The History of Sir Richard Calmady Part 80

Directly below, at the foot of the descending steps of the main entrance, lay the square, red-walled s.p.a.ce of gravel and of turf. He looked at it curiously, for there, with the maiming and death of Thomas Calmady's b.a.s.t.a.r.d, if legend said truly, all this tragic history of disaster had begun. There, too, the Clown, race-horse of merry name and mournful memory, had paid the penalty of wholly involuntary transgression just thirty years ago. That last was a rather horrible incident, of which Richard never cared to think. Chifney had told him about it once, in connection with the parentage of Verdigris--had told him just by chance. To think of it, even now, made a lump rise in his throat. Across the turf--offering quaint contrast to those somewhat b.l.o.o.d.y memories--the peac.o.c.ks, in all their bravery of royal blue-purple, living green and gold, led forth their sober-clad mates.

They had come out from the pepper-pot summer-houses to sun themselves.

They stepped mincingly, with a worldly and disdainful grace, and, reaching the gravel, their resplendent trains swept the rounded pebbles, making a small, dry, rattling sound, which, so deep was the surrounding quiet, a.s.serted itself to the extent of saluting d.i.c.kie's ears. Beyond the red wall the parallel lines of the elm avenue swept down to the blue and silver levels of the Long Water, the alder copses bordering which showed black-purple, and the reed-beds rusty as a fox, against thin stretches of still unmelted snow. The avenue climbed the farther ascent to the wide archway of the red and gray gate-house, just short of the top of the long ridge of bare moorland. The gra.s.s slopes of the park, to the left, were backed by the dark, sawlike edge of the fir forest, and a soft gloom of oak woods, gray-brown and mottled as a lizard's belly and back, closed the end of the valley eastward. On the right the terraced gardens, with their ranges of glittering conservatories, fell away to the sombre pond in the valley, home of loudly-discoursing companies of ducks. The gentle hillside above was clothed by plantations, and a grove of ancient beech trees, whose pale, smooth boles stood out from among undergrowth of l.u.s.trous hollies and the warm russet of fallen leaves. And over it all brooded the restfulness of the Sabbath, and the gladness of a fair and equal light.

And the charm of the scene worked upon Richard, not with any heat of excitement, but with a temperate and reasonable grace. For the spirit of it all was a spirit of temperance, of moderation, of secure tranquillity--a spirit stoic rather than epicurean, ascetic rather than hedonic, yet generous, s.p.a.cious, n.o.bly reasonable, giving ample scope for very sincere, if soberly-clad pleasures, and for activities by no means despicable or unmanly, though of a modest, unostentatious sort.

d.i.c.kie had tried not a few desperate adventures, had conformed his thought and action to not a few glaring patterns, rushing to violences of extreme colour, extreme white and black. All that had proved preeminently unsuccessful, a most poisonous harvest of Dead Sea fruit.

What, he began to ask himself, if he made an effort to conform it to the pattern actually presented to him--mellow, sun-visited, with the brave red of weather stained masonry in it, blue and silver of water and sky, l.u.s.tre of st.u.r.dy hollies, as well as the solemnity of leafless woods, finger of frost in the hollows, and bleakness of snow?

And, as he sat meditating thus, breathing the clear air, feeling the tempered, yet genial, sun-heat, many questions began to resolve themselves. He seemed to look, as down a long, cloudy vista--beyond the tumult and unruly clamour, the wayward resistance and defiant sinning, the craven complainings, the ever-repeated suspicions and misapprehensions of man--away into the patient, unalterable purposes of G.o.d. And looking, for the moment, into those purposes, he saw this also--namely, that sorrow, pain, and death, are sweet to whosoever dares, instead of fighting with, or flying from them, to draw near, to examine closely, to inquire humbly, into their nature and their function. He began to perceive that these three reputed enemies--hated and feared of all men--are, after all, the fashioners and teachers of humanity, to whom it is given to keep hearts pure, G.o.dly and compa.s.sionate, to purge away the dross of pride, hardness, and arrogance, to break the iron bands of ambition, self-love, and vanity, to purify by endurance and by charity, welding together--as with the cunning strokes of the master-craftsman's hammer--the innumerable individual atoms into a corporate whole, of fair form, of supreme excellence of proportion, the image and example of a perfect brotherhood, of a republic more firmly based and more beneficent than even that pictured by the divine Plato himself--since that was consolidated by exclusion, this by inclusion and pacification of those things which men most dread.--Perceived that, without the guiding and chastening of these three lovely terrors, humanity would, indeed, wax wanton, and this world become the merriest court of h.e.l.l, l.u.s.t and corruption have it all their own foul way, the flesh triumph, and all b.e.s.t.i.a.l things come forth to flaunt themselves gaudily, greedily, without remonstrance and without shame in the light of day.--Perceived in these three, a Trinity of Holy Spirits, bearing forever the message of the divine mercy and forgiveness.--Perceived how, of necessity, only the Man of Sorrows can truly be the Son of G.o.d.

