CHAPTER VII

WHEREIN TWO ENEMIES ARE SEEN TO CRY QUITS

Godfrey 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 assembled within.--She,

in brave attire of dark, red cloth, black braided and befrogged, heavy,

silk cords and knotted, dangling tassels--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 Godfrey 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 Dick Ormiston such overflowings of unqualified rapture

that, for a good two minutes, he had to forego assimilation 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 Godfrey!--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 Godfrey'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 quantity

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 passed 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 space 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.--Godfrey 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, Godfrey 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 assurance in

which she spoke.

"Oh, well, the tracks were too big for a fallow-deer to begin with. And

then there's a difference, you can't mistake it if you've ever compared

the two, in the cleft of the hoof."

"And you have compared the two?"

"Oh, certainly," Honoria answered.--She was beginning to recover her

nonchalance of manner and indolent slowness of speech. "I lose no

opportunity of acquiring odds and ends of information. One never knows

when they may come in handy."

She looked at him as she spoke, and her upper lip shortened and her

eyes narrowed into a delightful smile--a smile, moreover, which had the

faintest trace of an asking of pardon in it. And it struck Richard that

there was in her expression and bearing a transparent sincerity, and

that her eyes--now narrowed as she smiled--were not the clear, soft

brown they appeared at a distance to be, but an indefinable colour,

comparable only to the dim, yet clear, green gloom which haunts the

under-spaces of an ilex grove upon a summer day. He turned his head

rather sharply. He did not want to think about matters of that sort. He

was grateful to this young lady for the devoted care she had bestowed

on his mother--but, otherwise her presence was only a part of that

daily discipline which must be cheerfully undertaken in obedience to

the exigencies of his new and fair idea.

"Probably it is a deer that has broken out of Windsor Great Park and

traveled," he said. "They do that sometimes, you know."

But here small Dick Ormiston, whose spirits, lately pirouetting on

giddy heights of felicity, had suffered swift declension bootwards at

mention of his thrilling adventure in which, alas, he had neither lot

nor part, projected himself violently into the conversational arena.

"Mother," he piped, his words tumbling one over the other in his

eagerness--"Mother, I expect it's the same deer that grandpapa was

talking about when Lord Shotover came over to tea last Friday, and

wanted to know if Honoria wasn't back at Newlands again. And then he

and grandpapa yarned, don't you know. Because, Cousin Richard--it must

have been while you were away last year--the buckhounds met at Bagshot

and ran through Frimley and right across Spendle Flats----"

"No, they didn't, Cousin Richard," Godfrey interrupted. "They ran

through the bottom of Sandyfield Lower Wood."

"But they lost--any way they lost, Cousin Richard," the younger boy

cried.--"You weren't there, Godfrey, so you can't know what grandpapa

said. He said they lost somewhere just into Brockhurst, and he told

Lord Shotover how they beat up the country for nearly a week, and how

they never found it, and had to give it up as a bad job and go home

again. And--and--Lord Shotover said, rotten bad sport, stag-hunting,

unless you get it on Exmoor, where they're not carted and they don't

saw their antlers off. He said meets of the buckhounds ought to be

called Stockbroker's Parade, that was about all they amounted to. And

so, Cousin Richard, I think,--don't you, mother--that this must be that

same deer?"

Whereat the elder Dick's expression, which had grown somewhat dark at

the mention of Lord Shotover, brightened sensibly again. And, for cause

unknown, he looked at Honoria, smiling amusedly, before saying to the

very voluble small sportsman:--

"To be sure, Dick. Your arguments are unanswerable, convincingly sound.

No reasonable man could have a doubt about it! Of course it's the same

deer."

And so the luncheon finished gaily enough, though Miss St. Quentin was

conscious her contributions to the cultivation of that same gaiety were

but spasmodic. She dreaded the conclusion of the meal, fearing lest

then she might be called upon to behold Richard Calmady once again, as

she had beheld him--now just on six years ago--in the half dismantled

house in Lowndes Square, on the night of Lady Louisa Barking's ball.

