Chapter VI, “Accident or Destiny, According to Your Humour,” is set on 18 October 1842, St. Luke’s Day, and depicts the death of Sir Richard Calmady. Four days earlier, Richard had been carried back to Brockhurst from a steeplechase course after a fall from the horse Clown, championed by his brother-in-law Captain Roger Ormiston, Katherine’s brother. With anaesthetics not yet in use, Dr. Knott and Mr. Thoms of Westchurch amputated the right leg in the dining-room while Katherine paced outside, once beating her head against the wall in unutterable grief. Mortification set in within forty-eight hours. By the small hours of the 18th, the red drawing-room has been cleared to make way for Richard’s narrow camp-bed, medical equipment arranged on a what-not at its head, and the household gathered for the end: Dr. Knott, Julius March, Roger Ormiston, Mrs. Denny the housekeeper, and most centrally Katherine, who maintains her watch with quiet fortitude, her white dressing-gown spotless, her hair carefully dressed, in conscious refusal of slovenly grief.
Richard drifts in and out of consciousness. Katherine tries in vain to feed him a few drops of champagne from a china feeding-cup; most of it spills. In a moment of lucidity he reflects on his thirty years of life and on his gratitude for Katherine. When she begs to die with him, he refuses, urging her to remember the child and absolving her in advance from any future tie. He laments his helplessness and drifts through fragmented thoughts—Eton jokes shared with Roger, the small windows of the new lodge, Lord Fallowfeild’s vague letters—before dozing. He dreams vividly of riding whole and vigorous across flowering pastures toward a great light streaming from the throne of God. Waking, he gives practical instructions: the stables to be carried on under Chifney, Roger to keep an eye on things, the next Richard Calmady, if a boy, to be taught to ride straight. As the autumn dawn floods through a casement opened by Ormiston, with the sounds of the racehorses being ridden out to exercise, Richard briefly mistakes his state for troubled sleep, calls for his son, smiles at Katherine, and then passes away.
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