"You won't mind, though, mother?"

Katherine stroked the short curly hair back from his forehead.

"I don't mind anything that promises to make you happier, d.i.c.kie," she said. "What else did you and Dr. Knott settle--anything else?"

Richard waited, then he turned on his elbow and looked full and very earnestly at her.

"Yes, mother, we did settle something more. And something that I'm afraid you won't like. But it would make me happier than anything else--it would make all the difference that--that can be made, you know."

He paused, his expression very firm though his lips quivered.

"Dr. Knott wants me to ride."

Katherine drew back, stood up straight, threw out her hands as though to keep off some actual and tangible object of offense.

"Not that, Richard," she cried. "Anything in the world rather than that."

He looked at her imploringly, yet with a certain determination, for the child was dying fast in him and the forceful desires and intentions of youth growing.

"Don't say I mustn't, mother. Pray, pray don't, because----"

He left the sentence unfinished, overtaken by the old habit of obedience, yet he did not lower his eyes.

But Lady Calmady made no response. For the moment she was outraged to the point of standing apart, even from her child. For a moment, even motherhood went down before purely personal feeling--and this, by the irony of circ.u.mstance, immediately after motherhood had made supreme confession of immutability. But remembering her husband's death, remembering the source of all her child's misfortune, it appeared to her indecent, a wanton insult to all her past suffering, that such a proposition should be made to her. And, in a flash of cruelly vivid perception, she knew how the boy would look on a horse, the grotesque, to the vulgar, wholly absurd spectacle he must, notwithstanding his beauty, necessarily present. For a moment the completeness of love failed before pride touched to the very quick.

"But, how can you ride?" she said. "My poor child, think--how is it possible?"

Richard sat upright, pressing his hands down on the bedclothes on either side to steady himself. The colour rushed over his face and throat.

"It is possible, mother," he answered resolutely, "or Dr. Knott would never have talked about it. He couldn't have been so unkind. He drew me the plan of a saddle. He said I was to show it to Uncle Roger to-night.

Of course it won't be easy at first, but I don't care about that. And Chifney would teach me. I know he would. He said the other day he'd make a sportsman of me yet."

"When did you talk with Chifney?" Lady Calmady spoke very quietly, but there was that in her tone which came near frightening the boy. It required all his daring to answer honestly and at once.

"I talked to him the day Aunt Ella and Helen were here. I--I went down to the stables with him and saw all the horses."

"Then either you or he did very wrong," Lady Calmady remarked.

"It was my fault, mother, all my fault. Chifney would have ridden on, but I stopped him. Chaplin tried to prevent me. I--I told him to mind his own business. I meant to go. I--I saw all the horses, and they were splendid," he added, enthusiasm gaining over fear. "I saw the stables, and the weighing-room, and everything. I never enjoyed myself so much before. I told Chaplin I would tell you, because he ought not to be blamed, you know. I did mean to tell you directly I came in. But all those people were here."--Richard's face darkened. "And you remember what happened? That put everything else out of my head."

A pause. Then he said: "Are you very angry?"

Katherine made no reply. She moved away round the foot of the bed and stood at the sunny window in silence. Bitterness of hot humiliation possessed her. Heretofore, whatever her trial, she had been mistress of the situation; she had reigned a queen-mother, her authority undisputed. And now it appeared her kingdom was in revolt, conspiracy was rife. Richard's will and hers were in conflict; and Richard's will must eventually obtain, since he would eventually be master. Already courtiers bowed to that will. All this was in her mind. And a wounding of feeling, far deeper and more intimate than this,--since Katherine's n.o.bility of character was great and the worldly aspect, the greed of personal power and undisputed rule, could not affect her for long. It wounded her, as a slight upon the memory of the man she had so wholly loved, that this first conflict between Richard and herself should turn on the question of horses and the racing-stable. The irony of the position appeared unpardonable. And then, the vision of poor Richard--her darling, whom she had striven so jealously to shield ever since the day, over thirteen years ago, when undressing her baby she had first looked upon its malformed limbs--Richard riding forth for all the staring, mocking world to see, again arose before her.

