The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
denial. She owned she had robbed her mistress of a shilling here and
sixpence there, that she had taken now a bit of table silver and then a
garment to the pawn-shop. How could she help it? Her wages were a
trifle, since her character was damaged. Wasn't it a charity to employ
a girl like her at all, so her mistress said? And yet the child must
live. And Richard Calmady, sitting in judgment there, with those four
other gentlemen of substantial means and excellent position, sickened
as he listened to the sordid details, the relentless elementary
arguments. For the girl, awed and frightened at first, grew eloquent in
self-defense.--"She loved him"--he being a smart young fellow, who,
with excellent recommendations from Chifney, had left the Brockhurst
stables some two years before, to take service in Westchurch.--"And he
always spoke her fair. Had told her he'd marry her right enough, after
a bit--before God he would. But it would ruin his chance of first-class
places if he married yet. The gentry wouldn't take any but single men
of his age. A wife would stand in his way. And she didn't want to stand
in his way--he knew her better than that. Not but that he reckoned her
just as much his wife as any woman could be. Of course he did. What a
silly she was to trouble about it. And then when there was no hiding
any longer how it was with her, he up and awayed to London, saying he
would make a home for her there. And he kept on writing for a bit, but
he never told her where to write to him in return, so she couldn't
answer. And then his letters came seldom, and then stopped altogether,
and then--and then----"
The girl was rebuked for her much speaking, and so wasting the time of
the court. There were other cases. And Richard Calmady sickened yet
more, recognising in that a parable of perpetual application. For are
there not always other cases? The tragedy of the individual life
reaching its climax seems, to the chief actor, worthy to claim and hold
universal attention. Yet the sun never stands still in heaven, nor do
the footsteps of men tarry upon earth. No one person may take up too
much space, too much time. The movement of things is not stayed. The
single cry, however bitter, is drowned in the roar of the pushing
crowd. The individual, however keen his griefs, however heinous the
offense done him, must make way for those same other cases. This is the
everlasting law.
And so pained, out of tune, troubled too by smouldering fires of anger,
Richard left Westchurch and his fellow-magistrates as early as he
decently could. Avoiding the highroad leading by Newlands and through
Sandyfield village, he cut across country by field lanes and over waste
lands to Farley Row. The wide quiet of the autumn afternoon, the slight
chill in the air, were grateful to him after the noise and close
atmosphere of the court. Yet the young man strove vainly to think of
pleasant things and to regain his serenity. The girl's tear-blotted
face, the tones of her voice, haunted him. Six weeks' imprisonment. The
sentence, after all, was a light one. Yet who was he, who were those
four other well-to-do gentlemen, that they should judge her at all? How
could they measure the strength of the temptation which had beset her?
If temptation is strong enough, must not the tempted of necessity
yield? If the tempted does not yield, is that not merely proof that the
temptation was not strong enough? The whole thing appeared to him a
matter of mathematics or mechanics. Given a greater weight than it can
carry, the rope is bound to break. And then for those who have not felt
the strain to blame the rope, punish the rope! It seemed to Richard, as
he rode homeward, that human justice is too often a very comedy of
injustice. It all appeared to him so exceedingly foolish. And yet
society must be protected. Other pretty, weak, silly creatures must be
warned, by such rather brutal object lessons, not to bear bastards or
pawn their mistresses' spoons.
"'_Je ne sais pas ce que c'est que la vie eternelle, mais celle ci est
une mauvaise plaisanterie_,'" Dickie quoted to himself somewhat
bitterly.
He turned aside at Farley Row, following the narrow road that runs
behind the houses in the main street and the great, vacant stables and
outbuildings of the White Lion Inn. And here, as though the immediate
displeasures of this ill-starred day were insufficient, memory arose
and recalled other displeasures of long ago. Recalled old Jackie Deeds
lurching out of that same inn yard, empty pipe in mouth, greedy of
alms. Recalled the old postboy's ugly morsel of profanity--"God
Almighty had His jokes too." And, at that, the laughter of those
loafers upon the canal bridge saluted Richard's ears once more, as did
the loud, familiar phrases of Mr. Lemuel Image, the Westchurch brewer.
Before him the flat expanse of Clerke's Green opened out; and the turf
of it--beaded with dew which the frail sunshine of the early morning
had failed to burn up--was crossed by long tracks of darker green,
where flocks of geese had wandered over its misty surface. Here the
traveling menagerie and all the booths of the fair had been stationed.
Memory rigged up the tents once more, painted the vans in crude,
glaring colours, set drums beating and merry-go-rounds turning, pointed
a malicious finger at the sign-board of a certain show. How many times
Richard had passed this way in the intervening years, and remembered in
passing, yet thrown all hurt of remembrance from him directly and
lightly! To-day it gripped him. He put his horse into a sharp trot.
Skirting the edge of the green, he rode down a rutted cart lane--farm
buildings and well-filled rickyards on the left--and forded the
shallow, brown stream which separates the parish of Farley from that of
Sandyfield and the tithing of Brockhurst.