And from that she shrank, not with her former physical repulsion

towards the man himself, but with the moral repulsion of one compelled

against his will to gaze upon a pitifully cruel sight, the suffering of

which he is powerless to lessen or amend. The short, light-made

crutches, lying on the floor by the young man's chair, shocked her as

the callous exhibition of some unhappy prisoner's shackling-irons

might. It constituted an indignity offered to the Richard sitting here

beside her, so much as to think of, let alone look at, that same

Richard when on foot. Therefore it was with an oddly mingled relief and

sense of playing traitor, that she rose with the rest of the little

company and left him by himself. She was thankful to escape, though all

the while her inherent loyalty tormented her with accusation of

meanness, as of one who deserts a comrade in distress.

But here the small Dick, to whom such complex refinements of

sensibility were as yet wholly foreign, created a diversion by prancing

round from the far side of the table and forcibly seizing her hand. He

was jealous of the large share Godfrey had to-day secured of her

society. He meant to have his innings. So he rubbed his curly head

against her much braided elbow, butting her lovingly in the exuberance

of his affection as some nice, little ram-lamb might. But just as they

reached the door, through which Lady Calmady and the rest of the party

had already passed, the boy drew up short.

"I say, hold on half a minute, Honoria, please," he said.

And then, turning round, his cheeks red as peonies, he marched back to

where Richard sat alone at the head of the table.

"In case--in case, don't you know," he began, stuttering in the excess

of his excitement--"in case, Cousin Richard, mummy didn't quite take in

what you said at the beginning of luncheon--you did mean for really

that I was to come and stay here in the summer holidays, and that you'd

take me out, don't you know, and show me your horses?"

And to Honoria, glancing at them, there was a singular, and almost

tragic, comment on life in the likeness, yet unlikeness, of those two

faces.--The features almost identical, the same blue eyes, the two

heads alike in shape, each with the same close-fitted, bright-brown cap

of hair. But the boy's face flushed, without afterthought or

qualification of its eager happiness--the man's colourless, full of

reserve, almost alarmingly self-contained and still.

Yet, when the elder Richard's answer came, it was altogether gentle and

kindly.

"Yes, most distinctly _for really_, Dick," he said. "Let there be no

mistake about it. Let it be clearly understood I want to have you here

just as long, and just as often, as your mother and father will spare

you. I'll show you the horses, never fear, and let you ride them too."

"A--a--a real big one?"

"Just as big a one as you can straddle." Richard paused.--"And I'll

show you other things, if all goes well, which I'm beginning to

think--and perhaps you'll think so too some day--are more important

even than horses."

He put his hand under the boy's chin, tipped up the ruddy, beaming,

little face and kissed it.

"It's a compact," he said.--"Now cut along, old chap. Don't you see

you're keeping Miss St. Quentin waiting?"

Whereupon the small Richard started soberly enough, being slightly

impressed by something--he knew not quite what--only that it made him

feel awfully fond, somehow, of this newly discovered cousin and

namesake. But, about half-way down the room, that promise of a horse, a

thorough-bred, and just as big as he could straddle, swept all before

it, rendering his spirits uncontrollably explosive. So he made a wild

rush and flung himself headlong upon the waiting Honoria.

"Oh! you want to bear-fight, do you? Two can play at that game," she

cried, "you young rascal!"

Then without apparent effort, or diminution of her lazy grace, the

elder Richard saw her pick the boy up by his middle, and,

notwithstanding convulsive wrigglings on his part, throw him across her

shoulder and bear him bodily away through the lobby, into the hall, and

out of sight.