Thinking of all this, Katherine gazed out over the stately home scene--gra.s.s plot and gardens, woodland and distant landscape, rich in the golden splendour of steady sunshine--with smarting eyes and a sense of impotent misery that wrapped her about as a burning garment. The boy was beginning to go his own way. And his way was not hers. And those she had trusted were disloyal, helping him to go it. Alone, in retirement, she had borne her great trouble with tremendous courage.

But how should she bear it under changed conditions, amid publicity, gossip, comment?

d.i.c.kie, meanwhile, had let himself drop back against the pillows. He set his teeth and waited. It was hard. An opportunity of escape from the galling restraints of his infirmity had been presented to him, and his mother--his mother after promise given, after the sympathy of a lifetime; his mother, in whom he trusted absolutely--was unwilling he should accept it! As he lay there all the desperate longing for freedom and activity that had developed in him of late--all the pa.s.sion for sport, for that primitive, half-savage manner of life, that intimate, if somewhat brutal, relation to nature, to wild creatures and to the beasts whom man by centuries of usage has broken to his service, which is the special heritage of Englishmen of gentle blood--sprang up in Richard, strong, all compelling. He must have his part in all this. He would not be denied. He cried out to her imperiously:--

"Mother, speak to me! I haven't done anything really wrong. I've a right to do what any other boy has--as far as I can get it. Don't you see riding is just the one thing to--to make up--to make a man of me?

Don't you see that?"

He sat bolt upright, stretching out his arms to her in fierce appeal, while the level sunshine touched his bright hair and wildly eager face.

"Mummy, mummy darling, don't you see? Try to see. You can't want to take away my one chance!"

Katherine turned at that reiterated cry, and her heart melted within her. The boy was her own, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. From her he had life. From her he had also lifelong disgrace and deprivation. Was there anything then, which, he asking, she could refuse to give? She cast herself on her knees beside the bed again and buried her face in the sheet.

"My precious one," she sobbed, "forgive me. I am ashamed, for I have been both harsh and weak. I said I would help you, and then directly I fail you. Forgive me."

And the boy was amazed, speechless at first, seeing her broken thus; shamed in his turn by the humility of her att.i.tude. To his young chivalry it was as an impiety to look upon her tears.

"Please don't cry, mother," he entreated tremulously, a childlike simplicity of manner taking him. "Don't cry--it is dreadful. I never saw you cry before."--Then, after a pause, he added: "And--never mind about my riding. I don't so very much care about it--really, I don't believe I do--after all."

At that dear lie Katherine raised her bowed head, a wonderful sweetness in her tear-stained face, tender laughter upon her lips. She drew the boy's hands on to her shoulders, clasped her hands across his extended arms, and kissed him upon the mouth.

"No, no, my beloved, you shall ride," she said. "You shall have your saddle--twenty thousand saddles if you want them. We will talk to Uncle Roger and Chifney to-night. All shall be as you wish."

"But you're not angry, mother, any more?" he asked, a little bewildered by her change of tone and by the pa.s.sion of her lovely looks and speech.

Katherine shook her head, and still that tender laughter curved her lips.

"No, I am never going to be angry any more--with you at least, d.i.c.k. I must learn to be plucky too. A pair of us, d.i.c.kie, trying to keep up one another's pluck! Only let us go forward hand in hand, you and I, and then, however desperate our doings, I at least shall be content."

CHAPTER VIII

TELLING, INCIDENTALLY, OF A BROKEN-DOWN POSTBOY AND A COUNTRY FAIR

The Brockhurst-mail phaeton waited, in the shade of the three large sycamores, before Appleyard's shop at Farley Row. A groom stood stiff and straight at the horses' heads. While upon the high driving-seat, a trifle excited by the suddenness of his elevation, sat Richard. He held the reins in his right hand, and stretched his left to get the cramp out of his fingers. His arms ached--there was no question about it. He had never driven a pair before, and the horses needed a lot of driving.

For the wind was gusty, piling up heavy ma.s.ses of black-purple rain-cloud in the southeast. It made the horses skittish and unsteady, and d.i.c.kie found it was just all he could do to hold them, so that Chifney's reiterated admonition, "Keep 'em well in hand, Sir Richard,"

had been not wholly easy to obey.

