The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he learned
even more than he taught, under this fire of cross-examination. He had
never come intimately in contact with a child's mind before; and
Dickie's daring speculations and suggestions opened up very surprising
vistas at times. The boy was a born adventurer; a gaily audacious
sceptic moreover, notwithstanding his large swallow for romance, until
his own morsel of reason and sense of dramatic fitness were satisfied.
And so, having once apprehended that idea of payment, he searched for
justification of it instinctively in all he saw and read. He found it
again in the immortal story of the siege of Troy, and in the long
wanderings and manifold trials of that most experimental of
philosophers, the great Ulysses. He found it too in more modern and
more authentic history--in the lives of Galileo and Columbus, of Sir
Walter Raleigh and many another hero and heroine, of whom, because of
some unusual excellence of spirit or attainment, their fellow-men, and,
as it would seem, the very gods themselves, have grown jealous, not
enduring to witness a beauty rivalling or surpassing their own.
The idea was all confused as yet, coloured by childish fancies,
instinctive merely, not realised. Yet it occupied a very actual place
in the little boy's mind. He lingered over it silently, caressing it,
returning to it again and again in half-frightened delight. It lent a
fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and unsightly
creatures--to blind worms and slow-moving toads; to trapped cats and
dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged sea-gull, property of
Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners, that paced, picking up loathsome
living in the matter of slugs and snails, about the cabbage beds, all
the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of the freedom of the sea
in its wild, pale eyes.
It further provoked Dickie to expend all his not inconsiderable gift of
draughtsmanship, in the production of long processions of half-human
monsters of a grotesque and essentially uncomfortable character. He
scribbled these upon all available pieces of paper, including the
fly-leaves of Todhunter's Arithmetic, and of his Latin and Greek
primers. In an evil hour, for the tidiness of his school-books, he came
across the ballad of "Aiken-Drum," with its rather terrible mixture of
humour, realism, and the supernatural. From thenceforth for some
weeks--though he adroitly avoided giving any direct account of the
origin of these grisly imaginative freaks--many margins were adorned,
or rather defaced, by fancy portraits of that "foul and stalwart
ghaist" the Brownie of Badnock.
So did Dickie dwell, through all his childhood and the early years of
youth, in the dear land of dreams, petted, considered, sheltered with
perhaps almost cruel kindness, from the keen winds of truth that blow
forever across the world. Which winds, while causing all to suffer and
bringing death to the weak and fearful, to the lovers of lies and the
makers of them, go in the end to strengthen the strong who dare face
them, and fortify these in the acceptance of the only knowledge really
worth having--namely, the knowledge that romance is no exclusive
property of the past, or eternal life of the future, but that both
these are here immediately and actually for whoso has eyes to see and
courage to possess.
The fairest dreams are true. Yet it is so ordered that to know that we
must awake from them. And the awakening is an ugly process enough, too
often. When Dickie was about thirteen, the awakening began for him. It
came in time-honoured forms--those of horses and of a woman.
CHAPTER II
IN WHICH OUR HERO IMPROVES HIS ACQUAINTANCE WITH MANY THINGS--HIMSELF
INCLUDED
It came about in this wise. Roger Ormiston was expected at Brockhurst,
after an absence of some years. He had served with distinction in the
Sikh war; and had seen fighting on a grand scale in the battles of
Sobraon and Chillianwallah. Later, the restless genius of travel had
taken hold on him, leading him far eastward into China, and northward
across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and
looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and
learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering
fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible
beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all
this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston
was, to him, as the return of the mighty Ulysses himself.
For a change was coming over the boy. He began to weary of fable and
cry out for fact. He had just entered his fourteenth year. He was
growing fast; and, but for that dwarfing deformity, would have been
unusually tall, graceful and well-proportioned. But along with this
increase of stature had come a listlessness and languor which troubled
Lady Calmady. The boy was sweet-tempered enough, had his hours, indeed,
of overflowing fun and high spirits. Still he was restless and tired
easily of each occupation in turn. He developed a disquieting relish
for solitude; and took to camping-out on one of the broad window-seats
of the Long Gallery, in company with volumes of Captain Cook's and
Hakluyt's voyages, old-time histories of sport and natural history; not
to mention Robinson Crusoe and the merry but doubtfully decent pages of
Geoffrey Gambado. And his mother noted, not without a sinking of the
heart, that the window-seat, which in his solitary moods Dickie most
frequented, was precisely that one of the eastern bay which
commanded--beyond the smooth, green expanse and red walls of the
troco-ground--a good view of the grass ride, running parallel with the
lime avenue, along which the horses from the racing stables were taken
out and back, morning and evening, to the galloping ground. Then fears
began to assail Katherine that the boy's childhood, the content and
repose of it, were nearly past. Small wonder that her heart should
sink!
