"Oh, dear no, of course not!" he answered, half closing his eyes.

"Nothing in the world's the matter."

He unclasped his hands, leaned forward and patted the bulldog lying across the rug at his feet. "At least nothing more than usual, nothing more than the abiding something which always has been and always will be the matter."

"Ah, my dear!" Katherine cried softly.

"I've just been reading Burton's Anatomy here," he went on bending down, so that his face was hidden, while he pulled the dog's soft ears.

"He a.s.sures all--whom it may concern--that 'bodily imperfections do not a whit blemish the soul or hinder the operations of it, but rather help and much increase it.' There, Camp, poor old man, don't start--it's nothing worse than me. I wonder if the elaborate pains which have been taken through generations of your ancestors to breed you into your existing and very royal hideousness--your flattened nose and perpetual grin, for instance--do help and much increase the operations of your soul!"

He looked up suddenly.

"What do you think, mother?"

"I think--think, my darling," she said, "that perhaps neither you nor I are quite ourselves to-night."

"Oh, well I've had rather a beastly day!" Richard dropped back against the chair cushions again, clasping his hands behind his head. "Or I've seemed to have it, which comes practically to much the same thing. I confess I have been rather hipped lately. I suppose it's the weather.

You're not really in a hurry, mother, are you? Come and sit down."

And obediently Katherine drew forward a chair and sat beside him. Those uprisings of vagrant desire still struggled, combating the dominion of the fixed idea. But the struggle grew faint and fainter. And then, for a measurable time, Richard fell silent again while she waited. Verily there is no sharper discipline for a woman's proud spirit, than that administered, often quite unconsciously, by the man whom she loves.

"We gave a wretched girl six weeks to-day for robbing her mistress," he remarked at last. "It was a flagrant case, so I suppose we were justified. In fact I don't see how we could have done otherwise. But it went against me awfully, all the same. She has a child to support. Jim Gould got her into trouble and deserted her, like a cowardly, young blackguard. However, it's easy to be righteous at another person's expense. Perhaps I should have done the same in his place. I wonder if I should?"--

"My dear, we need hardly discuss that point, I think," Lady Calmady said.

Richard turned his head and smiled at her.

"Poor dear mother, do I bore you? But it is so comfortable to grumble.

I know it's selfish. It's a horrid bad habit, and you ought to blow me up for it. But then, mother, take it all round, really I don't grumble much, do I?"

"No, no!" Katherine said quickly. "Indeed, d.i.c.kie, you don't."

"I have been awfully afraid though, lately, that I do grumble more than I imagine," he went on, straightening his head, while his handsome profile showed clear cut against the dancing brightness of the firelight. "But it's almost impossible always to carry something about with you which--which you hate, and not let it infect your att.i.tude of mind and, in a degree, your speech. Twenty or thirty years hence it may prove altogether sufficient and satisfactory to know"--his lips worked, obliging him to enunciate his words carefully--"that bodily imperfections do not a whit blemish the soul or hinder its operations--are, in short, an added means of grace. Think of it! Isn't it a nice, neat, little arrangement, sort of spiritual consolation stakes! Only I'm afraid I'm some two or three decades on the near side of that comfortable conclusion yet, and I find----"

Richard shifted his position, letting his arms drop along the chair arms with a little thud. He smiled again, or at all events essayed to do so.

"In fact, I find it's beastly difficult to care a hang about your soul, one way or another, when you clearly perceive your body's making you the laughing-stock of half the people--why, mother, sweet dear mother,--what is it?"

For Lady Calmady's two hands had closed down on his hand, and she bowed herself above them as though smitten with sharp pain.

"Pray don't be distressed," he went on. "I beg your pardon. I wasn't thinking what I was saying, I'm an a.s.s. It's nothing I tell you but the weather. You're all a lot too good to me and indulge me too much, and I grow soft, and then every trifle rubs me the wrong way. I'm a regular spoilt child--I know it and a jolly good spanking is what I deserve.

Burton, here, declares that the autumnal, like the vernal, equinox breeds hot humours and distempers in the blood. I believe we ought to be bled, spring and fall, like our forefathers. Look here, mother, don't take my grumbling to heart. I tell you I'm just a little hipped from the weather. Let's send for dear old Knott and get him to drive out the devil with his lancet? No, no, seriously, I tell you what we will do. It'll be good for us both. I have arrived at a decision. We'll have Uncle William and--Helen----"

Richard had spoken very rapidly, half ashamed, trying to soothe her. He paused on the last word. He was conscious of a singular pleasure in p.r.o.nouncing it. The perfectly finished figure of his cousin, outstanding against the wide, misty brightness of the sunset, the scent of the wood and moorland, the haunting suggestion of glad secrets, even that upcurling of blue cigarette smoke, rising as the smoke of incense--with a difference--upon the clear evening air, above all that silent flattery of intimate and fearless glances, those gay welcoming gestures, that merry calling, as of birds in the tree-tops, from the spirit of youth within him to the spirit of youth so visibly and radiantly resident in her--all this rose up before Richard. He grew reckless, though reckless of precisely what, innocent as he was, in fact although mature in learning, he knew not as yet. Only he turned on his mother a face at once eager and shy, coaxing her as when in his long-ago baby-days he had implored some petty indulgence or the gift of some coveted toy on which his little heart was set.

"Yes, let us have them," he said. "You know Helen is very charming. You will admire her, mother. She is as clever as she can stick, one sees that at a glance. And she is very much _grande dame_ too--and, oh, well, she is a whole lot of charming things! And her coming would be a wholesome breaking up of our ordinary ways of going on. We are usually very contented--at least, I think so--you, and dear Julius, and I, but perhaps we are getting into a bit of a rut. Helen's society might prove an even more efficacious method of driving out my blue-devils than Knott's lancet or a jolly good spanking."

