Mrs. Ormiston did not reply. Even her chatter was for the moment stilled. She pressed a handkerchief against the little dancer's forehead, and it was stained with blood.

"Ah! she is a wicked woman!" wailed the child. "She has hurt me. She threw me against the table. _Maman quel malheur ca se verra. Il y aura certainement une cicatrice_!"

"Nonsense," Ormiston said harshly. "It's nothing, Kitty, the merest scratch."

"Yes, my dear, we will have the carriage at once,"--this from Mr.

Cathcart to his wife. The incident, from all points of view, shocked his sense of decency. Immediate retirement became his sole object.

Lady Calmady moved away, carrying the boy. She trembled a little. He was heavy. Moreover, she sickened at the sight of blood. But little Helen Ormiston caught at her dress, looked up at her.

"I hate you," she said, hissing the words out with concentrated pa.s.sion between her pretty even teeth. "You have spoilt me. I will hate you always, when I grow up. I will never forget."

Alone in the great state-bedroom next door, a long time elapsed before either Richard or Katherine spoke. The boy leaned back against the sofa cushions, holding his mother's hand. The cas.e.m.e.nts stood wide open, and little winds laden with the scent of the hawthorns in the park wandered in, gently stirring the curtains of the ebony bed, so that the trees of the Forest of This Life thereon embroidered appeared somewhat mournfully to wave their branches, while the Hart fled forward and the Leopard, relentless in perpetual pursuit, followed close behind. There was a crunching of wheels on the gravel, a sound of hurried farewells.

Then in a minute or two more the evening quiet held its own again.

Suddenly d.i.c.kie flung himself down across Katherine's lap, his poor body shaken by a tempest of weeping.

"Mother, I can't bear it--I can't bear it," he sobbed. "Tell me, does everybody do that?"

"Do what, my own precious?" she said, calm from very excess of sorrow.

Later she would weep too in the dark, lying lonely in the cold comfort of that stately bed.

"Laugh at me, mother, mock at me?" and his voice, for all that he tried to control it, tore at his throat and rose almost to a shriek.

CHAPTER VI

DEALING WITH A PHYSICIAN OF THE BODY AND A PHYSICIAN OF THE SOUL

History repeats itself, and to Katherine just now came most unwelcome example of such repet.i.tion. She had foreseen that some such crisis must arise as had arisen. Yet when it arose, the crisis proved none the less agonising because of that foreknowledge. Two strains of feeling struggled within her. A blinding sorrow for her child, a fear of and shame at her own violence of anger. Katherine's mind was of an uncompromising honesty. She knew that her instinct had, for a s.p.a.ce at least, been murderous. She knew that, given equal provocation, it would be murderous again.

And this was, after all, but the active, objective aspect of the matter. The pa.s.sive and subjective aspect showed danger also. In her extremity Katherine's soul cried out for G.o.d--for the sure resting-place only to be found by conscious union of the individual with the eternal will. But such repose was denied her. For her anger against G.o.d, even while thus earnestly desiring Him, was even more profound than her anger against man. The pa.s.sion of those terrible early days when her child's evil fortune first became known to her--held in abeyance all these years by constant employment and the many duties incident to her position--returned upon her in its first force. To believe G.o.d is not, leaves the poor human soul homeless, sadly desolate, barren in labour as is a slave. But the sorrow of such belief is as a trifle beside the hideous fear that G.o.d is careless and unjust, that virtue is but a fond imagination of all-too-n.o.ble human hearts, that the everlasting purpose is not good but evil continually.

And, haunted by such fears, Katherine once again sat in outer darkness.

All gracious things appeared to her as illusions; all gentle delights but as pa.s.sing anodynes with which, in his misery, man weakly tries to deaden the pain of existence for a little s.p.a.ce. She suffered a profound discouragement.

And so it seemed to her but as part of the cruel whole when history repeated itself yet further, and Dr. Knott, pausing at the door of Richard's bedroom, turned and said to her:--

"It will be better, you know, Lady Calmady, to let him face it alone.

He'll feel it less without you. Winter can give me all the a.s.sistance I want." Then he added, a queer smile playing about his loose lips:--"Don't be afraid. I'll handle him very gently. Probably I shan't hurt him at all--certainly not much."

"Ah!" Katherine said, under her breath.

"You see it is done by his own wish," John Knott went on.

"I know," she answered.

She respected and trusted this man, entertained for him, notwithstanding his harsh speech and uncouth exterior, something akin to affection. Yet remembering the part he had played in the fate of the father, it was very dreadful to her that he should touch the child. And Dr. Knott read her thought. He did not resent it. It was all natural enough! From his heart he was sorry for her, and would have spared her had that been possible. But he discriminated very clearly between primary and secondary issues, never sacrificing, as do feeble and sentimental persons, the former to the latter. In this case the boy had a right to the stage, and so the mother must stand in the wings. John Knott possessed a keen sense of values in the human drama which the exigencies of his profession so perpetually presented to him. He waited quietly, his hand on the door-handle, looking at Katherine from under his rough eyebrows, silently opposing his will to hers.

Suddenly she turned away with an impatient gesture.

"I will not come with you," she said.

"You are right."

"But--but--do you think you can really do anything to help him, to make him happier?" Katherine asked, a desperation in the tones of her voice.

"Happier? Yes, in the long run, because certainty of whatever kind, even certainty of failure, makes eventually for peace of mind."