On the day of her brother's return, Katherine, after rather anxious
search, so found Richard. He was standing on the book-strewn
window-seat. He had pushed open the tall narrow casement and leaned
out. The April afternoon was fitfully bright. A rainbow spanned the
landscape, from the Long Water in the valley to the edge of the forest
crowning the table-land. Here and there showers of rain fell, showing
white against huge masses of purple cloud piled up along the horizon.
And as Katherine drew near, threading her way carefully between the
Chinese cabinets, oriental jars, and many quaint treasures furnishing
the end of the great room, she saw that, along the grass ride, some
twenty race-horses, came streeling homeward in single file--a long line
of brown, chestnut, black, and of the raw yellows and scarlets of
horse-clothing against the delicate green of springing turf and opening
leaves. Beside them, clad in pepper-and-salt mixture, breeches and
gaiters complete, Mr. Chifney pricked forward soberly on his handsome
gray cob. The boys called to one another now and then, admonished a
fretful horse breaking away from the string. One of them whistled
shrilly a few bars of that then popular but undistinguished tune, "Pop
goes the weazel." And Richard craned far out, steadying himself against
the stone mullion on either side with uplifted hands, heedless alike of
his mother's presence and of the heavy drops of rain which splattered
in at the open casement.
"Dickie, Dickie," Katherine called, in swift anxiety. "Be careful. You
will fall."
She came close, putting her arm round him. "You reckless darling," she
went on; "don't you see how dangerous the least slip would be?"
The boy straightened himself and looked round at her. His blue eyes
were alight. All the fitful brightness, all the wistful charm of the
April evening was in his face.
"But it's the only place where I can see them, and they're such
beauties," he said. "And I want to see them so much. You know we always
miss them somehow, mummy, when we go out."
Katherine was off her guard. Three separate strains of feeling
influenced her just then. First, her growing recognition of the change
in Richard, of that passing away of childhood which could not but make
for difficulty and, in a sense, for pain. Secondly, the natural
excitement of her brother's homecoming, disturbing the monotony of her
daily life, bringing, along with very actual joy, memories of a past,
well-beloved yet gone beyond recall. Lastly, the practical and
immediate fear that Dickie had come uncommonly near tumbling
incontinently out of the window. And so, being moved, she held the boy
tightly and answered rather at random, thereby provoking fate.
"Yes, my dearest, I know we always miss them somehow when we go out. It
is best so. But do pray be more careful with these high windows."
"Oh! I'm all right--I'm careful enough." His glance had gone back to
where the last of the horses passed out of sight behind the red wall of
the gardens. "But why is it best so? Ah! they're gone!" he exclaimed.
Katherine sat down on the window-seat, and Richard, clinging on to the
window-ledge, while she still held him, lowered himself into a sitting
position beside her.
"Thank you, mummy," he said. And the words cut her. They came so often
in each day, and always with the same little touch of civil dignity.
The courtesy of Richard's recognition of help given, failed to comfort
her for the fact that help was so constantly required. Lady Calmady's
sense of rebellion arose and waxed strong whenever she heard those
thanks.
"Mother," he went on, "I want to ask you something. You won't mind?"
"Do I ever mind you questioning me?" Yet she felt a certain tightening
about her heart.
"Ah, but this is different! I've wanted to for a long while, but I did
not know if I ought--and yet I did not quite like to ask Auntie Marie
or Julius. And, of course, one doesn't speak to the servants about
anything of that sort."
Richard's curly head went up with a fine, little air of pride as he
said the last few words. His mother smiled at him. There was no doubt
as to her son's breeding.
"Well, what then?" she said.
"I want to know--you're sure you don't mind--why you dislike the
horses, and never go to the stables or take me there? If the horses are
wrong, why do we keep them? And if they're not wrong, why, mother,
don't you see, we may enjoy them, mayn't we?"
He flushed, looking up at her, spoke coaxingly, merrily, a trifle
embarrassed by his own temerity, yet keen to prove his point and
acquire possession of this so coveted joy.
Katherine hesitated. She was tempted to put aside his question with
some playful excuse. And yet, where was the use? The question must
inevitably be answered one day; and Katherine, as had been said, was
moved just now, dumbness of long habit somewhat melted. Perhaps this
was the appointed time. She drew her arm from around the boy and took
both his hands in hers.
"My dearest," she said, "our keeping the horses is not wrong. But--one
of the horses killed your father."
Richard's lips parted. His eyes searched hers.
"But how?" he asked presently.
"He was trying it at a fence, and it came down with him--and trampled
him."
There was a pause. At last the boy asked rather breathlessly: "Was he
killed then, mother, at once?"
It had been Katharine's intention to state the facts simply, gravely,
and without emotion. But to speak of these things, after so long
silence, proved more trying than she had anticipated. The scene in the
red drawing-room, the long agony of waiting and of farewell rose up
before her after all these years with a vividness and poignancy that
refused to be gain-said.