And, perceiving all this, Richard's att.i.tude towards his own unhappy deformity began to suffer modification. The sordid, yet extravagant, chap-book legend no longer outraged either his moral or his scientific sense. He recalled his emotions in the theatre at Naples when Morabita sang, remembering how wholly welcome had then been to him that imagined approaching-act of retributive justice. He recalled, too, the going forth of love towards his supposed executioners which he had experienced, his reverence for, and yearning towards, the dull-coloured working-bees of the _parterre_. How he had longed to be at one with them, partaker of their corporate action and corporate strength! How he had rejoiced in the conviction that the final issues are subject to their ruling, that the claims of want are stronger than those of wealth, that labour is more honourable than sloth, intelligence than privilege, liberty more abiding than tyranny--the idea of equality, of fellowship, more excellent than the aristocratic idea, that of born master and of born serf! And both that welcome of the accomplishment of a signal act of justice, and that desire to partic.i.p.ate in the eternal strength of the children of labour as against the ephemeral and fict.i.tious strength of the children of idleness and wealth, found strange confirmation in the chap-book legend.

For it seemed to Richard that, taking all that singular matter both of prophecy and of cure simply--as believers take some half-miraculous, scripture tale--he had already, in his own person, in right of the physical uncomeliness of it, paid part, at all events, of the price demanded by the Eternal Justice for his ancestors' sinning and for his own. It was not needful that the bees should swarm and the dull-coloured mult.i.tude revenge itself on the indolent, full-fed larvae peopling the angular honey-cells, as far as he, Richard Calmady, was concerned. That revenge had been taken long ago, in a mysterious and rather terrible manner, before his very birth. While, in the stern denunciation, the adhering curse, of the outraged and so-soon-to-be-childless mother, he found the just and age-old protest, the patient faith in the eventual triumph of the proletariat--of the defenseless poor as against the callous self-seeking and sensuality of the securely guarded rich. By the fact of his deformity he was emanc.i.p.ated from the delusions of his cla.s.s, was made one, in right of the suffering and humiliation of it, with the dull-coloured mult.i.tudes whose corporate voice declares the ultimate verdict, who are the architects and judges of civilisation, of art, even of religion, even, in a degree, of nature herself. Salvation, according to the sorry yet inspiring rhyme of the chap-book, was contingent upon precisely this recognition of brotherhood with, and practice of willing service towards, all maimed and sorrowful creatures. His America was here or nowhere, his vocation clearly indicated, his work immediate and close at hand.

How the Eternal Justice might see fit to deal with other souls, why he had been singled out for so peculiar and conspicuous a fate, Richard did not pretend to say. All that had become curiously unimportant to him. For he had ceased to call that fate a cruel one. It had changed its aspect. It had come suddenly to satisfy both his conscience and his imagination. With a movement at once of wonder and of deep-seated thankfulness, he, for the first time, held out his hands to it, accepting it as a comrade, pledging himself to use rather than to spurn it. He looked at it steadfastly and, so looking, found it no longer abhorrent but of mysterious virtue and efficacy, endued with power to open the gates of a way, closed to most men, into the heart of humanity, which, in a sense, is nothing less than the heart of Almighty G.o.d Himself. It was as though, like the saint of old, daring to kiss the scabs and sores of the leper, he found himself gazing on the divine lineaments of the risen Christ. And this brought to him a sense of almost awed repose. It released him from the vicious circle of self, of sharp-toothed disappointment and leaden-heavy discouragement, in which he had so long fruitlessly turned. He seemed consciously to slough off the foul and ragged garment of the past and all its base, unprofitable memories, as the snake sloughs off her old skin in the warm May weather and glides forth, glittering, in a coat of untarnished, silver mail.

The whole complexion of his thought regarding his personal disfigurement was changed.

