The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
Indeed, the present position was so agreeable to him that Dickie's
spirits would have risen to an unusual height, but for a certain
chastening of the flesh in the shape of the occasional pressure of a
broad strap against his middle, which brought him unwelcome remembrance
of recent discoveries it was his earnest desire to ignore, still better
to forget.
For just at starting there had been a rather bad moment. Winter, having
settled him on the seat of the dog-cart, was preparing to tuck him in
with many rugs, when Ormiston said--
"Look here, dear old chap, I've been thinking about this, and upon my
word you don't seem to me very safe. You see this is a different matter
to your donkey-chair, or the pony-carriage. There's no protection at
the side, and if the horses shied or anything--well, you'd be in the
road. And I can't afford to spill you the first time we go out
together, or there'd be a speedy end of all our fun."
Richard tried to emulate his uncle's cool indifference, and take the
broad strap as a matter of course. But he was glad the tongue of the
buckle slipped so directly into place; and that Henry's attention was
engaged with the near horse, which fretted at standing; and that
Leonard, the footman, was busy making Camp jump up at the back; and
that his mother, who had been watching him from the lowest of the wide
steps, turned away and went up to the flight to join Julius March
standing under the gray arcade. As the horses sprang forward,
clattering the little pebbles of the drive against the body of the
carriage, and swung away round the angle of the house, Katherine came
swiftly down the steps again smiling, kissing her hand to him. Still,
the strap hurt--not poor Dickie's somewhat ill-balanced body, to which
in truth it lent an agreeable sense of security, but his, just then,
all too sensitive mind. So that, notwithstanding a fine assumption of
gaiety, as he kissed his hand in return, he found the dear vision of
his mother somewhat blurred by foolish tears which he had resolutely to
wink away.
But now that disquieting incident was left nearly ten minutes behind.
The last park gate and its cluster of mellow-tinted thatched cottages
was past. Not only out-of-doors and all the natural exhilaration of it,
but the spectacle of the world beyond the precincts of the park--into
which world he, in point of fact, so rarely penetrated--wooed him to
interest and enjoyment. To Dickie, whose life through his mother's
jealous tenderness and his own physical infirmity had been so
singularly circumscribed, there was an element, slightly pathetic, of
discovery and adventure in this ordinary afternoon drive.
He did not want to talk. He was too busy simply seeing, everything food
for those young eyes and brain so greedy of incident and of beauty. He
sat upright and stared at the passing show.--At the deep lane, its
banks starred with primroses growing in the hollows of the gnarled
roots of oaks and ash trees. At Sandyfield rectory, deep-roofed,
bow-windowed, the red walls and tiles of it half smothered in ivy and
coton-easter. At the low, squat-towered, Georgian church, standing in
its acre of close-packed graveyard, which is shadowed by yew trees and
by the clump of three enormous Scotch firs in the rectory garden
adjoining. At the Church Farm, just beyond--a square white house, the
slated roofs of it running up steeply to a central block of chimneys,
it having, in consequence, somewhat the effect of a monster
extinguisher. At the rows of pale, wheat stacks, raised on granite
straddles; at the prosperous barns, yards, and stables, built of wood
on brick foundations, that surround it, presenting a mass of rich,
solid colour and of noisy, crowded, animal life. At the fields, plough
and pasture, marked out by long lines of hedgerow trees, broken by
coppices--these dashed with tenderest green--stretching up and back to
the dark purple-blue range of the moorland. At scattered cottages, over
the gates of whose gardens gay with daffodils and polyanthus, groups of
little girls and babies, in flopping sunbonnets and scanty lilac
pinafores, stared back at the passing carriage, and then bobbed the
accustomed curtsy. In the said groups were no boys, save of infant
years. The boys were away shepherding, or to plough, or bird-minding.
For as yet education was free indeed--in the sense that you were free
to take it, or leave it, as suited your pocket and your fancy.
Richard stared too at the pleasant, furze-dotted commons, spinning away
to right and left as the horses trotted sharply onward--commons whereon
meditative donkeys endured rather than enjoyed existence, after the
manner of their kind; and prodigiously large families of yellow-gray
goslings streeled after the flocks of white geese, across spaces of
fresh sprung grass around shallow ponds, in which the blue and dapple
of the sky was reflected. He stared at Sandyfield village too--a
straight street of detached houses, very diverse in colour and in
shape, standing back, for the most part, amid small orchards and
gardens that slope gently up from the brook, which last, backed, here
by a row of fine elms, there by one of Lombardy poplars, borders the
road. Three or four shops, modest in size as they are ambitious in the
variety of objects offered for sale in them, advance their windows
boldly. So does the yellow-washed inn, the Calmady arms displayed upon
its swinging sign-board. A miller's tented waggon, all powdery with
flour, and its team of six horses, brave with brass harness and bells,
a timber-carriage, and a couple of spring-carts, were drawn up on the
half-moon of gravel before the porch; while, from out the open door,
came a sound of voices and odour of many pipes and much stale beer.
