The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
the main road across the park, Brockhurst was substantially the same in
the year of grace 1842, when this truthful history actually opens, as
it had been when Sir Denzil's workmen set the last tier of bricks of
the last twisted chimney-stack in its place. The grand, simple masses
of the house--Gothic in its main lines, but with much of Renaissance
work in its details--still lent themselves to the same broad effects of
light and shadow, as it crowned the southern and western sloping
hillside amid its red-walled gardens and pepper-pot summer-houses, its
gleaming ponds and watercourses, its hawthorn dotted paddocks; its
ancient avenues of elm, of lime, and oak. The same panelings and
tapestries clothed the walls of its spacious rooms and passages; the
same quaint treasures adorned its fine Italian cabinets; the same air
of large and generous comfort pervaded it. As the child of true lovers
is said to bear through life, in a certain glad beauty of person and of
nature, witness to the glad hour of its conception, so Brockhurst, on
through the accumulating years, still bore witness to the fortunate
historic hour in which it was planned.
Yet, since in all things material and mortal there is always a little
spot of darkness, a germ of canker, at least the echo of a cry of
fear--lest life being too sweet, man should grow proud to the point of
forgetting he is, after all, but a pawn upon the board, but the sport
and plaything of destiny and the vast purposes of God--all was not
quite well with Brockhurst. At a given moment of time, the diabolic
element had of necessity obtruded itself. And, in the chronicles of
this delightful dwelling-place, even as in those of Eden itself, the
angels are proven not to have had things altogether their own gracious
way.
The pierced stone parapet, which runs round three sides of the house,
and constitutes, architecturally, one of its most noteworthy features,
is broken in the centre of the north front by a tall, stepped and
sharply pointed gable, flanked on either hand by slender, four-sided
pinnacles. From the niche in the said gable, arrayed in sugar-loaf hat,
full doublet and trunk hose, his head a trifle bent so that the tip of
his pointed beard rests on the pleatings of his marble ruff, a
carpenter's rule in his right hand, Sir Denzil Calmady gazes
meditatively down. Delicate, coral-like tendrils of the Virginian
creeper, which covers the house walls, and strays over the bay windows
of the Long Gallery below, twine themselves yearly about his ankles and
his square-toed shoes. The swallows yearly attempt to fix their gray,
mud nests against the flutings of the scallop-shell canopy sheltering
his bowed head; and are yearly ejected by cautious gardeners armed with
imposing array of ladders and conscious of no little inward reluctance
to face the dangers of so aerial a height.
And here, it may not be unfitting to make further mention of that same
little spot of darkness, germ of canker, echo of the cry of fear, that
had come to mar the fair records of Brockhurst For very certain it was
that among the varying scenes, moving merry or majestic, upon which Sir
Denzil had looked down during the two and a quarter centuries of his
sojourn in the lofty niche of the northern gable, there was one his
eyes had never yet rested upon--one matter, and that a very vital one,
to which had he applied his carpenter's rule the measure of it must
have proved persistently and grievously short.
Along the straight walks, across the smooth lawns, and beside the
brilliant flower-borders of the formal gardens, he had seen generations
of babies toddle and stagger, with gurglings of delight, as they
clutched at glancing bird or butterfly far out of reach. He had seen
healthy, clean-limbed, boisterous lads and dainty, little maidens laugh
and play, quarrel, kiss, and be friends again. He had seen ardent
lovers--in glowing June twilights, while the nightingales shouted from
the laurels, or from the coppices in the park below--driven to the most
desperate straits, to visions of cold poison, of horse-pistols, of
immediate enlistment, or the consoling arms of Betty the housemaid, by
the coquetries of some young lady captivating in powder and patches, or
arrayed in the high-waisted, agreeably-revealing costume which our
grandmothers judged it not improper to wear in their youth. He had seen
husband and wife, too, wandering hand in hand at first, tenderly
hopeful and elate. And then, sometimes, as the years lengthened,--they
growing somewhat sated with the ease of their high estate,--he had seen
them hand in hand no longer, waxing cold and indifferent, debating
even, at moments, reproachfully whether they might not have invested
the capital of their affections to better advantage elsewhere.
All this and much more Sir Denzil had seen, and doubtless measured, for
all that he appears so immovably calm and apart. But that which he had
never yet seen was a man of his name and race, full of years and
honours, come slowly forth from the stately house to sun himself,
morning or evening, in the comfortable shelter of the high, red-brick,
rose-grown garden walls. Looking the while, with the pensive
resignation of old age, at the goodly, wide-spreading prospect. Smiling
again over old jokes, warming again over old stories of prowess with
horse and hound, or rod and gun. Feeling the eyes moisten again at the
memory of old loves, and of those far-away first embraces which seemed
to open the gates of paradise and create the world anew; at
remembrances of old hopes too, which proved still-born, and of old
distresses, which often enough proved still-born likewise,--the whole
of these simplified now, sanctified, the tumult of them stilled, along
with the hot, young blood which went to make them, by the kindly torpor
of increasing age and the approaching footsteps of greatly reconciling
Death.
