by an overmastering longing for
sympathy. She was so tired of the long struggle with sorrow, so tired
of her own attitude of sustained courage. And now, when surely a little
respite and repose might have been granted her, it seemed that a new
order of courage was demanded of her, a courage passive rather than
active, a courage of relinquishment and self-effacement. That was a
little too much. For all her valiant spirit, she shrank away. She grew
weak. She could not face it.
And so it happened that to-night--as once long ago, when poor Richard
suffered his hour of mental and physical torment at the skilful, yet
relentless hands of Dr. Knott, in the bedchamber near by--Katherine's
anguish and revolt found expression in restless pacings, and those
pacings brought her to the chapel door. It stood ajar. Before the altar
the three hanging lamps showed each its tongue of crimson flame. A
whiteness of flowers, set in golden vases upon the re-table, was just
distinguishable. But the delicately carved spires and canopies of
stalls, the fair pictured saints, and figure of the risen Christ--His
wounded feet shining like pearls upon the azure floor of heaven--in the
east window, were lost in soft, thick, all-pervading gloom. The place
was curiously still, as though waiting silently, in solemn and strained
expectation for the accomplishment of some mysterious visitation. And,
all the while without, the gale flung itself wailing against the angles
of the masonry, and the rain beat upon the glass of the high, narrow
windows as with a passion of despairing tears.
For some time Katherine waited in the doorway, a sombre figure in her