From out the open shop-door came mingled odour of new leather and of horse clothing. Within Mr. Chifney delivered himself of certain orders; while Appleyard--a small, fair man, thin of nose, a spot of violent colour on either cheek-bone--skipped before him goat-like, in a fury of complacent intelligence. For it was not every day so notable a personage as the Brockhurst trainer crossed his threshold. To Josiah Appleyard, indeed--not to mention his two apprentices stretching eyes and ears from the back-shop, to catch any chance word of Mr. Chifney's conversation--it appeared as though the G.o.ds very really condescended to visit the habitations of men. While Mrs. Appleyard, peeping from behind the wire blind of the parlour, had--as she afterwards repeatedly declared--"felt her insides turn right over," when she saw the carriage draw up. The conversation was prolonged and low toned. For the order was of a peculiar and confidential character, demanding much explanation on the one part, much application on the other. It was an order, in short, wholly flattering to the self-esteem of the saddler, both as tribute to his social discretion and his technical skill. Thus did Josiah skip goat-like, being glad.

Meanwhile, Richard Calmady waited without, resting his aching arms, gazing down the wide, dusty street, his senses lulled by the flutter of the sycamore leaves overhead. The said street offered but small matter of interest. For Farley Row is one of those dead-alive little towns on the borders of the forest land, across which progress, even at the time in question, 1856, had written Ichabod in capital letters. During the early years of the century some sixty odd coaches, plying upon the London and Portsmouth road, would stop to change horses at the White Lion in the course of each twenty-four hours. That was the golden age of the Row. Horns tw.a.n.ged, heavy wheels rumbled, steaming teams were led away, with drooping heads, into the s.p.a.cious inn yard, and fresh horses stepped out cheerily to take their place between the traces. The next stage across Spendle Flats was known as a risky one. Legends of Claude Duval and his fellow-highwaymen still haunt the woods and moors that top the long hill going northward. And the pa.s.sengers by those sixty coaches were wont to recover themselves from terrors escaped, or fortify themselves against terrors to come, by plentiful libations at the bar of the handsome red-brick inn. The house did a roaring trade.

But now the traffic upon the great road had a.s.sumed a local and altogether undemonstrative character. The coaches had fallen into lumber, the spanking teams had each and all made their squalid last journey to the knacker's; and the once famous Gentlemen of the Road had long lain at rest in mother earth's lap--sleeping there none the less peacefully because the necks of many of them had suffered a nasty rick from the hangman's rope, and because the hard-trodden pavement of the prison-yard covered them.

The fine stables of the White Lion stood tenantless, now, from year's end to year's end. Rats scampered, and bats squeaked in unlovely ardours of courtship, about the ranges of empty stalls and cobweb-hung rafters. Yet one ghost from out the golden age haunted the place still--a lean, withered, bandy-legged, little stick of a man, arrayed in frayed and tarnished splendour of sky-blue waist-jacket, silver lace, and jack-boots of which the soles and upper leathers threatened speedy and final divorce. In all weathers this bit of human wreckage--Jackie Deeds by name--might be seen wandering aimlessly about the vacant yard, or seated upon the bench beside the portico of the silent, bow-windowed inn, pulling at a, too often empty, clay-pipe and spitting automatically.

Over Richard, tender-hearted as yet towards all creatures whom nature or fortune had treated cavalierly, the decrepit postboy exercised a fascination. One day, when driving through the Row with Mary Cathcart, he had succeeded in establishing relations with Jackie Deeds through the medium of a half-crown. And now, as he waited beneath the rustling sycamores, it was with a sensation of quick, yet half-shy, pleasure, that he saw the disreputable figure lurch out of the inn yard, stand for a minute shading eyes with hand while making observations, and then hobble across the street, touching the peak of a battered, black-velvet cap as it advanced.

"Be 'e come to zee the show, sir?" the old man coughed out, peering with dim, blear eyes up into the boy's fresh face.

"No, we've come about something from Appleyard's. I--I didn't know there was a show."