The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
nobility of character was great and the worldly aspect, the greed of
personal power and undisputed rule, could not affect her for long. It
wounded her, as a slight upon the memory of the man she had so wholly
loved, that this first conflict between Richard and herself should turn
on the question of horses and the racing-stable. The irony of the
position appeared unpardonable. And then, the vision of poor
Richard--her darling, whom she had striven so jealously to shield ever
since the day, over thirteen years ago, when undressing her baby she
had first looked upon its malformed limbs--Richard riding forth for all
the staring, mocking world to see, again arose before her.
Thinking of all this, Katherine gazed out over the stately home
scene--grass plot and gardens, woodland and distant landscape, rich in
the golden splendour of steady sunshine--with smarting eyes and a sense
of impotent misery that wrapped her about as a burning garment. The boy
was beginning to go his own way. And his way was not hers. And those
she had trusted were disloyal, helping him to go it. Alone, in
retirement, she had borne her great trouble with tremendous courage.
But how should she bear it under changed conditions, amid publicity,
gossip, comment?
Dickie, meanwhile, had let himself drop back against the pillows. He
set his teeth and waited. It was hard. An opportunity of escape from
the galling restraints of his infirmity had been presented to him, and
his mother--his mother after promise given, after the sympathy of a
lifetime; his mother, in whom he trusted absolutely--was unwilling he
should accept it! As he lay there all the desperate longing for freedom
and activity that had developed in him of late--all the passion for
sport, for that primitive, half-savage manner of life, that intimate,
if somewhat brutal, relation to nature, to wild creatures and to the
beasts whom man by centuries of usage has broken to his service, which
is the special heritage of Englishmen of gentle blood--sprang up in
Richard, strong, all compelling. He must have his part in all this. He
would not be denied. He cried out to her imperiously:--
"Mother, speak to me! I haven't done anything really wrong. I've a
right to do what any other boy has--as far as I can get it. Don't you
see riding is just the one thing to--to make up--to make a man of me?
Don't you see that?"
He sat bolt upright, stretching out his arms to her in fierce appeal,
while the level sunshine touched his bright hair and wildly eager face.
"Mummy, mummy darling, don't you see? Try to see. You can't want to
take away my one chance!"
Katherine turned at that reiterated cry, and her heart melted within
her. The boy was her own, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. From
her he had life. From her he had also lifelong disgrace and
deprivation. Was there anything then, which, he asking, she could
refuse to give? She cast herself on her knees beside the bed again and
buried her face in the sheet.
"My precious one," she sobbed, "forgive me. I am ashamed, for I have
been both harsh and weak. I said I would help you, and then directly I
fail you. Forgive me."
And the boy was amazed, speechless at first, seeing her broken thus;
shamed in his turn by the humility of her attitude. To his young
chivalry it was as an impiety to look upon her tears.
"Please don't cry, mother," he entreated tremulously, a childlike
simplicity of manner taking him. "Don't cry--it is dreadful. I never
saw you cry before."--Then, after a pause, he added: "And--never mind
about my riding. I don't so very much care about it--really, I don't
believe I do--after all."
At that dear lie Katherine raised her bowed head, a wonderful sweetness
in her tear-stained face, tender laughter upon her lips. She drew the
boy's hands on to her shoulders, clasped her hands across his extended
arms, and kissed him upon the mouth.
"No, no, my beloved, you shall ride," she said. "You shall have your
saddle--twenty thousand saddles if you want them. We will talk to Uncle
Roger and Chifney to-night. All shall be as you wish."
"But you're not angry, mother, any more?" he asked, a little bewildered
by her change of tone and by the passion of her lovely looks and
speech.
Katherine shook her head, and still that tender laughter curved her
lips.
"No, I am never going to be angry any more--with you at least, Dick. I
must learn to be plucky too. A pair of us, Dickie, trying to keep up
one another's pluck! Only let us go forward hand in hand, you and I,
and then, however desperate our doings, I at least shall be content."
CHAPTER VIII
TELLING, INCIDENTALLY, OF A BROKEN-DOWN POSTBOY AND A COUNTRY FAIR
The Brockhurst-mail phaeton waited, in the shade of the three large
sycamores, before Appleyard's shop at Farley Row. A groom stood stiff
and straight at the horses' heads. While upon the high driving-seat, a
trifle excited by the suddenness of his elevation, sat Richard. He held
the reins in his right hand, and stretched his left to get the cramp
out of his fingers. His arms ached--there was no question about it. He
had never driven a pair before, and the horses needed a lot of driving.
For the wind was gusty, piling up heavy masses of black-purple
rain-cloud in the southeast. It made the horses skittish and unsteady,
and Dickie found it was just all he could do to hold them, so that
Chifney's reiterated admonition, "Keep 'em well in hand, Sir Richard,"
had been not wholly easy to obey.