Hence it fell out that not until quite late that evening did the moment

so dreaded by Miss St. Quentin actually arrive. In furtherance of delay

she practised a diplomacy not altogether flattering to her

self-respect, coming down rather late for dinner, and retiring

immediately after that meal to the Gun-Room, under plea of

correspondence which must be posted at Farley in time for to-morrow's

day mail. She was even late for prayers in the chapel, so that, taking

her accustomed place next to Lady Calmady in the last but one of the

stalls upon the epistle-side, she found all the members of the

household, gentle and simple alike, already upon their knees. The

household mustered strong that night, a testimony, it may be supposed,

to feudal as much as to religious feeling. In the seats immediately

below her were an array of women-servants, declining from the high

dignities of Mrs. Reynolds the housekeeper, the faithful Clara, and her

own lanky and loyal north-country woman Faulstich, to a very youthful

scullery maid, sitting just without the altar rails at the end of the

long row. Opposite were not only Winter, Bates the steward, Powell,

Andrews, and the other men-servants, but Chaplin, heading a detachment

from the house stables, and--unexampled occurrence!--Gnudi the Italian

_chef_, with his air of gentle and philosophic melancholy and his

anarchic sentiments in theology and politics, liable,--these last--when

enlarged on, to cause much fluttering in the dove-cote of the

housekeeper's room.--"To hear Signer Gnudi talk sometimes made your

blood run cold. It seemed as if you couldn't be safe anywhere from

those wicked foreign barricades and massacres," as Clara put it. And

yet, in point of fact, no milder man ever larded a woodcock or stuffed

it with truffles.

Alone, behind all these, in the first of the row of stalls with their

carven spires and dark vaulted canopies, sat Richard Calmady, whom all

his people had thus come forth silently to welcome. But, through prayer

and psalm and lesson alike, as Miss St. Quentin noted, he remained

immovable, to her almost alarmingly cold and self-concentrated. Only

once he turned his head, leaning a little forward and looking towards

the purple, and silver, and fair, white flowers of the altar, and the

clear shining of the altar lights.

"Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an

hungered and fed thee? or thirsty and gave thee drink? When saw we thee

a stranger, and took thee in? or naked and clothed thee? Or when saw we

thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer

and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it

unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

The words were given out by Julius March, not only with an exquisite

distinctness of enunciation, but with a ring of assurance, of

sustaining and thankful conviction. Richard leaned back in his stall

again, looking across at his mother. While Honoria, taken with a

sensitive fear of inquiring into matters not rightfully hers to inquire

into, hastily turned her eyes upon her open prayer-book. They must have

many things to say to one another, that mother and son, as she divined,

to-day,--far be it from her to attempt to surprise their confidence!

She rose from her knees, cutting her final petitions somewhat short,

directly the last of the men-servants had filed out of the chapel, and,

crossing the Chapel-Room, a tall, pale figure in her trailing, white,

evening dress, she pulled back the curtain of the oriel window, opened

one of the curved, many-paned casements and looked out. She was

curiously moved, very sensible of a deeper drama going forward around

her, going forward in her own thought--subtly modifying and transmuting

it--than she could at present either explain or place. The night was

cloudy and very mild. A soft, sobbing, westerly wind, with the smell of

coming rain in it, saluted her as she opened the casement. The last of

the frost must be gone, by now, even in the hollows--the snow wholly

departed also. The spring, though young and feeble yet, puling like

some ailing baby-child in the voice of that softly-complaining,

westerly wind, was here, very really present at last. Honoria leaned

her elbows on the stone window-ledge. Her heart went out in strong

emotion of tenderness towards that moist wind which seemed to cry, as

in a certain homelessness, against her bare arms and bare

neck.--"Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my

brethren----"

But just then Katherine Calmady called to her, and that in a sweet, if

rather anxious, tone.

"Honoria, dear child, come here," she said. "Richard is putting me

through the longer catechism regarding those heath fires in August

year, and the state of the woods."

Then, as the young lady approached her, Lady Calmady laid one hand on

her arm, looking up in quick and loving appeal at the serious and

slightly troubled face.