Not that he flattered himself the discomfort, the daily vexation and impediment of it, had pa.s.sed away. On the contrary these very actually remained, and would remain to the end. And the consequences they entailed remained also, the restrictions and deprivations they inflicted. They put many things, dear to every sane and healthy-minded man, hopelessly out of his reach, very much upon the shelf. Love and marriage were shelved thus, in his opinion, let alone lesser and more ephemeral joys. Only the ungrudging acceptance of the denial of those joys, whether small or great, was a vital part of that idea to the evolution of which he now dedicated himself--that Whole which, in process of its evolution, would make for a sober and temperate well-being, formed on the pattern, sober yet n.o.bly s.p.a.cious, cleanly, and wholesome, of the sun-visited landscape there without. He had just got to discipline himself into the harmony with the idea newly revealed to him. And that, as he told himself, not without a sense of the humour of the situation in certain aspects, meant in more than one department, plenty of work!--And he had to spend himself and go on, through good report and ill, through grat.i.tude and, if needs be, through abuse and detraction, still spending himself, actively, untiringly, in the effort to make some one person--it hardly mattered whom, but for choice, those who like himself had been treated unhandsomely by nature or by accident--just a trifle happier day by day.

But, while Richard rested thus in the quiet sunshine, he lost count of time. High-noon came and pa.s.sed, finding and leaving him in absorbed contemplation of his own thought. At last a barking of dogs, and the sound of wheels away on the north side of the house, broke up the silence. Then a faint echo of voices, a boy's laughter in the great hall below. Then footsteps, which he took to be Lady Calmady's, coming lightly up the grand staircase. At the stair-head those footsteps paused for a little s.p.a.ce, as though in indecision whither to turn. And Richard, pushed by an impulse of considerateness somewhat, it must be owned, new to him, called:--

"Mother, is that you? Do you want me? I'm here."

Whereat the footsteps came forward, in at the open door and through the soft glory of the all-pervading sunshine, with an effect of gentle urgency and haste. Katherine's gray, silk pelisse was unfastened, showing the grey, silk gown, its floating ribbons, pretty frills and flounces, beneath. Every detail of her dress was very fresh and very finished, a demure daintiness in it, from the topmost, gray plume and upstanding, velvet bow of her bonnet to the pretty shoes upon her feet.

Along with a lace handkerchief and her church books, she carried a bunch of long-stalked violets. Her face was delicately flushed, a great surprise, touching upon anxiety, tempering the quick pleasure of her expression.

"My dearest," she said, "this is as delightful as it is unexpected.

What brings you here?"

And Richard smiled at her without reserve, no longer as though putting a force upon himself or of set purpose, but naturally, spontaneously, as one who entertains pleasant thoughts. He took her hand and kissed it with a certain courtliness and reverent fervour.

"I came to look for something here," he said, "which I have looked for at many times and in very various places, yet never somehow managed to find."

But Katherine, at once tenderly charmed and rendered yet more anxious by a quality in his manner and his speech unfamiliar to her, the purport of which she failed at once to gauge, answered him literally.

"My dearest, why didn't you tell me? I would have looked for it before I went to church, and saved you the trouble of the journey from the gallery here."

"Oh! the journey wasn't bad for me, I rather enjoyed it," d.i.c.kie said.

"And then to tell you the truth, you've spent the better part of your dear life in looking for that same something which I could never manage to find! Poor, sweet mother, no thanks to me, so far, that you haven't utterly worn yourself out in the search for it."--He paused, and gazed away out of the open cas.e.m.e.nt.--"But I have a good hope that's all over and done with now, and that at last I've found the thing myself."

And Katherine, still charmed, still anxious, looked down at him wondering, for there was a perceptible undercurrent of emotion beneath the lightness of his speech.

"However, all that will keep," he continued.--"How did you enjoy your church? Did dear old Julius distinguish himself? How did he preach?"

And Katherine, still wondering, again answered literally.

"Very beautifully," she said, "with an unusual force and pathos. He took the congregation not a little by storm. He fairly carried us away. He was eloquent, and that with a simplicity which made one question whether he did not speak out of some pressing personal experience."--Katherine's manner was touched by a pretty edge of pique.--"Really I believed I knew all about Julius and his doings by this time, but it seems I don't! I think I must find out. It would vex me that anything should happen in which he needed sympathy, and that I did not offer it.--His subject was the answer to prayer and the fulfilment of prophecy--and how both come, come surely and directly, yet often in so different a form to that which, in our narrowness of vision and dulness of sense, we antic.i.p.ate, that we fail to recognise either the answer or the fulfilment, and so miss the blessing they must needs bring, and which is so richly, so preciously, ours if we had but the wit to understand and lay hold of it."