From out the open shop-door came mingled odour of new leather and of
horse clothing. Within Mr. Chifney delivered himself of certain orders;
while Appleyard--a small, fair man, thin of nose, a spot of violent
colour on either cheek-bone--skipped before him goat-like, in a fury of
complacent intelligence. For it was not every day so notable a
personage as the Brockhurst trainer crossed his threshold. To Josiah
Appleyard, indeed--not to mention his two apprentices stretching eyes
and ears from the back-shop, to catch any chance word of Mr. Chifney's
conversation--it appeared as though the gods very really condescended
to visit the habitations of men. While Mrs. Appleyard, peeping from
behind the wire blind of the parlour, had--as she afterwards repeatedly
declared--"felt her insides turn right over," when she saw the carriage
draw up. The conversation was prolonged and low toned. For the order
was of a peculiar and confidential character, demanding much
explanation on the one part, much application on the other. It was an
order, in short, wholly flattering to the self-esteem of the saddler,
both as tribute to his social discretion and his technical skill. Thus
did Josiah skip goat-like, being glad.
Meanwhile, Richard Calmady waited without, resting his aching arms,
gazing down the wide, dusty street, his senses lulled by the flutter of
the sycamore leaves overhead. The said street offered but small matter
of interest. For Farley Row is one of those dead-alive little towns on
the borders of the forest land, across which progress, even at the time
in question, 1856, had written Ichabod in capital letters. During the
early years of the century some sixty odd coaches, plying upon the
London and Portsmouth road, would stop to change horses at the White
Lion in the course of each twenty-four hours. That was the golden age
of the Row. Horns twanged, heavy wheels rumbled, steaming teams were
led away, with drooping heads, into the spacious inn yard, and fresh
horses stepped out cheerily to take their place between the traces. The
next stage across Spendle Flats was known as a risky one. Legends of
Claude Duval and his fellow-highwaymen still haunt the woods and moors
that top the long hill going northward. And the passengers by those
sixty coaches were wont to recover themselves from terrors escaped, or
fortify themselves against terrors to come, by plentiful libations at
the bar of the handsome red-brick inn. The house did a roaring trade.
But now the traffic upon the great road had assumed a local and
altogether undemonstrative character. The coaches had fallen into
lumber, the spanking teams had each and all made their squalid last
journey to the knacker's; and the once famous Gentlemen of the Road had
long lain at rest in mother earth's lap--sleeping there none the less
peacefully because the necks of many of them had suffered a nasty rick
from the hangman's rope, and because the hard-trodden pavement of the
prison-yard covered them.
The fine stables of the White Lion stood tenantless, now, from year's
end to year's end. Rats scampered, and bats squeaked in unlovely
ardours of courtship, about the ranges of empty stalls and cobweb-hung
rafters. Yet one ghost from out the golden age haunted the place
still--a lean, withered, bandy-legged, little stick of a man, arrayed
in frayed and tarnished splendour of sky-blue waist-jacket, silver
lace, and jack-boots of which the soles and upper leathers threatened
speedy and final divorce. In all weathers this bit of human
wreckage--Jackie Deeds by name--might be seen wandering aimlessly about
the vacant yard, or seated upon the bench beside the portico of the
silent, bow-windowed inn, pulling at a, too often empty, clay-pipe and
spitting automatically.
Over Richard, tender-hearted as yet towards all creatures whom nature
or fortune had treated cavalierly, the decrepit postboy exercised a
fascination. One day, when driving through the Row with Mary Cathcart,
he had succeeded in establishing relations with Jackie Deeds through
the medium of a half-crown. And now, as he waited beneath the rustling
sycamores, it was with a sensation of quick, yet half-shy, pleasure,
that he saw the disreputable figure lurch out of the inn yard, stand
for a minute shading eyes with hand while making observations, and then
hobble across the street, touching the peak of a battered, black-velvet
cap as it advanced.
"Be 'e come to zee the show, sir?" the old man coughed out, peering
with dim, blear eyes up into the boy's fresh face.
"No, we've come about something from Appleyard's. I--I didn't know
there was a show."
"Oh! bain't there though, Sir Richard! I tell 'e there be a prime sight
of a show. There be monkeys down town, and dorgs what dances on their
'inder legs, and gurt iron cages chock full er wild beastises, by what
they tells me."
Dickie, feeling anxiously in his pockets for some coin of sufficient
size to be worthy of Mr. Deeds' acceptance, ejaculated involuntarily:--"Oh!
are there? I'd give anything to see them."
"Sixpence 'ud do most er they 'ere shows, I expect. The wild beastises
'ud run into a shilling may be."--The old postboy made a joyless,
creaking sound, bearing but slightest affinity to laughter. "But you
'ud see your way round more'n a shilling, Sir Richard. A terrible,
rich, young gentleman, by what they tells me."
Something a trifle malicious obtained in this attempt at jocosity,
causing Dickie to bend down rather hastily over the wheel, and thrust
his offering into the crumpled, shaky hands.
"There," he said. "Oh! it's nothing. I'm so pleased you--you don't
mind. Where do you say this show is?"
"Gor a'mighty bless 'e, sir," the old man whimpered, with a change of
tone. "'Tain't every day poor old Jackie Deeds runs across a rich,
young gentleman as ull give him 'arf a crown. Times is bad, mortal
bad--couldn't be much wuss."
"I'm so sorry," Richard answered. He felt apologetic, as though in some
manner responsible for the decay of the coaching system and his
companion's fallen estate.
"Mortal bad, couldn't be no wuss."
"I'm very sorry. But about the show--where is it please?" the boy asked
again, a little anxious to change the subject.
"Oh! that there show. 'Tain't much of a show neither, by what they
tells me."