"My answers only reveal the woeful greatness of my ignorance. My

geography has run mad. I am planting forests in the midst of

corn-fields, so Dickie assures me, and making hay generally--as you, my

dear, would say--of the map."

Still her eyes dwelt upon Honoria's in insistent and loving appeal.

"Come," she said, "explain to him, and save me from further exposition

of my own ignorance."

Thus admonished the young lady sat down on the low sofa beside Richard

Calmady. As she did so Katherine rose and moved away. Honoria

determined to see only the young man's broad shoulders, his

irreproachable dress clothes, his strangely still and very handsome

face. But, since there was no concealing rug to cover them, it was

impossible that she should long avoid also seeing his shortened and

defective limbs and oddly shod feet. And at that she winced and shrank

a little, for all her high spirit and inviolate, maidenly strength.

"Oh yes! those fires!" she said hurriedly. "There were several--you

remember, Cousin Katherine?--or I dare say you don't, for you were ill

all the time. But the worst was on Spendle Flats. You know that long

three-cornered bit"--she looked Richard bravely in the face

again--"which lies between the Portsmouth Road and our crossroad to

Farley? It runs into a point just at the top of Star Hill."

"Yes, I know," Dickie said.

He had seen her wince.--Well, that wasn't wonderful! She could not very

well do otherwise, if she had eyes in her head. He did not blame her.

And then, though it was not easy to do so with entire serenity, this

was precisely one of those small unpleasant incidents which, in

obedience to his new code, he was bound to accept calmly,

good-temperedly, just as part of the day's work, in fact. He had done

with malingering. He had done with the egoism of sulking and

hiding--even to the extent of a _couvre-pieds_. All right, here it

was!--Richard settled his shoulders squarely against the straight,

stuffed back of the Chippendale sofa, and talked on.

"It's a pity that bit is burnt," he said. "I haven't been over that

ground for nearly six years, of course. But I remember there were very

good trees there--a plantation at the top end, just before you come to

the big gravel-pits, and the rest self-sown. Are they all gone?"

"Licked as clean as the back of your hand," Honoria replied, warming to

her subject. "They hardly repaid felling for firewood. It made me

wretched. Some idiot threw down a match, I suppose. There had been

nearly a month's drought, and the whole place was like so much tinder.

There was an easterly breeze too. You can imagine the blaze! We hadn't

the faintest chance. Poor, old Iles lost his head completely, and sat

down with his feet in a dry ditch and wept. There must be over two

hundred acres of it. It's a dreadful eyesore, perfectly barren and

useless, but for a little sour grass even a gipsy's donkey has to be

hard up before he cares to eat!"--Miss St. Quentin shifted her position

with a certain impatience. "I can't bear to see the land doing no

work," she said.

"Doing no work?" Dickie inquired. He began to be interested in the

conversation from other than a purely practical and local standpoint.

"Of course," she asserted. "The land has no more right to lie idle than

any of the rest of us--unless it's a bit of tilth sweetening in fallow

between two crops. That is reasonable enough. But for the rest," she

said, a certain brightness and self-forgetting gaining on her--"let it

contribute its share all the while, like an honest citizen of the

universe. Let it work, most decidedly let it work."

"And what about such trifles as the few hundred square miles of desert

or mountain range?" Richard inquired, half amused, half--and that

rather unwillingly--charmed. "They are liable to be a thorn in the side

of the--well, socialist."