"That is a hard saying."

"This is a hard world." Dr. Knott looked down at the floor, shrugging his unwieldy shoulders. "The sooner we learn to accept that fact the better, Lady Calmady. I know it is sharp discipline, but it saves time and money, let alone disappointment.--Now as to all these elaborate contrivances I've brought down from London, they're the very best of their kind. But I am bound to own the most ingenious of such arrangements are but clumsy remedies for natural deficiency. Man hasn't discovered how to make over his own body yet, and never will. The Almighty will always have the whip-hand of us when it comes to dealing with flesh and blood. All the same we've got to try these legs and things----"

Katherine winced, pressing her lips together. It was brutal, surely, to speak so plainly? But John Knott went on quietly, commiserating her inwardly, yet unswerving in common sense.

"Try 'em every one, and so convince Sir Richard one way or the other.

This is a turning-point. So far his general health has been remarkably good, and we've just got to set our minds to keeping it good. He must not fret if we can help it. If he frets, instead of developing into the sane, manly fellow he should, he may turn peevish, Lady Calmady, and grow up a morbid, neurotic lad, the victim of all manner of brain-sick fancies--become envious, spiteful, a misery to others and to himself."

"It is necessary to say all this?" Katherine asked loftily.

Dr. Knott's eyes looked very straight into hers, and there were tears in them.

"Indeed, I believe it is," he replied, "or, trust me, I wouldn't say it. I take no pleasure in giving pain at this time of day, whether mental or physical. All I want is to spare pain. But one must sacrifice the present to the future, at times, you know--use the knife to save the limb. Now I must go to my patient. It isn't fair to keep him waiting any longer. I'll be as quick as I can. I suppose I shall find you here when I've finished?"

As he opened the door Dr. Knott's heavy person showed in all its ungainliness against the brightness of sunlight flooding d.i.c.kie's room.

And to Katherine he seemed hideous just then--inexorable in his great common sense, in the dead weight of his personality and of his will, as some power of nature. He was to her the incarnation of things as they are,--not things as they should be, not things as she so pa.s.sionately desired they might be. He represented rationalism as against miracle, intellect as against imagination, the bitter philosophy of experience as against that for which all mortals so persistently cry out--namely, the all-consoling promise of extravagant hope. As with chains he bound her down to fact. Right home on her he pressed the utter futility of juggling with the actual. From the harsh truth that, neither in matters practical nor spiritual is any redemption without shedding of blood he permitted her no escape.

And all this Katherine's clear brain recognised and admitted, even while her poor heart only rebelled the more madly. To be convinced is not to be reconciled. And so she turned away from that closed door in a veritable tempest of feeling, and went out into the Chapel-Room. It was safer, her mind and heart thus working, to put a s.p.a.ce between herself and that closed door.

Just then Julius March crossed the room, coming in from the stair-head.

The austere lines of his ca.s.sock emphasised the height and emaciation of his figure. His appearance offered a marked contrast to that of the man with whom Katherine had just parted. His occupation offered a marked contrast also. He carried a gold chalice and paten, and his head was bowed reverentially above the sacred vessels. His eyes were downcast, and the dull pallor of his face and his long thin hands was very noticeable. He did not look round, but pa.s.sed silently, still as a dream, into the chapel. Katherine paced the width of the great room, turned and paced back and forth again some half-dozen times, before he emerged from the chapel door. In her present humour she did not want him, yet she resented his abstraction. The physician of the soul, like the physician of the body, appeared to her lamentably devoid of power to sustain and give comfort at the present juncture.

This, it so happened, was one of those days when the mystic joy of his priestly office held Julius March forcibly. He had ministered to others, and his own soul was satisfied. His expression was exalted, his short-sighted eyes were alive with inward light. Tired and worn, there was still a remarkable suavity in his bearing. He had come forth from the holy of holies, and the vision beheld there dwelt with him yet.

Meanwhile, brooding storm sat on Katherine's brow, on her lips, dwelt in her every movement. And something of this Julius perceived, for his devotion to her was intact, as was his self-abnegation. Throughout all these years he had never sought to approach her more closely. His att.i.tude had remained as delicately scrupulous, untouched by worldliness, or by the baser part of pa.s.sion, as in the first hour of the discovery of his love. Her near presence gave him exquisite pleasure; but, save when she needed his a.s.sistance in some practical matter, he refused to indulge himself by pa.s.sing much time in her society. Abstinence still remained his rule of life. But just now, strong with the mystic strength of his late ministrations, and perceiving her troubled state, he permitted himself to remain and pace beside her.

"You have been out all day?" Katherine said.

"Yes, I stayed on to the end with Rebecca Light. They sent for me early this morning. She pa.s.sed away very peacefully in that little attic at the new lodge looking out into the green heart of the woods."

"Ah! It's simple enough to die," Katherine said, "being old. The difficult thing is to live, being still young."

"Has my absence been inconvenient? Have you wanted me?" Julius asked.--Those quiet hours spent in the humble death-chamber suddenly appeared to him as an act of possible selfishness.

"Oh no!" she answered bitterly. "Why should I want you? Have I not sent Roger and Mary away? Am I not secretly glad dear Marie de Mirancourt is just sufficiently poorly to remain in her room? When the real need comes--one learns that among all the other merciless lessons--one is best by oneself."