The narrative then moves to Katherine’s slow convalescence following the birth of her son. She rests in a great ebony half-tester bed with Queen Anne embroidered hangings depicting the Hart pursued by the Leopard through the Forest of This Life—a parable that mirrors her own situation. Ormiston visits her and, after more than a week, breaks the devastating news about the baby’s condition. Katherine is initially still, her face going ashen as the color and youthful roundness drain from it. She demands to see the child alone, locking the doors behind her. In a private, intense scene, she unwraps the infant, examines his perfect body and then his malformed limbs, and gradually understands the connection to her late husband’s accident with the horse. Her mother-love, previously an extension of her love for her dead husband, becomes its own fierce, ancient emotion. She kisses the shortened limbs many times, crooning to the child, and cries out in anguish and rebellion: “God is unjust! He takes pleasure in fooling us. God is unjust!”
In the days that follow, Katherine demands that Roger have the horse called the Clown—the animal that killed her husband—shot on the lawn before sunset that very evening. She is merciless, and Roger, already feeling like a hangman to his sister, agrees. The execution takes place as the spring evening descends, the blackbirds and thrushes falling silent at the sharp report of the pistol before resuming their song. Dr. Knott discovers the dead horse the next morning, torn at by carrion crows against the rising sun, and reflects that letting blood sometimes has its benefits, noting that Katherine shows no signs of going under.
A new era begins at Brockhurst. The narrator invokes the law of compensation, suggesting it works permanently in human affairs, and Julius March finds a measure of contentment through the sorrows of those he loves. Mrs. St. Quentin, Julius’s aunt, dies peacefully in her sleep, spared knowledge of Dickie’s condition. Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, a French Catholic friend of Katherine’s girlhood, closes her apartment in Paris and takes up permanent residence at Brockhurst, explaining that she has come to remain until she herself ends. Katherine refuses Ormiston’s offer to stay, urging him to pursue his military career. A singular quiet settles over the estate, a quiet of waiting and pause rather than accomplishment, broken only by the changing seasons and the local gentry’s discreet whispers about the family’s Romanizing tendencies and the little boy’s misfortune.
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