"Oh, I've no quarrel with them. They come under a different

head."--Honoria's manner had ceased to be in any degree embarrassed,

though a slight perplexity came into her expression. For just then she

remembered, somehow, her pacings of the station platform at Culoz, the

salutation of the bleak, pure, evening wind from out the fastnesses of

the Alps, and all her conversation there with her faithful admirer,

Ludovic Quayle. And it occurred to her what singular contrast in

sentiment that bleak evening wind offered to the mild, moist, westerly

wind--complaint of the homeless baby, Spring--which had just now cried

against her bosom! And again Honoria became conscious of being in

contact, both in herself and in her surroundings, with more coercing,

more vital drama than she could either interpret or place. Again

something of fear invaded her, to combat which she hurried into

speech.--"No, I haven't any quarrel with deserts and so on," she

repeated. "They're uncommonly useful things for mankind to knock its

head against--invincible, unnegotiable, splendidly competent to teach

humanity its place. You see we've grown not a little conceited--so at

least it seems to me--on our evolutionary journey up from the

primordial cell. We're too much inclined to forget we've developed soul

quite comparatively recently, and, therefore, that there is probably

just as long a journey ahead of us--before we reach the ultimate of

intellectual and spiritual development--as there is behind us

physically from, say the parent ascidian, to you and me. And--and

somehow"--Honoria's voice had become full and sweet, and she looked

straight at Dickie with a rare candour and simplicity--"somehow those

big open spaces remind one of all that. They drive one's

ineffectualness home on one. They remind one that environment, that

mechanical civilisation, all the short cuts of applied science, after

all count for little and inevitably come to the place called _stop_.

And that braces one. It makes one the more eager after that which lies

behind the material aspects of things, and to which these merely act as

a veil."

Honoria had bowed herself together. Her elbows were on her knees, her

chin in her two hands, her charming face alight with a pure enthusiasm.

And Richard watched her curiously. His acquaintance with women was

fairly comprehensive, but this woman represented a type new to his

experience. He wanted to tolerate her merely, to regard her as an

element in his scheme of self-discipline. And it began to occur to him

that, from some points of view, she knew as much about that, as much

about the idea inspiring it, as he did. He leaned himself back in the

angle of the sofa, and clasped his hands behind his head.

"All the same," he said, "I am afraid those burnt acres on Spendle

Flats are hardly extensive enough to afford an object for me to knock

my head against, and so enforce salutary remembrance of the limitations

of human science. Possibly that has already been sufficiently brought

home to me in other ways."

He paused a minute.

Honoria straightened herself up. Again she saw--whether she would or

no--those defective shortened limbs and oddly shod feet. And again,

somehow, that complaint of the moist spring wind seemed to cry against

her bare arms and neck, begetting an overwhelming pitifulness in her.

"So, since it's not necessary we should reserve it as an object lesson

in general ineffectualness, Miss St. Quentin, what shall we do with

it?"

"Oh, plant," she said.

"With the ubiquitous Scotchman?"

"It wouldn't carry anything else, except along the boundaries. There

you might put in a row of horn-beam and oak. They always look rather

nice against a background of firs.--Only the stumps of the burnt trees

ought to be stubbed."

"Let them be stubbed," Richard said.

"Where are you going to find the labour? The estate is very much

under-manned."

"Import it," Richard said.

"No, no," Honoria answered, again warming to her subject. "I don't

believe in imported labour. If you have men by the week, they must

lodge. And the lodger is as the ten plagues of Egypt in a village. If a

man comes by the day, he is tired and slack. His heart is not in his

work. He does as little as he can. Moreover, in either case, the wife

and children suffer. He's certain to take them home short money. He's

pretty safe, being tired in the one case, or, in the other, on the

loose, to drink."

Dickie's face gave. He laughed a little.

"We seem to have come to a fine _impasse_!" he remarked. "Though

humiliatingly small, that tract of burnt land must clearly be kept to

knock one's head against."

Honoria rose to her feet.

"Richard, I wish you'd build," she said, in her earnestness unconscious

of the unceremonious character of her address. "Iles ought to have done

that before now. But he is old and timid, and his one idea has been to

save. You know this Brockhurst property alone would carry eight or ten

more families. There's plenty of work. It needn't be made. It is there

ready to hand. Give them good gardens, allotments if you can, and leave

to keep a pig. That's infinitely better than extravagant wages. Root

them down in the soil. Let them love the place--tie them up to it----"

"Your socialism is rather quaintly crossed with feudalism, isn't it?"

