The History of Sir Richard Calmady. Lucas Malet
Julius said softly.
Dr. Knott contemplated the contents of his glass, for a moment, whether critically or absently it would have been difficult to decide. But all the harshness had gone out of his face, and his loose lips worked into a smile pathetic in quality.
"To the baby.—And I venture to add a clause to your invocation of that heartless jade, Dame Fortune. May he never lack good courage and good friends. He will need both."
Julius March set down his wine untasted. He had received a very disagreeable impression.
"Come, come, it appears to me, we are paying these honours in a most lugubrious spirit," Mrs. Ormiston broke in. "I wish the baby a long life and a merry one, in defiance of all prophecies and traditions belonging to his paternal ancestry. Go on, Mr. March, you're shamefully neglecting your duty. No heel taps."
She threw back her head showing the whole of her white throat, drained her glass and then flung it over her shoulder. It fell on the black, polished boards, beyond the edge of the carpet, shivered into a hundred pieces, that lay glittering, like scattered diamonds in the lamplight. For the day had died altogether. Fleets of dark, straggling cloud chased each other across spaces of pallid sky, against the earthward edge of which dusky tree-tops strained and writhed in the force of the tearing gale.
Ella Ormiston rose laughing from her place at table.
"That's the correct form," she said, "it ensures the fulfilment of the wish. You ought all to have cast away your glasses regardless of expense. Come, Mary, we will remove ourselves. Mind and bid me good-bye before you go, Dr. Knott, and report on Lady Calmady. It's probably the last time you'll have the felicity of seeing me. I'm off at cockcrow to-morrow morning."
CHAPTER VIII
ENTER A CHILD OF PROMISE
After closing the door behind the two ladies, Ormiston paused by the near window and gazed out into the night. The dinner had been, in his opinion, far from a success. He feared his relation to Mary Cathcart had retrograded rather than progressed. He wished his sister-in-law would be more correct in speech and behaviour. Then he held the conversation had been in bad taste. The doctor should have abstained from pressing Julius with questions. He assured himself, again, that the story was not worth a moment's serious consideration; yet he resented its discussion. Such discussion seemed to him to tread hard on the heels of impertinence to his sister, to her husband's memory, and to this boy, born to so excellent a position and so great wealth. And the worst of it was, that like a fool, he had started the subject himself!
"The wind's rising," he remarked at last. "You'll have a rough drive home, Knott."
"It won't be the first one. And my beauty's of the kind which takes a lot of spoiling."
The answer did not please the young man. He sauntered across the room and dropped into his chair, with a slightly insolent demeanour.
"All the same, don't let me detain you," he said, "if you prefer seeing Lady Calmady at once and getting off."
"You don't detain me," Dr. Knott answered. "I'm afraid that it's just the other way about, and that I must detain you, Captain Ormiston, and that on rather unpleasant business."
Julius March had risen to his feet. "You—you have no fresh cause for anxiety about Lady Calmady?" he said hurriedly.
The doctor glanced up at the tall, spare, black figure and dark, sensitive face with a half-sneering, half-pitying smile.
"Oh no, no!" he replied; "Lady Calmady's going on splendidly. And it is to guard, just as far as we can, against cause for anxiety later, that I want to speak to Captain Ormiston now. We've got to be prepared for certain contingencies. Don't you go, Mr. March. You may as well hear what I've to say. It will interest you particularly, I fancy, after one or two things you have told us to-night!"
"Sit down, Julius, please."—Ormiston would have liked to maintain that same insolence of demeanour, but it gave before an apprehension of serious issues. He looked hard at the doctor, cudgeling his brains as to what the latter's enigmatic speech might mean—divined, put the idea away as inadmissible, returned to it, then said angrily:—"There's nothing wrong with the child, of course?"
Dr. Knott turned his chair sideways to the table and shaded his face with his thick, square hand.
"Well, that depends on what you call wrong," he slowly replied.
"It's not ill?" Ormiston said.
"The baby's as well as you or I—better, in fact, than I am, for I am confoundedly touched up with gout. Bear that in mind, Captain Ormiston—that the child is well, I mean, not that I am gouty. I want you to definitely remember that, you and Mr. March."
"Well, then, what on earth is the matter?" Ormiston asked sharply. "You don't mean to imply it is injured in any way, deformed?"
Dr. Knott let his hand drop on the table. He nodded his head. Ormiston perceived, and it moved him strangely, that the doctor's eyes were wet.
"Not deformed," he answered. "Technically you can hardly call it that, but maimed."
"Badly?"
"Well, that's a matter of opinion. You or I should think it bad enough, I fancy, if we found ourselves in the same boat." He settled himself back in his chair.—"You had better understand it quite clearly," he continued, "at least as clearly as I can put it to you. There comes a point where I cannot explain the facts but only state them. You have heard of spontaneous amputation?"
Across Ormiston's mind came the remembrance of a litter of puppies he had seen in the sanctum of the veterinary surgeon of his regiment. A lump rose in his throat.
"Yes, go on," he said.
"It is a thing that does not happen once in most men's experience. I have only seen one case before in all my practice and that was nothing very serious. This is an extraordinary example. I need not remind you of Sir Richard Calmady's accident and the subsequent operation?"
"Of course not—go on," Ormiston repeated.
"In both cases the leg is gone from here," the doctor continued, laying the edge of his palm across the thigh immediately above the knee. "The foot is there—that is the amazing part of it—and, as far as I can see, is well formed and of the normal size; but so embedded in the stump that I cannot discover whether the ankle-joint and bones of the lower leg exist in a contracted form or not."
Ormiston poured himself out a glass of port. His hand shook so that the lip of the decanter chattered against the lip of the glass. He gulped down the wine and, getting up, walked the length of the room and back again.
"God in heaven," he murmured, "how horrible! Poor Kitty, how utterly horrible!—Poor Kitty."
For the baby, in his own fine completeness, he had as yet no feeling but one of repulsion.
"Can nothing be done, Knott?" he asked at last.
"Obviously nothing."
"And it will live?"
"Oh! bless you, yes! It'll live fast enough if I know a healthy infant when I see one. And I ought to know 'em by now. I've brought them into the world by dozens for my sins."
"Will it be able to walk?"
"Umph—well—shuffle," the doctor answered, smiling savagely to keep back the tears.
The young man leaned his elbows on the table, and rested his head on his hands. All this shocked him inexpressibly—shocked him almost to the point of physical illness. Strong as he was he could have fainted, just then, had he yielded by ever so little. And this was the boy whom they had so longed for then! The child on whom they had set such fond hopes, who was to be the pride of his young mother, and restore the so rudely shaken balance of her life! This was the boy who should go to Eton, and into some crack regiment, who should ride straight, who was heir to great possessions!
"The saviour has come, you see, Mr. March, in as thorough-paced a disguise as ever saviour did yet," John Knott said cynically.
"He