The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
your mother has left you. They are best read, perhaps, in silence and
alone."
CHAPTER VI
A LITANY OF THE SACRED HEART
Richard drew himself up on to the wide, cushioned bench below the
oriel-window. The February day was windless and very bright. And
although, in sheltered, low-lying places, where the frost held, the
snow still lingered, in the open it had already disappeared, and that
without unsightliness of slush--shrinking and vanishing, cleanly burned
up and absorbed by the genial heat. A Sabbath-day restfulness held the
whole land. There was no movement of labour, either of man or beast.
And a kindred restfulness pervaded the house. The rooms were vacant.
None passed to and fro. For it so happened that good Mr. Caryll's
successor, the now rector of Sandyfield, had been called away to
deliver certain charity sermons at Westchurch, and that to-day Julius
March officiated in his stead. Therefore Lady Calmady and Miss St.
Quentin, and the major part of the Brockhurst household, had repaired
by carriage or on foot to the little, squat, red-brick, Georgian church
whose two bells rang out so friendly and fussy an admonition to the
faithful to gather within its walls.
Richard had the house to himself. And this accentuation of solitude,
combined with wider space wherein he could range without fear of
observation, was far from unwelcome to him. Last night he had untied
the tag of rusty, black ribbon binding together the packet of tattered,
dog's-eared, little chap-books which for so long had reposed in the
locked drawer of Julius March's study table beneath the guardianship of
the bronze _pieta_. With very conflicting feelings he had mastered the
contents of those same untidy, little volumes, and learned the sordid,
and probably fabulous, tale set forth in them in meanest vehicle of
jingling verse. Vulgarly told to catch the vulgar ear, pandering to the
popular superstitions of a somewhat ignoble age, it proved repugnant
enough--as Julius had anticipated--both to Richard's reason and to his
taste. The critical faculty rejected it as an explanation absurdly
inadequate. The cause was wholly disproportionate to the effect, as
though a mouse should spring forth a mountain instead of a mountain a
mouse. At least that was how the matter struck Richard at first. For
the story was, after all, as he told himself, but a commonplace of life
in every civilised community. Many a man sins thus, and many a woman
suffers, and many bastards are yearly born into the world
without--perhaps unfortunately--subsequent manifestation of the divine
wrath and signal chastisement of the sinner, or of his legitimate
heirs, male or female. Affiliation orders are as well known to
magistrate's clerks, as are death-certificates of children bearing the
maiden name of their mother to those of the registrar.
All that Richard could dispose of, if with a decent deploring of the
frequency of it, yet composedly enough. But there remained that other
part of it. And this he could not dispose of so cursorily. His own
unhappy deformity, it is true, was amply accounted for on lines quite
other than the fulfilment of prophecy, offering, as it did, example of
a class of prenatal accidents which, if rare, is still admittedly
recurrent in the annals of obstetrics and embryology. Nevertheless, the
foretelling of that strange Child of Promise, whose outward aspect and
the circumstances of whose birth--as set forth in the sorry rhyme of
the chap-book--bore such startling resemblance to his own, impressed
him deeply. It astonished, it, in a sense, appalled him. For it came so
very near. It looked him so insistently in the face. It laid strong
hands on him from out the long past, claiming him, associating itself
imperatively with him, asserting, whether he would or no, the actuality
and inalienability of its relation to himself. Science might pour scorn
on that relation, exposing the absurdity of it both from the moral and
physical point of view. But sentiment held other language. And so did
that nobler morality which takes its rise in considerations spiritual
rather than social and economic, and finds the origins and ultimates,
alike, not in things seen and temporal, but in things unseen and
eternal--things which, though they tarry long for accomplishment, can
neither change, nor be denied, nor, short of accomplishment, can pass
away.
And it was this aspect of the whole, strange matter--the thought,
namely, of that same Child of Promise who, predestined to bear the last
and heaviest stroke of retributive justice, should, bearing it rightly,
bring salvation to his race--which obtained with Dickie on the fair
Sunday morning in question. It refused to quit him. It affected him
through all his being. It appealed to the poetry, the idealism, of his
nature--a poetry and idealism not dead, as he had bitterly reckoned
them, though sorely wounded by ill-living and the disastrous issues of
his passion for Helen de Vallorbes. He seemed to apprehend the approach
of some fruitful, far-ranging, profoundly-reconciling and beneficent
event. As in the theatre at Naples, when Morabita sang, and to his
fever-stricken, brain-sick fancy the dull-coloured multitude in the
_parterre_ murmured, buzzing remonstrant as angry swarming bees, so now
a certain exaltation of feeling, exaltation of hope, came upon him. Yet
having grown, through determined rebellion and unlovely experience, not
a little distrustful of all promise of good, he turned on himself
bitterly enough, asking if he would never learn to profit by
hardly-bought, practical knowledge? If he would never contrive to cast
the simpleton wholly out of him? He had been fooled many times, fooled
there at Naples to the point of unpardonable insult and degradation.
What so probable as that he would be fooled again, now?