Ahead lay the wide, rough road, ending in a broken avenue of ancient
oaks, and bordered on either hand by a strip of waste land overgrown
with coarse grasses and low thickets of maple--which leads up to the
entrance of the Brockhurst woods. Over these hung a soft, bluish haze,
making them appear vast in extent, and upraising the dark ridge of the
fir forest, which crowns them, to mountain height against the western
sky. A covey of partridges ran up the sandy road before Richard's
horse; and, rising at last, with a long-drawn whir of wings, skimmed
the top of the bank and dropped into the pale stubble field on the
other side of it. He paused at the head of the avenue while the
keeper's wife--in lilac apron and sunbonnet--ran out to open the big,
white gate; the dogs meantime, from their kennels under the Spanish
chestnuts upon the slope behind her gabled cottage, setting up a
vociferous chorus. Thus heralded, Richard passed into the whispering,
mysterious stillness of the autumn woods.
The summer had been dry and fine, the foliage unusually rich and heavy,
all the young wood ripening well. Consequently the turn of the leaf was
very brilliant that year. The sweetly, sober, English landscape seemed
to have run mad and decked itself, as for a masquerade, in extravagant
splendours of colour. The smooth-stemmed beeches had taken on every
tint from fiery brown, through orange and amber, to verdigris green
touching latest July shoots. The round-headed oaks, practising even in
carnival time a measure of restraint, had arrayed themselves in a
hundred rich, finely-gradated tones of russet and umber. While, here
and there, a tall bird-cherry, waxing wanton, had clothed itself like
the Woman of Babylon in rose-scarlet from crown to lowest black-barked
twig. Higher up, the larch plantations rose in crowds of
butter-coloured spires. Amethystine and blood-red, white-spotted
toadstools, in little companies, pushed through the light soil on
either side the road. Trailing sprays of bramble glowed as flame. Rowan
berries hung in heavy coral bunches, and the dogwood spread itself in
sparse china-pink clusters. Only the undergrowth of crooked alders, in
swampy, low-lying places, kept its dark, purplish green; and the light
foliage of the ash waved in shadowy pallor against its knobbed and
knotted branches; and the ranks of the encircling firs retained their
solemn habit, as though in protest against the universal riot.
The stream hidden away in the hazel coppice gurgled and murmured.
Beech-masts pattered down, startling the stillness as with a sudden
dropping of thunder rain. Squirrels, disturbed in the ingathering of
their winter store, whisked up the boles of the great trees and scolded
merrily from the forks of the high branches. Shy wild things rustled
and scampered unseen through the tangled undergrowth and beds of
bracken. While that veil of bluish haze touched all the distance of the
landscape with a delicate mystery, and softly blotted the vista of each
wide shooting drive, or winding pathway, to left and right.
And as Richard rode onward, leaves gay even in death fluttering down
around him, his mood began to suffer change. He ceased to think and
began to feel merely. First came a dreamy delight in the beauty of the
scene about him. Then the sense of mystery grew upon him--of mystery,
not merely hanging in the delicate haze, but dwelling in the endless
variety of form and colour which met his eyes, of mystery inviting him
in the soft, multitudinous voices of the woodland. And as the minutes
passed this sense grew increasingly provocative, became too
increasingly elusive. The light leapt into Dickie's eyes. He smiled to
himself. He was filled with unreasoning expectation. He seemed--it was
absurd, yet very charming--to be playing hide-and-seek with some glad
secret which at any instant might be revealed to him. It murmured to
him in the brook. It scolded at him merrily with the scolding
squirrels. It startled the surrounding stillness, with the down
pattering beech-masts and fluttering of leaves. It eluded him deftly,
rustling away unseen through the green and gold of the bracken. Lastly
when, reaching the summit of the ridge of hill, he entered upon the
levels of the great table-land, it hailed him in the long-drawn sighing
of the fir forest. For a wind, suddenly awakened, swept towards him
from some far distance, neared, broke overhead, as summer waves upon a
shingly beach, died in delicious whispers, only to sweep up and break
and die again. Meanwhile the gray pall of cloud parted in the west,
disclosing spaces of faint yet clearest blue, and the declining sun,
from behind dim islands of shifting vapour, sent forth immense rays of
mild and misty light.
Richard laughed involuntarily to himself. For there was a fantastic,
curiously alluring influence in all this. It spoke to him as in
delicate persuasion. His sense of expectation intensified. He would not
ride homeward and shut himself within four walls just yet; but yield
himself to the wooing of these fair sylvan divinities; to that of the
spirit of the evening wind, of the softly shrouding haze, and of the
broadening sunlight, a little longer.
A turf-ride branches away to the left, leading along a narrow
outstanding spur of table-land to a summer-house, the prospect from
which is among the noted beauties of Brockhurst. This summer-house or
Temple, as it has come to be called, is an octagonal structure.
Round-shafted pillars rise at each projecting angle. In the recesses
between them are low stone benches, save in front where an open
colonnade gives upon the view. The roof is leaded, and surmounted by a
wooden ball and tall, three-sided spike. These last, as well as the
plastered, windowless walls are painted white. Within, the hollow of
the dome is decorated in fresco, with groups of gaily clad ladies and
their attendant cavaliers, with errant cupids, garlands of flowers,
trophies of rather impossible musical instruments, and cages full of