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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.
Behind her, the florid, though rectangular, decoration of the house front ranged up, storey above storey, in arcade and pilaster, heavily mullioned window, carven plaque and string course, to pairs of matching pinnacles and griffins these last rampant, supporting the Calmady shield and coat-of-arms the quaint forms of which break the long line of the pierced, stone parapet in the centre of the façade, and rise above the rusty red of the low-pitched roofs, until the spires of the one and crested heads of the other are outlined against the sky.
For a spirit of extravagant and unreasoning excitement appeared to seize on the dog. Forgetful of age, of stiff limbs and short-coming breath, he gamboled round Lady Calmady, describing crazy circles upon the grass, and barking until the unseemly din echoed back harshly from against the great red and gray façade.
"No, no, you are mistaken there," Honoria put in, holding her still closer. "You were tempted to take a rather desperate way out of your difficulties. It would have been unwise, but there was nothing wicked in it. The wrong thing is as Mr. Decies tells you to marry without love, and so make all your life a lie, by pretending to give Richard Calmady that which you do not, and cannot, give him."
One was from Lady Calmady, and that he put aside with a certain anger, calling himself unwilling, knowing himself unfit, to read it. Another he tore open. The handwriting was unknown to him. He began reading it in bewilderment. Then he understood. "MONSIEUR," it ran, "You are in process of exterminating me.
Lastly comes Courtney Calmady, who, living in excellent repute until close upon sixty, seemed destined by Providence to break the evil chain of the family fate.
Then as young Lady Calmady, somewhat ghostly in her trailing, white evening dress, bent her charming head, the boy, suddenly overcome with the manifold excitements of the day, flung his arms round her. "Oh! oh!" he gasped, "how awfully ripping it is to be back here again with you and Cousin Richard and Aunt Katherine! I wish number-four dormitory would get measles the middle of every term!
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.
March, isn't there? Preach a good, rattling sermon on it next Sunday to Lady Calmady, if you want to keep her here a bit longer. Nature abhors a vacuum. Granted. But nature abhors excess, even of virtue. And punishes it just as harshly as excess of vice. Yes, I tell you, she's worn herself out." Miss St.
Thus Julius learned how, during the closing years of the Commonwealth, the young royalist gentleman, Sir Thomas Calmady, dwelling in enforced seclusion at Brockhurst, relieved the tedium of country life by indulgence in divers amours. He was large-hearted, apparently, and could not see a comely face without attempting intimate acquaintance with the possessor of it.
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