第四章 – CHAPTER VI
Chapter IV opens on an autumn evening in the Gun-Room of Brockhurst, where Lady Calmady (Katherine) stands before a hearth of pine logs to question her son Richard about inviting his uncle William and cousin Helen de Vallorbes. The narrator attributes Katherine’s unusual restlessness to her brother’s recent arrival, which has stirred suppressed memories of a Paris and London youth, stirring vague ambitions and a longing for “a wider sphere of action.” Richard, sunk in a long armchair with a calf-bound volume — Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy — and the old bulldog Camp at his feet, weighs the “two evils” of inviting guests against the risk of disappointment. Quoting Burton on the text’s claim that bodily imperfections “do not a whit blemish the soul,” Richard concedes bitterly that he is “some two or three decades on the near side of that comfortable conclusion.” He finally decides in favour of the visit, persuaded above all by the memory of Helen’s “silent flattery of intimate and fearless glances.” Katherine, having momentarily set aside her own ambitions, reassumes the maternal role, only to return anxiously to propose a further guest, Honoria St. Quentin, whom Richard curtly declines.
The chapter’s perspective then shifts to Julius March, the family chaplain. After his customary devotions before an image of the Virgin and the Dead Christ, he watches Katherine walking alone on the terrace and joins her beneath a star-blazing sky. The two pace the gray stone quarries in a long exchange that moves from cosmic meditation to intimate confession. Katherine complains of growing old, of her vanished youth, and of Richard’s unhappiness. Julius first offers theological consolation, then yields to “lively irritation” when she turns from her own concerns to Richard’s. The passage records a striking physical moment: Julius stands “arms extended wide, as once crucified,” gazing upward in an act of self-surrender. Katherine is moved and chastened. They speak of an “endless chain” of human sympathy whose last link is “riveted to the steps of the throne of God,” and Katherine refers to a “quarrel” with God begun nearly four-and-twenty years earlier — at Richard’s birth. Julius answers that “a miracle will be worked,” and Katherine retorts that for her the time is “at once too long and too short.”
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