And so, in effort to shake off both the dominion of unfounded hope, and
the gnawing ache of inward emptiness which made that hope at once so
cruel and so dear, as the sound of wheels dying away along the lime
avenue assured him that the goodly company of church-goers had, verily
and indeed, departed, he set forth on a pilgrimage through the great,
silent house. Passing through the two libraries, the antechamber and
state drawing-room--with its gilded furniture, fine pictures and
tapestries--he reached the open corridor at the stair-head. Here the
polished, oak floor, the massive balusters, and tall, carven
newel-posts--each topped by a guardian griffin, long of tail, ferocious
of beak, and sharp of claw--showed with a certain sober cheerfulness in
the pleasant light. For, through all the great windows of the eastern
front, the sun slanted in obliquely. While in the Chapel-Room beyond,
situated in the angle of the house and thus enjoying a southern as well
as eastern aspect, Richard found a veritable carnival of misty
brightness, so that he moved across to the oriel-window--whose gray,
stone mullions and carved transomes showed delicately mellow of tone
between the glittering, leaded panes--in a glory of welcoming warmth
and sunlight. Frost and snow might linger in the hollows, but here in
the open, on the upland, spring surely had already come.
With the help of a brass ring, riveted by a stanchion into the space of
paneling below the stone window-sill--placed there long ago, when he
was a little lad, to serve him in such case as the present--Richard
drew himself up on to the cushioned bench. He unfastened one of the
narrow, curved, iron-framed casements, and, leaning his elbows on the
sill, looked out. The air was mild. The smell of the earth was sweet,
with a cleanly, wholesome sweetness. The sunshine covered him. And
somehow, whether he would or no, hope reasserted its dominion, and that
exaltation of feeling entered into possession of him once again, as he
rested, gazing away over the familiar home scene, over this land,
which, as far as sight carried, had belonged to his people these many
generations, and was now his own.
Directly below, at the foot of the descending steps of the main
entrance, lay the square, red-walled space of gravel and of turf. He
looked at it curiously, for there, with the maiming and death of Thomas
Calmady's bastard, if legend said truly, all this tragic history of
disaster had begun. There, too, the Clown, race-horse of merry name and
mournful memory, had paid the penalty of wholly involuntary
transgression just thirty years ago. That last was a rather horrible
incident, of which Richard never cared to think. Chifney had told him
about it once, in connection with the parentage of Verdigris--had told
him just by chance. To think of it, even now, made a lump rise in his
throat. Across the turf--offering quaint contrast to those somewhat
bloody memories--the peacocks, in all their bravery of royal
blue-purple, living green and gold, led forth their sober-clad mates.
They had come out from the pepper-pot summer-houses to sun themselves.
They stepped mincingly, with a worldly and disdainful grace, and,
reaching the gravel, their resplendent trains swept the rounded
pebbles, making a small, dry, rattling sound, which, so deep was the
surrounding quiet, asserted itself to the extent of saluting Dickie's
ears. Beyond the red wall the parallel lines of the elm avenue swept
down to the blue and silver levels of the Long Water, the alder copses
bordering which showed black-purple, and the reed-beds rusty as a fox,
against thin stretches of still unmelted snow. The avenue climbed the
farther ascent to the wide archway of the red and gray gate-house, just
short of the top of the long ridge of bare moorland. The grass slopes
of the park, to the left, were backed by the dark, sawlike edge of the
fir forest, and a soft gloom of oak woods, gray-brown and mottled as a
lizard's belly and back, closed the end of the valley eastward. On the
right the terraced gardens, with their ranges of glittering
conservatories, fell away to the sombre pond in the valley, home of
loudly-discoursing companies of ducks. The gentle hillside above was
clothed by plantations, and a grove of ancient beech trees, whose pale,
smooth boles stood out from among undergrowth of lustrous hollies and
the warm russet of fallen leaves. And over it all brooded the
restfulness of the Sabbath, and the gladness of a fair and equal light.
And the charm of the scene worked upon Richard, not with any heat of
excitement, but with a temperate and reasonable grace. For the spirit
of it all was a spirit of temperance, of moderation, of secure
tranquillity--a spirit stoic rather than epicurean, ascetic rather than
hedonic, yet generous, spacious, nobly reasonable, giving ample scope
for very sincere, if soberly-clad pleasures, and for activities by no
means despicable or unmanly, though of a modest, unostentatious sort.
Dickie had tried not a few desperate adventures, had conformed his
thought and action to not a few glaring patterns, rushing to violences
of extreme colour, extreme white and black. All that had proved
preeminently unsuccessful, a most poisonous harvest of Dead Sea fruit.
What, he began to ask himself, if he made an effort to conform it to
the pattern actually presented to him--mellow, sun-visited, with the
brave red of weather stained masonry in it, blue and silver of water
and sky, lustre of sturdy hollies, as well as the solemnity of leafless
woods, finger of frost in the hollows, and bleakness of snow?
And, as he sat meditating thus, breathing the clear air, feeling the
tempered, yet genial, sun-heat, many questions began to resolve
themselves. He seemed to look, as down a long, cloudy vista--beyond the
tumult and unruly clamour, the wayward resistance and defiant sinning,
the craven complainings, the ever-repeated suspicions and