The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
when the throne it represents has fallen to ruin? And yet, being very
much a woman, those words of praise came altogether sweetly to
Katherine from the lips of her brother and her son. She moved away,
embarrassed, not quite mistress of herself, sat down on the arm of
Richard's chair, leaned across him and patted the bull-dog--who raised
his heavy head with a grunt, and slapped Dickie smartly in the stomach
with his tail, by way of welcome.
"You dear foolish creatures," she said, "pray talk of something more
profitable. I am growing old, and, in some ways, I am rather thankful
for it. All the same, Dickie, darling, you positively must and shall go
to bed."
But Colonel Ormiston interrupted her. He spoke with a trace of
hesitation, turning to the fireplace and flicking the ash off the end
of his cigar.
"By the bye, Katherine, how's Mary Cathcart? Have you seen her lately?"
"Yes, last week."
"Then she's not gone the way of all flesh and married?"
"No," Lady Calmady answered. She bent a little lower, tracing out the
lines on the dog's wrinkled forehead with her finger. "Several men have
asked her to marry. But there is only one man in the world, I fancy,
whom Mary would ever care to marry--poor Camp, did I tickle you?--and
he, I believe, has not asked her yet."
"Ah! there," Ormiston exclaimed quickly, "you are mistaken."
"Am I?" Katherine said. "I have great faith in Mary. I suppose she was
too wise to accept even him, being not wholly convinced of his love."
Lady Calmady raised her eyes. Ormiston looked very keenly at her. And
Richard, watching them, felt his breath come rather short with
excitement, for he understood that his mother was speaking in riddles.
He observed, moreover, that Colonel Ormiston's face had grown pale for
all its sunburn.
"And so," Katherine went on, "I think the man in question had better be
quite sure of his own heart before he offers it to Mary Cathcart
again."
Ormiston flung his half-smoked cigar into the fire. He came and stood
in front of Richard.
"Look here, old chap," he said, "what do you say to our driving over to
Newlands to-morrow? You can set me right if I've forgotten any of the
turns in the road, you know. And you and Miss Cathcart are great chums,
aren't you?"
"Mother, may I go?" the boy asked.
Lady Calmady kissed his forehead.
"Yes, my dearest," she said. "I will trust you and Uncle Roger to take
care of each other for once. You may go."
The immediate consequence of all which was, that Richard went to bed
that night with a brain rather dangerously active and eyes rather
dangerously bright. So that when sleep at last visited him, it came
burdened with dreams, in which the many impressions and emotions of the
day took altogether too lively a part, causing him to turn restlessly
to and fro, and throw his arms out wide over the cool linen sheets and
pillow.
For there was new element in Dickie's dreams to-night:--namely, a
recurrent distress of helplessness and incapacity of movement, and
therefore of escape, in the presence of some on-coming multitudinous
terror. He was haunted, moreover, by a certain stanza of the ballad of
Chevy Chase. It had given him a peculiar feeling, sickening yet
fascinating, ever since he could remember first to have read it, a
feeling which caused him to dread reading it beforehand, yet made him
turn back to it again and again. And to-night, sometimes Richard was
himself, sometimes his personality seemed merged in that of
Witherington, the crippled fighting-man, of whose maiming and deadly
courage that stanza tells. And the battle was long and fierce, as from
out a background of steeple-shaped, honey-combed rocks and sparse trees
with large golden leaves--like those on the panels of the great,
lacquered cabinets in the Long Gallery--innumerable hordes of fanatic
Chinamen poured down on him, a hideous bedizenment of vermilion
war-devils painted on their blue tunics and banners and shields. And
he, Richard,--or was it he, Witherington?--alone facing them all,--they
countless in number, always changing yet always the same. From under
their hard, upturned hats, a peacock feather erect in each, the cruel,
oblique-eyed, impassive faces stared at him. They pressed him back and
back against the base of a seven-storied pagoda, the wind bells of
which jangled far above him from the angles of its tiers of fluted
roofs. And the sky was black and polished. Yet it was broad, glaring
daylight, every object fearfully distinct. And he was fixed there,
unable to get away because--yes, of course, he was Witherington, so
there was no need of further explanation of that inability of escape.
And still, at the same time, he could see Chifney on the handsome gray
cob, trotting soberly along the green ride, beside the long string of
race-horses coming home from exercise. The young leaves were fragile
and green now, not sparse and metallic, and the April rain splashed in
his face. He tried to call out to Tom Chifney, but the words died in
his throat. If they would only put him on one of those horses! He knew
he could ride, and so be safe and free. He called again. That time his
voice came. They must hear. Were they not his own servants, after all,
and his own horses--or would be soon, when he was grown up? But neither
the trainer, nor the boys so much as turned their heads; and the living
ribbon of brown and chestnut swept on and away out of sight. No one
would heed him, no one would hearken to his cry.
