Three weeks of dry July weather had meanwhile matured the country round Brockhurst. On the very evening of the Lowndes Square scene, Lady Katherine Calmady, alone on the troco-ground with only the ageing bulldog Camp for company, was moved by the heat, the scent of the gardens, and the song of a nightingale to pray passionately for a sight of her first husband, Richard Calmady the elder, dead these many years. Her prayer was granted. The spirit of her husband crossed the moonlit lawn towards her in everyday riding-dress, and she received a vision in which she understood that her love had never been taken from her, but endured as an eternal, ever-present fact of her being, and that her service was self-development rather than self-effacement. The vision faded only as Camp grew restless and the sound of an urgent horse and carriage came down the elm avenue. Winter, the butler, betraying unusual emotion, told her that Sir Richard had returned from the wars and awaited her in the Gun-Room.
Chapter IX depicts the consequence. Richard, fresh from a brutal interview with Lord Fallowfeild, coldly announced the termination of the engagement, described the match as a transaction to purchase an heir to prove his manhood, and cynically swung the lamp to expose the full extent of his deformity. The natural setting, with nightingales singing and the sweetness of wild thyme drifting through the open casements, formed a poignant contrast to the infernal landscape of their confrontation. Katherine strove to bear his accusations in silence; he, needing a human sacrifice for his humiliation, took a dark satisfaction in her anguish. He proceeded to articulate a philosophy of nihilistic determinism, declared that belief in human responsibility was at an end, and announced a deliberate turn to sensual self-indulgence, listing Paris and Baden-Baden as his destinations. He confessed that Helen de Vallorbes remained the one woman he truly loved and that Constance had been meant to fill a place Helen could not. Katherine, broken-hearted, knelt before him, begging him to rail at her rather than at God. Richard, hardened, replied that good and evil were delusions, that he would break God’s laws wherever he could, and that he would tear the vitals out of living, using his very deformity as a means of power. He named his stable arrangements, ordered Katherine to invite a female companion of her own rank rather than be left alone with Julius March, and bade her good-bye. Lady Calmady went out without looking back. Left at the writing-table, Richard broke down in a single cry against the God who had made him so, and the sequence closes with the announcement of Book V: RAKE’S PROGRESS.
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