Dickie remarked.

He drew himself forward, slipped down off the sofa, stood upright. And

then, indeed, the cruel disparity between his stature and her own--for

tall though she was, he, by right of make and length of arm, should

evidently have been by some two or three inches the taller--and all the

grotesqueness of his deformity, were fully disclosed to Honoria. For

the second time that day, her tact, her presence of mind, her ready

speech, deserted her. She backed a little away from him.

And Richard perceived that. It is not easy to be absolutely

philosophic. Something of his old anger revived towards Miss St.

Quentin. He shuffled forward a step or two, and, steadying himself with

one hand on the arm of the sofa, reached down to pick up his crutches.

But his grasp was not very sure just then. He secured one. To his

intense annoyance the other escaped him, falling back on the floor with

a rattle. Then, instantly, before he could make effort to recover it,

Honoria's white figure swept down on one knee in front of him. She laid

hold of the crutch, gave it him silently, and rose to her full height

again, pale, gallant, stately, but with a quivering of her lips and

nostrils, and an amazement of regret and pity in her eyes, which very

certainly had never found place there heretofore.

"Thanks," Richard said.--He waited just a minute. He too was amazed

somehow. He needed to revise the position. "About those eight or ten

happy families whom you wish to root so firmly in the soil, and the

housing of them--are you busy to-morrow morning?"

"Oh no--no"--Honoria declared, with rather unnecessary emphasis.

Generosity should surely be met by generosity. Dickie leaned his arm

against the arm of the sofa, and looked up at the speaker. Her

transparent sincerity, her superb chastity--he could call it by no

other word--of manner and movement, even of outline--the slight

angularity of strong muscle as opposed to soft roundness of cushioned

flesh--these arrested and impressed him.

"I had Chifney up from the stables this afternoon and made my peace

with him," he said. "He was very full of your praises, Honoria--for the

cousinship may as well be acknowledged between us, don't you think? You

have supplemented my lapses in respect of him, as of a good deal

else."--Richard looked away to the door of Lady Calmady's bedroom. It

stood open, and Katherine came from within with some books, and a

silver candlestick, in her hands.

"My dears," she said, "do you know it grows very late?"

"All right," he answered, "we're making out some plans for

to-morrow."--He looked at Honoria again. "Chifney engaged he and

Chaplin would find a horse, between them, which could be trusted

to--well--to put up with me," he said. "I promised to go down and have

breakfast with dear Mrs. Chifney at the stables, but I can be back here

by eleven. Would you be inclined to come out with me then? We could

ride over to that burnt land and have a poke round for sites for your

cottages."

"Oh yes, indeed, I can come," Honoria answered. Her delightful smile

beamed forth, and it had a new and very delicate charm in it. For it so

happened that the woman in her whom--to use her own phrase--she had

condemned to solitary confinement in the back attic, beat very

violently against her prison door just then in attempt to escape.

"Dear Cousin Katherine, good-night. Good-night, Richard," she said

hurriedly.--She went out of the room, lazily, slowly, down the black,

polished staircase, across the great, silent hall, and along the

farther lobby. But she let the Gun-Room door bang to behind her and

flung herself down in the armchair--in which, by the way, the old

bull-dog had died a year ago, broken-hearted by over long waiting for

the homecoming of his absent master. And then Honoria, though the least

tearful of women, wept--not in petulant anger, or with the easy,

luxuriously sentimental overflow common to feminine humanity, but

reluctantly, with hard, irregular sobs which hurt, yet refused to be

stifled, since the extreme limit of emotional and mental endurance had

been reached.

"Oh, it's fine!" she said, half aloud. "I can see that it's fine--but,

dear God, is there no way out of it? It's so horribly, so unspeakably

sad."

