CHAPTER II

GIVING THE VERY EARLIEST INFORMATION OBTAINABLE OF THE HERO OF THIS
BOOK

It happened in this way, towards the end of August, 1842.

In the gray of the summer evening, as the sunset faded and the twilight
gathered, spreading itself tenderly over the pastures and
corn-fields,–over the purple-green glooms of the fir forest–over the
open moors, whose surface is scored for miles by the turf-slane of the
cottager and squatter–over the clear brown streams that trickle out of
the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bogs, and gain volume and
vigour as they sparkle away by woodside, and green-lane, and village
street–and over those secret, bosky places, in the heart of the great
common-lands, where the smooth, white stems and glossy foliage of the
self-sown hollies spring up between the roots of the beech trees, where
plovers cry, and stoat and weazel lurk and scamper, while the old
poacher’s lean, ill-favoured, rusty-coloured lurcher picks up a
shrieking hare, and where wandering bands of gypsies–those lithe,
onyx-eyed children of the magic East–still pitch their dirty, little,
fungus-like tents around the camp-fire,–as the sunset died and the
twilight thus softly widened and deepened, Lady Calmady found herself,
for the first time during all the long summer day, alone.

For though no royal personage had graced the occasion with his
presence, nor had bears suffered martyrdom to promote questionably
amiable mirth, Brockhurst, during the past week, had witnessed a series
of festivities hardly inferior to those which marked Sir Denzil’s
historic house-warming. Young Sir Richard Calmady had brought home his
bride, and it was but fitting the whole countryside should see her. So
all and sundry received generous entertainment according to their
degree.–Labourers, tenants, school-children. Weary old-age from
Pennygreen poorhouse taking its pleasure of cakes and ale half
suspiciously in the broad sunshine. The leading shopkeepers of
Westchurch and their humbler brethren from Farley Row. All the country
gentry too. Lord and Lady Fallowfeild and a goodly company from Whitney
Park, Lord Denier and a large contingent from Grimshott Place, the
Cathcarts of Newlands, and many more persons of undoubted
consequence–specially perhaps in their own eyes.

Not to mention a small army of local clergy–who ever display a
touching alacrity in attending festivals, even those of a secular
character–with camp-followers, in the form of wives and families,
galore.

And now, at last, all was over,–balls, sports, theatricals,
dinners,–the last in the case of the labourers, with the unlovely
adjunct of an ox roasted whole. Even the final garden-party, designed
to include such persons as it was, socially speaking, a trifle
difficult to place–Image, owner of the big Shotover brewery, for
instance, who was shouldering his way so vigorously towards fortune and
a seat on the bench of magistrates; the younger members of the firm of
Goteway & Fox, Solicitors of Westchurch; Goodall, the Methodist miller
from Parson’s Holt, and certain sporting yeoman farmers with their
comely womankind–even this final entertainment, with all its small
triumphs and heart-burnings, flutterings of youthful inexperience,
aspirations, condescensions, had gone, like the rest of the week’s
junketings, to swell the sum of things accomplished, of all that which
is past and done with, and will never come again.

Fully an hour ago, Dr. Knott, “under plea of waiting cases, had hitched
his ungainly, thick-set figure into his high gig.

“Plenty of fine folks, eh, Timothy?” he said to the ferret-faced groom
beside him, as he gathered up the reins; and the brown mare, knowing
the hand on her mouth, laid herself out to her work. “Handsome young
couple as anybody need wish to see. Not much business doing there for
me, I fancy, unless it lies in the nursery line.”

“Say those Brockhurst folks mostly dies airly, though,” remarked
Timothy, with praiseworthy effort at professional encouragement.

“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
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.

“Ah! you are tired, you poor dear. No wonder, after the week’s work you
have had. Another day will do just as well. Only I want you to come out
sometimes in the first blush of the morning, before the day has had
time to grow commonplace, while the gossamers are still hung with dew,
and the mists are in hollows, and the horses are heady from the fresh
air and the light. You will like it all, Kitty. It is rather inspiring.
But it will keep. To-morrow I’ll let you rest in peace.”

“Oh no! it is not that,” Katherine said quickly. The importunate
thought was upon her again, clamouring, not only to be recognised, but
fairly owned to and permitted to pass the doors of speech. And a
certain modesty made her shrink from this. To know something in the
secret of your own heart, or to tell it, thereby making it a hard
concrete fact, outside yourself, over which, in a sense, you cease to
have control, are two such very different matters! Katherine trembled
on the edge of her confession, though that to be confessed was, after
all, but the natural crown of her love.

“I think I ought not to ride now–for a time, Dick.” All the blood
rushed into her face and throat, and then ebbed, leaving her very white
in the growing darkness.–“You have given me a child,” she said.