The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
"Ah! you are tired, you poor dear. No wonder, after the week's work you
have had. Another day will do just as well. Only I want you to come out
sometimes in the first blush of the morning, before the day has had
time to grow commonplace, while the gossamers are still hung with dew,
and the mists are in hollows, and the horses are heady from the fresh
air and the light. You will like it all, Kitty. It is rather inspiring.
But it will keep. To-morrow I'll let you rest in peace."
"Oh no! it is not that," Katherine said quickly. The importunate
thought was upon her again, clamouring, not only to be recognised, but
fairly owned to and permitted to pass the doors of speech. And a
certain modesty made her shrink from this. To know something in the
secret of your own heart, or to tell it, thereby making it a hard
concrete fact, outside yourself, over which, in a sense, you cease to
have control, are two such very different matters! Katherine trembled
on the edge of her confession, though that to be confessed was, after
all, but the natural crown of her love.
"I think I ought not to ride now--for a time, Dick." All the blood
rushed into her face and throat, and then ebbed, leaving her very white
in the growing darkness.--"You have given me a child," she said.
CHAPTER III
TOUCHING MATTERS CLERICAL AND CONTROVERSIAL
Brockhurst had rarely appeared more blessed by spacious sunshine and
stately cheerfulness than during the remaining weeks of that summer. A
spirit of unclouded serenity possessed the place, both indoors and out.
If rain fell, it was only at night. And this, as so much else, Julius
March noted duly in his diary.
For that was the period of elaborate private chronicles, when persons
of intelligence and position still took themselves, their doings and
their emotions with most admired seriousness. Natural science, the
great leveler, had hardly stepped in as yet. Therefore it was, that
already, Julius's diary ran into many stout manuscript volumes; each in
turn soberly but richly bound, with silver clasp and lock complete, so
soon as its final page was written. Begun when he first went up to
Oxford, some thirteen years earlier, it formed an intimate history of
the influences of the Tractarian Movement upon a scholarly mind and
delicately spiritual nature. At the commencement of his Oxford career
he had come into close relations with some of the leaders of the
movement. And the conception of an historic church, endowed with mystic
powers--conveyed through an unbroken line of priests from the age of
the apostles--the orderly round of vigil, fast, and festival, the
secret, introspective joys of penance and confession, the fascinations
of the strictly religious life, as set before him in eloquent public
discourse or persuasive private conversation,--had combined to kindle
an imagination very insufficiently satisfied by the lean spiritual
meats offered it during an Evangelical childhood and youth. Julius
yielded himself up to his instructors with passionate self-abandon. He
took orders, and remained on at Oxford--being a fellow of his
college--working earnestly for the cause he had so at heart. Eventually
he became a member of the select band of disciples that dwelt,
uncomfortably, supported by visions of reactionary reform at once
austere and beneficent, in the range of disused stable buildings at
Littlemore.
Of the storm and stress of this religious war, its triumphs, its
defeats, its many agitations, Julius's diaries told with a deep, if
chastened, enthusiasm. His was a singularly pure nature, unmoved by the
primitive desires which usually inflame young blood. Ideas heated him;
while the lust of the eye and the pride of life left him almost
scornfully cold. He strove earnestly, of course, to bring the flesh
into subjection to the spirit; which was, calmly considered, a slight
waste of time, since the said flesh showed the least possible
inclination of revolt. The earlier diaries contain pathetic
exaggerations of the slightest indiscretion. Innocent and virtuous
persons have ever been prone to such little manias of self-accusation!
Later, the flesh did assert itself, though in a hardly licentious
manner. Oxford fogs and damp, along with plain living and high
thinking, acting upon a constitution naturally far from robust,
produced a commonplace but most disabling nemesis in the form of colds,
coughs, and chronic asthma. Julius did not greatly care. He was in that
exalted frame of mind in which martyrdom, even by phthisis or bronchial
affections, is immeasurably preferable to no martyrdom at all. Perhaps
fortunately his relations, and even his Oxford friends, took a quite
other view of the matter, and insisted upon his using all legitimate
means to prolong his life.
Julius left Oxford with intense regret. It was the Holy City of the
Tractarian Movement; and at this moment the progress of that Movement
was the one thing worth living for, if live indeed he must. He went
forth bewailing his exile and enforced idleness, as a man bewails the
loss of the love of his youth. For a time he traveled in Italy and in
the south of France. On his return to England he went to stay with his
friend and cousin, Sir Richard Calmady. Brockhurst House had always
been extremely congenial to him. Its suites of handsome rooms, the
inlaid marble chimneypieces of which reach up to the frieze of the
heavily moulded ceilings, its wide passages and stairways, their carved
balusters and newel-posts, the treasures of its library--now
overflowing the capacity of the two rooms originally designed for them,
and filling ranges of bookcases between the bay windows of the Long
Gallery running the whole length of the first floor from east to
west,--the chapel in the southern wing, its richly furnished altar and
the glories of its famous, stained-glass windows, all these were very
grateful to his taste. While the light, dry, upland air and near
neighbourhood of the fir forest eased the physical discomforts from
which, at times, he still suffered shrewdly.