For Sir Denzil's male descendants, one and all,--so says tradition, so
say too the written and printed family records, the fine monuments in
the chancel of Sandyfield Church, and more than one tombstone in the
yew-shaded church-yard,--have displayed a disquieting incapacity for
living to the permitted "threescore years and ten," let alone
fourscore, and dying decently, in ordinary, commonplace fashion, in
their beds. Mention is made of casualties surprising in number and
variety; and not always, it must be owned, to the moral credit of those
who suffered them. It is told how Sir Thomas, grandson of Sir Denzil,
died miserably of gangrene, caused by a tear in the arm from the antler
of a wounded buck. How his nephew Zachary--who succeeded him--was
stabbed during a drunken brawl in an eating-house in the Strand. How
the brother of the said Zachary, a gallant young soldier, was killed at
the battle of Ramillies in 1706. Dueling, lightning during a summer
storm, even the blue-brown waters of the Brockhurst Lake in turn claim
a victim. Later it is told how a second Sir Denzil, after hard fighting
to save his purse, was shot by highwaymen on Bagshot Heath, when riding
with a couple of servants--not notably distinguished, as it would
appear, for personal valour--from Brockhurst up to town.
Lastly comes Courtney Calmady, who, living in excellent repute until
close upon sixty, seemed destined by Providence to break the evil chain
of the family fate. But he too goes the way of all flesh, suddenly
enough, after a long run with the hounds, owing to the opening of a
wound, received when he was little more than a lad, at the taking of
Frenchtown under General Proctor, during the second American war. So he
too died, and they buried him with much honest mourning, as befitted so
kindly and honourable a gentleman; and his son Richard--of whom more
hereafter--reigned in his stead.
CHAPTER II
GIVING THE VERY EARLIEST INFORMATION OBTAINABLE OF THE HERO OF THIS
BOOK
It happened in this way, towards the end of August, 1842.
In the gray of the summer evening, as the sunset faded and the twilight
gathered, spreading itself tenderly over the pastures and
corn-fields,--over the purple-green glooms of the fir forest--over the
open moors, whose surface is scored for miles by the turf-slane of the
cottager and squatter--over the clear brown streams that trickle out of
the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bogs, and gain volume and
vigour as they sparkle away by woodside, and green-lane, and village
street--and over those secret, bosky places, in the heart of the great
common-lands, where the smooth, white stems and glossy foliage of the
self-sown hollies spring up between the roots of the beech trees, where
plovers cry, and stoat and weazel lurk and scamper, while the old
poacher's lean, ill-favoured, rusty-coloured lurcher picks up a
shrieking hare, and where wandering bands of gypsies--those lithe,
onyx-eyed children of the magic East--still pitch their dirty, little,
fungus-like tents around the camp-fire,--as the sunset died and the
twilight thus softly widened and deepened, Lady Calmady found herself,
for the first time during all the long summer day, alone.
For though no royal personage had graced the occasion with his
presence, nor had bears suffered martyrdom to promote questionably
amiable mirth, Brockhurst, during the past week, had witnessed a series
of festivities hardly inferior to those which marked Sir Denzil's
historic house-warming. Young Sir Richard Calmady had brought home his
bride, and it was but fitting the whole countryside should see her. So
all and sundry received generous entertainment according to their
degree.--Labourers, tenants, school-children. Weary old-age from
Pennygreen poorhouse taking its pleasure of cakes and ale half
suspiciously in the broad sunshine. The leading shopkeepers of
Westchurch and their humbler brethren from Farley Row. All the country
gentry too. Lord and Lady Fallowfeild and a goodly company from Whitney
Park, Lord Denier and a large contingent from Grimshott Place, the
Cathcarts of Newlands, and many more persons of undoubted
consequence--specially perhaps in their own eyes.
Not to mention a small army of local clergy--who ever display a
touching alacrity in attending festivals, even those of a secular
character--with camp-followers, in the form of wives and families,
galore.
And now, at last, all was over,--balls, sports, theatricals,
dinners,--the last in the case of the labourers, with the unlovely
adjunct of an ox roasted whole. Even the final garden-party, designed
to include such persons as it was, socially speaking, a trifle
difficult to place--Image, owner of the big Shotover brewery, for
instance, who was shouldering his way so vigorously towards fortune and
a seat on the bench of magistrates; the younger members of the firm of
Goteway & Fox, Solicitors of Westchurch; Goodall, the Methodist miller
from Parson's Holt, and certain sporting yeoman farmers with their
comely womankind--even this final entertainment, with all its small
triumphs and heart-burnings, flutterings of youthful inexperience,
aspirations, condescensions, had gone, like the rest of the week's
junketings, to swell the sum of things accomplished, of all that which
is past and done with, and will never come again.
Fully an hour ago, Dr. Knott, "under plea of waiting cases, had hitched
his ungainly, thick-set figure into his high gig.
"Plenty of fine folks, eh, Timothy?" he said to the ferret-faced groom
beside him, as he gathered up the reins; and the brown mare, knowing
the hand on her mouth, laid herself out to her work. "Handsome young
couple as anybody need wish to see. Not much business doing there for
me, I fancy, unless it lies in the nursery line."
"Say those Brockhurst folks mostly dies airly, though," remarked
Timothy, with praiseworthy effort at professional encouragement.