And Richard had uninterrupted leisure to bestow on all this seeing, for
his companion, Colonel Ormiston, was preoccupied and silent. Once or
twice he looked down at the boy as though suddenly remembering his
presence and inquired if he was "all right." But it was not until they
had crossed the long, white-railed bridge, at the end of Sandyfield
street--which spans not only the little brown river overhung by
black-stemmed alders, but a bit of marsh, reminiscent of the ancient
ford, lush with water grasses, beds of king-cups, and broad-leaved
docks--not until then did Colonel Ormiston make sustained effort at
conversation. Beyond the bridge the road forks.
"Left to Newlands, isn't it?" he asked sharply.
Then, as the carriage swept round the turn, he woke up from his long
reverie; waking Richard up also, from his long dream of mere seeing, to
human drama but dimly apprehended close there at his side.
"Oh, well, well!" the man exclaimed, throwing back his head in sharp
impatience, as a horse will against the restraint of the bearing-rein.
He raised his eyebrows, while his lips set in a smile the reverse of
gay. Then he looked down at Richard again, an unwonted softness in his
expression.
"Been happy?" he said. "Enjoyed your drive? That's right. You
understand the art of being really good company, Dick."
"What's that?"
"Allowing other people to be just as bad company as they like."
"I--I don't see how you could be bad company," Dickie said, flushing at
the audacity of his little compliment.
"Don't you, dear old chap? Well, that's very nice of you. All the same,
I find, at times, I can be precious bad company to myself."
"Oh! but I don't see how," the boy argued, his enthusiasm protesting
against all possibility of default in the object of it. Richard wanted
to keep his hands down,--unconsciousness, if only assumed, told for
personal dignity--but in the agitation of protest, spite of himself, he
laid hold of the top edge of that same chastening strap. "It must be so
awfully jolly to be like you--able to do everything and go everywhere.
There must be such a lot to think about."
The softness was still upon Ormiston's face. "Such a lot?" he said. "A
jolly lot too much, believe me, very often, Dick."
He looked away up the copse-bordered road, over the ears of the
trotting horses.
"You've read the story of Blue Beard and that unpleasant locked-up room
of his, where the poor little wives hung all of a row? Well, I'm sorry
to say, Dick, most men when they come to my age have a room of that
sort. It's an inhospitable place. One doesn't invite one's friends to
dine and smoke there. At least no gentleman does. I've met one or two
persons who set the door open and rather gloried in inviting
inspection--but they were blackguards and cads. They don't count. Still
each of us is obliged to go in there sometimes himself. I tell you it's
anything but lively. I've been in there just now."
The dappled cloud creeping upward from the southern horizon veiled the
sun, the light of which grew pale and thin. The scent of the larch
wood, on the right, hung in the air. Richard's eyes were wide with
inquiry. His mind suffered growing-pains, as young minds of any
intellectual and poetic worth needs must. The possibility of moral
experience, incalculable in extent as that golden-gray outspread of
creeping, increasing vapour overhead, presented itself to him. The
vastness of life touched him to fear. He struggled to find a limit,
clothing his effort in childish realism of statement.
"But in that locked-up room, Uncle Roger, you can't have dead
women--dead wives."
Ormiston laughed quietly.
"You hit out pretty straight from the shoulder, master Dick," he said.
"Happily I can reassure you on one point. All manner of things are hung
up in there--some ugly--almost all ugly, now, to my eyes, though some
of them had charming ways with them once upon a time. But, I give you
my word, neither ugly nor charming, dead nor alive, are there any
wives."
The boy considered a moment, then said stoutly, "I wouldn't go in there
again. I'd lock the door and throw away the key."
"Wait till your time comes! You'll find that is precisely what you
can't do."
"Then I'd fetch them out, once and for all, and bury them."
The carriage had turned in at the lodge gate. Soon a long, low, white
house and range of domed conservatories came into view.
"Heroic remedies!" Ormiston remarked, amused at the boy's vehemence.
"But no doubt they do succeed now and then. To tell you the truth,
Dick, I have been thinking of something of the kind myself. Only I'm
afraid I shall need somebody to help me in carrying out so extensive a
funeral."
"Anybody would be glad enough to help you," Richard declared, with a
strong emphasis on the pronoun.
"Ah! but the bother is anybody can't help one. Only one person in all
this great rough and tumble of a world can really help one. And often
one finds out who that person is a little bit too late. However, here
we are. Perhaps we shall know more about it all in the next half hour,
if these good people are at home."
In point of fact the good people in question were not at home.
Ormiston, holding reins and whip in one hand, felt for his card-case.
"So we've had our journey for nothing you see, Dick," he said.
And to Richard the words sounded regretful. Moreover, the drama of this
expedition seemed to him shorn of its climax. He knew there should be
something more, and pushed for it.
"You haven't asked for Mary," he said. "And I thought we came on
purpose to see Mary. She won't like us to go away like this. Do ask."
Colonel Ormiston's expression altered, hardened. And Richard, in his
present hypersensitive state, remembered the cool scrutiny bestowed on
the winged sea-gull of his dream last night. This man had seemed so
near him just now, while they talked. Suddenly he became remote again,
all understanding of him shut away by that slight insolence of bearing.
Still he did as Richard prayed him. Miss Cathcart was at home. She had