He laughed quietly, patting Katherine's hand, but looking away.

"And there is no denying it would be a vastly more graceful one--don't you think so?"

Thus were smouldering fires of personal ambition quenched in Lady Calmady, as so often before. Richard's tenderness brought her to her knees. She hugged, with an almost voluptuous movement of pa.s.sion, that half-rejected burden of maternity, gathering it close against her heart once more. But, along with the rapture of self-surrender, came a thousand familiar fears and anxieties. For she had looked into d.i.c.kie's mind, as he spoke out his grumble, and had there perceived the existence of much which she had dreaded and to the existence of which she had striven to blind herself.

"My darling," she said, with a certain hesitation, "I will gladly have them if you wish it--only you remember what happened long ago when Helen was here last?"

"Yes, I know, I was afraid you would think of that. But you can put that aside. Helen's not the smallest recollection of it. She told me so this afternoon."

"Told you so?" Katherine repeated.

"Yes," he said. "It was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would have been impossible."

There was a pause. Lady Calmady rose. The young man spoke with conviction, yet her anxiety was not altogether allayed.

"Impossible," he repeated. "Pretty mother don't disquiet yourself.

Trust me. To tell you the truth I have felt to-day--is it very foolish?--that I should like some one of my own age for a little while, as--don't you know--a playfellow."

Katherine bent down and kissed him. But mother-love is not, even in its most self-sacrificing expression, without torments of jealousy.

"My dear, you shall have your playfellow," she said, though conscious of a tightening of the muscles of her beautiful throat. "Good-night.

Sleep well."

She went out, closing the door behind her. The perspective of the dimly-lighted corridor, and the great hall beyond, struck her as rather sadly lifeless and silent. What wonder, indeed, that Richard should ask for a companion, for something young! Love made her selfish and cowardly she feared. She should have thought of this before. She turned back, again opening the Gun-Room door.

Richard had raised himself. He stood on the seat of the chair, steadying himself by one hand on the chair-back, while with the other he pulled the rug from beneath the sleepy bull-dog.

"Wake up, you lazy old beggar," he was saying. "Get down, can't you. I want to go to bed, and you block the way, lying there in gross comfort, snoring. Make yourself scarce, old man. If I'd your natural advantages in the way of locomotion, I wouldn't be so slow of using them----"

He looked up, and slipped back into a sitting position hastily.

"Oh, mother, I thought you had gone!" he exclaimed, almost sharply.

And to Katherine, overstrung as she was, the words came as a rebuke.

"My dearest, I won't keep you," she said. "I only came back to ask you about Honoria St. Quentin."

"What about her?"

"She is staying at Newlands--the two girls are friends, I believe. She seemed to me a fine creature when last I saw her. She knows the world, yet struck me curiously untouched by it. She is well read, she has ideas--some of them a little extravagant, but time will modify that.

Only her head is awake as yet, not her heart, I think. Shall I ask her to come too?"

"So that we may wake up her heart?" Richard inquired coldly. "No thanks, dear mother, that's, too serious an undertaking. Have her another time, please. I saw her to-day, and, no doubt my taste is bad, but I must confess she did not please me very much. Nor--which is more to the point in this connection perhaps--did I please her. Would you ring the bell, please, as you're there? I want Powell. Thanks so much.

Good-night."

Some ten minutes later Julius March, after kneeling in prayer, as his custom was, before the divinely sorrowful and compa.s.sionate image of the Virgin Mother and the Dead Christ, looked forth through the many-paned study window into the clair-obscure of the windless autumn night. He had been sensible of an unusual element in the domestic atmosphere this evening, and had been vaguely disquieted concerning both Katherine and Richard. It was impossible but that, as time went on, life should become more complicated at Brockhurst, and Julius feared his own inability to cope helpfully with such complication. He entertained a mean opinion of himself. It appeared to him he was but an unprofitable servant, unready, tongue-tied, lacking in resource. A depression possessed him which he could not shake off. What had he to show, after all, for these fifty-odd years of life granted to him? He feared his religion had walked in silver slippers, and would so walk to the end. Could it then, in any true and vital sense, be reckoned religion at all? Gross sins had never exercised any attraction over him. What virtue was there, then, in being innocent of gross sin? But to those other sins--sins of defective moral courage in speech and action, sins arising from over-fastidiousness--had he not yielded freely? Was he not a spiritual valetudinarian? He feared so. Offered, in the Eternal Mercy, endless precious opportunities of service, he had been too weak, too timorous, too slothful, to lay hold on them. And so, as it seemed to him very justly, to-night confession, prayer, adoration, left him unconsoled.

Then, looking out of the many-paned window, while the shame of his barrenness clothed him even as a garment, he beheld Lady Calmady pacing slowly over the gray quarries of the terrace pavement. A dark, fur-bordered mantle shrouded her tall figure from head to foot. Only her face showed, and her hands folded stiffly high upon her bosom, strangely pale against the blackness of her cloak. Ordinarily Julius would have scrupled to intrude upon her lonely walk. But just now the cry within him for human sympathy was urgent. Her near neighbourhood in itself was very dear to him, and she might let fall some gracious word testifying that, in her opinion at least, his life had not been wholly vain. For very surely that which survives when all other pa.s.sions are uprooted and cast forth--survives even in the case of the true ascetic and saint--is the unquenchable yearning for the spoken approval of those whom we love and have loved.

And so, pushed by his poverty of self-esteem, Julius March, throwing a plaid on over his ca.s.sock, went out and paced the gray quarries beside Katherine Calmady.