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.