Whereupon Richard smiled again.

"Yes," he said, "very probably Julius did speak out of personal experience, or rather vicarious experience. However, I don't think he need worry this time, at least I hope not. The answer to prayer and fulfilment of prophecy, when they're good enough to come along, don't always get the cold shoulder."--Then his expression changed, hardened a little, his lips growing thin and his jaw set.--"Look here, mother," he added, "I think perhaps I have been rather playing the fool lately, since we came home. I propose to take to the ordinary habits of civilised, Christian man again. If it doesn't bother you, would you kindly let the servants know that I'm coming down to luncheon?"

"Oh! my dearest, how stupid of me, I'm so grieved!" Katherine cried.

She sat down beside him on the cushioned bench, dropping service books, handkerchief, and violets, in the extremity of her gentle and apologetic distress.--"It never occurred to me that you might like to come down. The Newlands people came over to church, and I brought Mary and the two boys back. G.o.dfrey is over from Eton for the Sunday, and little d.i.c.k has had a cold and has not gone back to school yet. What can we do? It would be lovely to have you, and yet I don't quite know how I can send them away again."

"But why on earth should they be sent away?" Richard said, touched and amused by her earnestness. "Mary's always a dear, And I've been thinking lately I shouldn't mind seeing something of that younger boy.

He is my G.o.dson, isn't he? And Knott tells me he is curiously like you and Uncle Roger. You see it's about time to select an heir-apparent for Brockhurst. Luckily I've a free hand. My life's the last in the entail."

Then, looking at him, Lady Calmady's lips trembled a little. Health had returned and with it his former good looks, but matured, spiritualised, as it seemed to her just now. The livid line of the scar had died out too, and was nearly gone. And all this, taken in connection with his words just uttered, affected her to so great and poignant a love, so great and poignant a fear of losing him, that she dared not trust herself to make any comment on those same words lest the flood-gates of emotion should be opened and she should lose her self-control.

"Very well, d.i.c.kie," she said, bowing her head.--Then she added quickly, with a little gasp of renewed distress and apology:--"But--but, oh! dear me, Honoria is here too!"

Whereat Richard laughed outright. He could not help it, she was so vastly engaging in her distress.

"All right," he said, "I am equal to accepting Honoria St. Quentin into the bargain. In short, mother dear, I take over the lot, and if anybody else turns up between now and two o'clock I'll take them over as well.--Why, why, you dear sweet, don't look so scared! There's nothing to trouble about. I'm not too good to live, never fear. On the contrary, I am prepared to do quite a fine amount of living--only on new and more modest lines perhaps. But we won't talk about that just yet, please. We'll wait to give it a name until we're a little more sure how it promises to work out."

CHAPTER VII

WHEREIN TWO ENEMIES ARE SEEN TO CRY QUITS

G.o.dfrey Ormiston scudded along the terrace, past the dining-room windows, at the top of his speed, and Miss St. Quentin followed him at a hardly less unconventional pace. Together they burst, by the small, arched side-door, into the lobby. There ensued discussion lively though brief. Then, Winter setting wide the dining-room door in invitation, sight of Honoria was presented to the company a.s.sembled within.--She, in brave attire of dark, red cloth, black braided and befrogged, heavy, silk cords and knotted, dangling ta.s.sels--head-gear to match, dark red and black, a tall, stiff aigrette set at the side of it--in all producing a something delightfully independent, soldierly, ruffling even, in her aspect, as she pushed the black-haired, bright-faced, slim-made lad, her two hands on his shoulders, before her into the room.

"May we come to luncheon as we are, Cousin Katherine?" she cried.