And Richard remained on into the small hours, sitting before the dying

fire of the big hearth-place, at the eastern end of the gallery.

Mentally he audited his accounts, the profit and loss of this day's

doing, and, on the whole, the balance showed upon the profit side.

Verily it was only a day of small things, of very humble ambitions, of

far from world-shaking successes! Still four persons, he judged, he had

made a degree or so happier.--His mother rejoiced, though with

trembling as yet, at his return to the ordinary habits of the ordinary

man.--Sweet, dear thing, small wonder that she trembled! He had led her

such a dance in the past, that any new departure must give cause for

anxious questionings. Dickie sunk his head in his hands.--God forgive

him, what a dance he had led her!--And Julius March was happier--he,

Richard, was pretty certain of that--since Julius could not but

understand that, in the present case at all events, neither fulfilment

of prophecy nor answer to prayer had been disregarded.--And the

hard-bitten, irascible, old trainer, Tom Chifney, was happier--probably

really the happiest of the lot--since he demanded nothing more

recondite and far-reaching than restoration to favour, and due

recognition of the importance of his calling and of the merits of his

horses.--And nice, funny, voluble, little Dick Ormiston was happier

too. Richard's heart went out strangely to the dear little lad! He

wondered if it would be too much to ask Mary and Roger to give him the

boy altogether? Then he put the thought from him, judging it savoured

of the selfishness, the exclusiveness, and egoism, with which he had

sworn to part company forever.

He stretched his hand out over the arm of the chair, craving for some

creature, warm, sentient, dumbly sympathetic, to lay hold of.--He

remembered there used to be a man down near Alton, a hard-riding

farmer, who bred bull-dogs--white ones with black points, like Camp and

Camp's forefathers. He would tell Chifney to go down there and bespeak

the two best of the next litter of puppies.--Yes--he wanted a dog

again. It was foolish perhaps, but after all one did want something,

and, since other things were denied, a dog must do--and he wanted one

badly.--Yet the day had been a success on the whole. He had been true

to his code. Only--and Richard shrugged his shoulders rather

wearily--it had got to be begun all over again to-morrow, and next day,

and next--an endless perspective of to-morrows. And the poor flesh,

with its many demands, its delicious and iniquitous passions, its

enchantments, its revelations, its adorable languors, its drunken

heats, must it have nothing, nothing at all? Must that whole side of

things be ruled out forever?--He had no more desire for mistresses, God

forbid--Helen, somehow, had cleansed him of all possibility of that.

And he would never ask any woman to marry him. The sacrifice on her

part would be too great.--He thought of little Lady Constance.--Simply,

it was not right.--So, practically, the emotional joys of life were

reduced to this--they must consist solely in giving--giving--giving--of

time, sympathy, thought and money! A far from ignoble programme no

doubt, but a rather austere one for a man of liberal tastes, of varied

experience, and of barely thirty.--And he was as strong as a bull now.

He knew that. He might live to be ninety.--Yes, he thought he would ask

for little Dick Ormiston. The boy would be an amusement and interest

him.--And then suddenly the vision of Honoria St. Quentin, in her red

and black-braided gown, with that air of something ruffling and

soldierly about it, whipping the small Dick up in her strong arms,

throwing him across her shoulder and bearing him off bodily, and of

Honoria later, her sensitive face all alight, as she discoursed of the

ultimate aim and purpose of life and of living, came before him. Above

her white dress, he could see her white and finely angular shoulders as

she swept down to pick up that wretched crutch.--Yes, she was a being

of singular contrasts, of remarkable capacity, both mental and

practical! And she might have a heart--she might. Once or twice it had

looked rather like it.--But, after all, what did that matter? The

feminine side of things was excluded. Besides he supposed she was half

engaged to Ludovic Quayle.

Dickie yawned. He was sleepy. His meditations became unprofitable. He

had best go to bed.

"And the devil fly away with all women, saving and excepting my well

beloved mother," he said.