Once his mother and some man, whom he knew yet did not know, passed by
him hand in hand. She wore a white dress, and smiled with a look of
ineffable content. Her companion was tall, gracious in bearing and
movement, but unsubstantial, a luminous shadow merely. Richard could
not see his face. Yet he knew the man was of near kin to him. And to
them he tried to speak. But it was useless. For now he was not Richard
any more. He was not even Witherington, the crippled fighting-man of
the Chevy Chase ballad. He was--he was the winged sea-gull, with wild,
pale eyes, hiding--abject yet fierce--among the vegetable beds in the
Brockhurst kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of
snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston, calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle
insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered up and looked at the bird, and it
crawled away among the cabbages ignominiously, covered with the shame
of its incompleteness and its fallen estate.
And then from out the honey-combed rocks, under the black, polished
sky, the blue tunicked Chinamen swept down on Richard again with the
maddening horror of infinite number. They crushed in upon him, nearer
and nearer, pressing him back against the wall of that evil pagoda. The
air was hot and musky with their breath and thick with the muffled roar
of their countless footsteps. And they came right in on him, trampling
him down, suffocating, choking him with the heat of them and the dead
weight.
Shouting aloud--as it seemed to him--in angry terror, the boy woke. He
sat up trembling, wet with perspiration, bewildered by the struggle and
the wild phantasmagoria of his dream. He pulled open the neck of his
nightshirt, leaned his head against the cool brass rail of the back of
the bedstead, while he listened with growing relief to the rumble of
the wind in the chimney, and the swish of the rain against the
casements, and watched the narrow line of light under the door of his
mother's room.
Yes, he was Richard Calmady, after all, here in his own sheltered
world, among those who had loved and served him all his life. Nothing
hurtful could reach him here, nothing of which he need be afraid. There
was no real meaning in that ugly dream.
And then Dickie paused a moment, still sitting up in the warm darkness,
pressing his hands down on the mattress on either side to keep himself
from slipping. For involuntarily he recalled the feeling which had
prompted his declaration that he was glad his father had never seen
him; recalled his unwillingness to walk, lest he should meet Ormiston
unexpectedly; recalled the instinct which, even during that glorious
time in the Gun-Room, had impelled him to keep the embroidered
_couvre-pieds_ carefully over his legs and feet. And, recalling these
things, poor Dickie arrived at conclusions regarding himself which he
had happily avoided arriving at before. For they were harsh
conclusions, causing him to cower down in the bed, and bury his face in
the pillows to stifle the sound of the tearing sobs which would come.
Alas! was there not only too real a meaning in that same ugly dream and
that shifting of personality? He understood, while his body quivered
with the anguish of it, that he had more in common with, and was
nearer, far nearer, to the maimed fighting-man of the old ballad, even
to the poor seagull robbed of its power of flight, than to all those
dear people whose business in life it seemed to pet and amuse him, and
to minister to his every want--to the handsome soldier uncle, whose
home-coming had so excited him, to Julius March, his indulgent tutor,
to Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, his delightful companion, to Clara, his
obedient playfellow, to brown-eyed Mary Cathcart, and even to his
lovely mother herself!
Thus did the bitter winds of truth, which blow forever across the
world, first touch Richard Calmady, cutting his poor boyish pride as
with a whip. But he was very young. And the young, mercifully, know no
such word as the inevitable; so that the wind of truth is ever tempered
for them--the first smart of it over--by the sunshine of ignorant and
unlimited hope.
CHAPTER III
CONCERNING THAT WHICH, THANK GOD, HAPPENS ALMOST EVERY DAY
The merry spring sky was clear, save in the south where a vast
perspective of dappled cloud lay against it, leaving winding rivers of
blue here and there, as does ribbed sand for the incoming tide. As the
white gate of the inner park--the gray unpainted palings ranging far
away to right and left--swung to behind them, and Henry the groom,
after a smart run, clambered up into his place again beside Camp on the
back seat of the double dog-cart, Richard's spirits rose. Straight
ahead stretched out the long vista of that peculiar glory of
Brockhurst, its avenue of Scotch firs. The trunks of them, rough-barked
and purple below, red, smooth and glistering above, shot up some thirty
odd feet--straight as the pillars of an ancient temple--before the
branches, sweeping outward and downward, met, making a whispering,
living canopy overhead, through which the sunshine fell in tremulous
shafts, upon the shining coats and gleaming harness of the horses, upon
Ormiston's clear-cut, bronzed face and upright figure, and upon the
even, straw-coloured gravel of the road. The said road is raised by
about three feet above the level of the land on either side. On the
left, the self-sown firs grow in close ranks. The ground below them is
bare but for tussocks of coarse grass and ruddy beds of fallen fir
needles. On the right, the fir wood is broken by coppices of
silver-stemmed birches, and spaces of heather--that shows a
purple-brown against the gray of the reindeer moss out of which it
springs. Tits swung and frolicked among the tree-tops, and a jay flew
off noisily with a flash of azure wing-coverts and volley of harsh
discordant cries.
The rapid movement, the moist, pungent odour of the woodland, the
rhythmical trot of the horses, the rattle of the splinter-bar chains as
the traces slackened going downhill, above all the presence of the man
beside him, were pleasantly stimulating to Richard Calmady. The boy was
still a prey to much innocent enthusiasm. It appeared to him, watching
Ormiston's handling of the reins and whip, there was nothing this man
could not do, and do skilfully, yet all with the same easy unconcern.