He found the atmosphere of the place both soothing and steadying. And
of precisely this he stood sorely in need just now. For it must be
admitted that a change had come over the spirit of Julius March's great
ecclesiastical dream. Absence from Oxford and foreign travel had tended
at once to widen and modify his thought. He had seen the Tractarian
Movement from a distance, in due perspective. He had also seen
Catholicism at close quarters. He had realised that the logical
consequence of the teaching of the former could be nothing less than
unqualified submission to the latter. On his return to England he
learned that more than one of his Oxford friends was arriving,
reluctantly, at the same conclusion. Then there arose within him the
fiercest struggle his gentle nature had ever yet known. He was torn by
the desire to go forward, risking all, with those whom he reverenced;
yet was restrained by a sense of honour. For there was in Julius a
strain of obstinate, almost fanatic, loyalty. To the Anglican Church he
had pledged himself. Through her ministry he had received illumination.
To the work of her awakening he had given all his young enthusiasm. How
then could he desert her? Her rites might be maimed. The scandal of
schism might tarnish her fair fame. Accusations of sloth and
lukewarmness might not unjustly be preferred against her. All this he
admitted; and it was very characteristic of the man that, just because
he did admit it, he remained within her fold.
Yet the decision was dislocating to all his thought, even as the
struggle had been. It left him bruised. It cruelly shook his
self-confidence. For he was not one of those persons upon whom the
shipwreck of long-cherished hopes and purposes have a stimulating
effect, filling them merely with a buoyant satisfaction at the
opportunity afforded them of beginning all over again! Julius was
oppressed by the sense of a great failure. The diaries of this period
are but sorrowful reading. He believed he should go softly all his
days; and, from a certain point of view, in this he was right.
And it was here that Sir Richard Calmady intervened. He had watched his
cousin's struggle, had accepted its reality, sympathising, through
friendship rather than through moral or intellectual agreement. For he
was one of those fortunate mortals who, while possessing a strong sense
of God, have but small necessity to define Him. Many of Julius's
keenest agonies appeared to him subjective, a matter of words and
phrases. Yet he respected them, out of the sincere regard he bore the
man who suffered them. He did more. He tried a practical remedy.
Modestly, as one asking rather than conferring a favour, he invited
Julius to remain at Brockhurst, on a fair stipend, as domestic chaplain
and librarian.
"In the fulness of your generosity towards me you are creating a costly
sinecure," Julius had remonstrated.
"Not in the least. I am selfishly trying to secure myself a most
welcome companion, by asking you to undertake a very modest cure of
souls and to catalogue my books, when you might be filling some
important post and qualifying for a bishopric."
Julius had shaken his head sadly enough. "The high places of the Church
are not for me," he said. "Neither are her great adventures."
Thus did Julius March, somewhat broken both in health and spirit,
become a carpet-priest. The trumpet blasts of controversy reached him
as echoes merely, while his days passed in peaceful, if pensive
monotony. He read prayers morning and evening to the assembled
household in the chapel; reduced the confusion of the library shelves,
doing a fair amount of study, both secular and theological, during the
process; rode with his cousin on fine afternoons to distant farms, by
high-banked lanes in the lowland, or across the open moors; visited the
lodges, or the keepers' and gardeners' cottages within the limits of
the park, on foot. Now and again he took a service, or preached a
sermon, for good Mr. Caryll of Sandyfield, in whose amiable mind
instinctive admiration of those, even distantly, related to persons of
wealth and position jostled an equally instinctive terror of Mr.
March's "well-known Romanising tendencies." And in that there was,
surely, a touch of the irony of fate! Lastly, Julius did his utmost to
exercise an influence for good over the twenty and odd boys at the
racing stables--an unpromising generation at best, the majority of
whom, he feared, accepted his efforts for their moral and spiritual
welfare with the same somewhat brutish philosophy with which they
accepted Tom Chifney, the trainer's, rough-and-ready system of
discipline, and the thousand and one vagaries of the fine-limbed,
queer-tempered horses which were at once the glory and torment of their
young lives.
Things had gone on thus for rather more than a year, when Richard
Calmady married. Julius was perhaps inclined, beforehand, to underrate
the importance of that event. He was singularly innocent, so far, of
the whole question of woman. He had no sisters. At Oxford he had lived
exclusively among men, while the Tractarian Movement had offered a
sufficient outlet to all his emotion. The severe and exquisite verses
of the "Lyra Apostolica" fitly expressed the passions of his heart. To
the Church, at once his mother and his mistress, he had wholly given
his first love. He had gone so far, indeed, in a rapture of devotion
one Easter day, during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, as to
impose upon himself a vow of livelong chastity. This he did--let it be
added--without either the sanction or knowledge of his spiritual
advisers. The vow, therefore, remained unwitnessed and unratified, but
he held it inviolable nevertheless. And it lay but lightly upon him,