"We're scandalously late, but we're also most ferociously hungry and----"

But here, although Lady Calmady turned on her a welcoming and far from unjoyful countenance, she stopped dead, while G.o.dfrey incontinently gave vent to that which his younger brother--sitting beside his mother, Mary Ormiston, at table, on Richard Calmady's right--described mentally as "the most awful squawk." Which squawk, it may be added--whatever its effect upon other members of the company--as denoting involuntary and unceremonious descent from the high places of thirteen-year-old, public-school omniscience on the part of his elder, produced in eight-year-old d.i.c.k Ormiston such overflowings of unqualified rapture that, for a good two minutes, he had to forego a.s.similation of chocolate _soufflet_, and, slipping his hands beneath the table, squeeze them together just as hard as ever he could with both knees, to avoid disgracing himself by emission of an ecstatic giggle. For once he had got the whip hand of G.o.dfrey!--Having himself, for the best part of an hour now, been conversant with interesting developments, he found it richly diverting to behold his big brother thus incontinently bowled over by sudden disclosure of them. He repressed the giggle, with the help of squeezing knees and a certain squirming all down his neat, little back, but his blue eyes remained absolutely glued to G.o.dfrey's person, as the latter, recovering his presence of mind and good manners, proceeded solemnly up to the head of the table to greet his unlooked-for host.

Honoria, meanwhile, if guiltless of an audible squawk, had been--as she subsequently reflected--potentially alarmingly capable of some such primitive expression of feeling. For the shock of surprise which she suffered was so forcible, that it induced in her an absurd unreasoning instinct of flight. Indeed, that had happened, or rather was in process of happening, which revolutionised all her outlook. For that the unseen presence, consciousness of which had come to be so constant a quant.i.ty in her action and her thought, should thus declare itself in visible form, be materialised, become concrete, and that instantly, without prologue or preparation, projecting itself wholesale--so to speak--into the comfortable commonplaces of a Sunday luncheon--after her slightly uproarious race home with a perfectly normal schoolboy, from morning church too--affected her much as sudden intrusion of the supernatural might. It modified all existing relations, introducing a new and, as yet, incalculable element. Nor had she quite yet realised what power the unseen Richard Calmady, these many years, had exercised over her imagination, until Richard Calmady seen, was there evident, actually before her. Then all the harsh judgments she had pa.s.sed upon him, all the disapproval of, and dislike she had felt towards, him, flashed through her mind. And that matter too of his cancelled engagement!--The last time she had seen him was in the house in Lowndes Square, on the night of Lady Louisa Barking's great ball, standing--she could see all that now--it was as if photographed upon her brain--always would be--and it turned her a little sick.--Nevertheless it was impossible to pause any longer. It would be ridiculous to fly, so she must stick it out. That best of good Samaritans, Mary Ormiston, began talking to Julius March across the length of the table.

"Oh dear, yes, of course," she was saying. "But I never realised she was a sister of your old Oxford friend. I wish I had. It would have been so pleasant to talk about you and about home in that far country!

Her husband is in the Rifle Brigade, and she really is a nice, dear woman. I saw a great deal of her while we were at the Cape."

And so, under cover of Mary's kindly conversation, Miss St. Quentin settled down into her lazy, swinging stride. Her small head carried high, her pale, sensitive face very serious, her straight eyebrows drawn together by concentration of purpose, concentration of thought, she followed the boy up the long room.

As she came towards him, Richard Calmady looked full at her. His head was carried somewhat high too. His face was very still. His eyes--with those curiously small pupils to them--were very observant, in effect hiding rather than revealing his thought. His manner, as he held out his hand to her, was courteous, even friendly, and yet, notwithstanding her high and fearless spirit, Honoria--for the first time in her life probably--felt afraid. And then she began to understand how it came about that, whether he behaved well or ill, whether he was good or bad, cruel or kind, seen or unseen even, Richard, of necessity, could not but occupy a good deal of s.p.a.ce in the lives of all persons brought into close contact with him. For she recognised in him a rather tremendous creature, self-contained, not easily accessible, possessed of a larger portion than most men of energy and resolution, possessed too--and this, as she thought of it, again turned her a trifle sick--of an unusual capacity of suffering.

"I am ashamed of being so dreadfully late," she said as she slipped into the vacant place on his left.--G.o.dfrey Ormiston was beyond her, next to Julius March.--Honoria was aware that her voice sounded slightly unsteady, in part from her recent scamper, in part from a queer emotion which seemed to clutch at her throat.--"But we walked home over the fields and by the Warren, and just in that boggy bit where you cross the Welsh-road, G.o.dfrey found the slot of a red-deer in the snow, and naturally we both had to follow it up."

"Naturally," Richard said.

"I'm not so sure it was a red-deer, Honoria," the boy broke in.

"Oh yes, it was," she declared as she helped herself to a cutlet. "It couldn't have been anything else."

"Why not?" Richard asked. He was interested by the tone of a.s.surance in which she spoke.