The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
joyfully almost--rather as a ridding of himself of possible
perturbations and obsessions, than as an act of most austere
self-renunciation. In his ignorance he merely went forward with an
increased freedom of spirit. All of which is set down, not without
underlying pathos, in the diary of that date.
And that freedom of spirit remained by him, notwithstanding his altered
circumstances. It even served--indirectly, since none knew the fact of
his self-dedication save himself--as a basis of pleasant intercourse
with the women of his own social standing whom he now met. It served
him thus in respect of Lady Calmady, who accepted him as a member of
her new household with charming kindliness, treating him with a gentle
solicitude born of pity for his far from robust health and for the
mental struggles which she understood him to have passed through.
Many persons, it must be owned, described Julius as remarkably ugly.
But he did not strike Katherine thus. His heavy black hair, beardless
face and sallow skin--rendered dull and colourless, his features
thickened, though not actually scarred, by smallpox, which he had had
as a child,--his sensitive mouth, and the questioning expression of his
short-sighted brown eyes, reminded her of a fifteenth-century
Florentine portrait that had always challenged her attention when she
passed it in the vestibule of a certain obscure, yet aristocratic,
Parisian hotel, on the left bank--well understood--of the Seine.
The man of the portrait was narrow-chested, clothed in black. So was
Julius March. He had long-fingered, finely shaped hands. So had Julius.
He gave her the impression of a person endowed with a capacity of
prolonged and silent self-sacrifice. So did Julius. She wondered about
his story. For Julius, at least--little as she or he then suspected
it--the deepest places of the story still lay ahead.
CHAPTER IV
RAISING PROBLEMS WHICH IT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS HISTORY TO RESOLVE
It was not without a movement of inward thanksgiving that, the
festivities connected with Sir Richard and Lady Calmady's home-coming
being over, Julius March returned to his labours in the Brockhurst
library. Humanity at first hand, whatever its social standing or its
pursuits, was, in truth, always slightly agitating to him. He felt more
at home when dealing with conclusions than with the data that go to
build up those conclusions, with the thoughts of men printed and bound,
than with the urgent raw material from which those thoughts arise.
Revelation, authority--these were still his watchwords; and in face of
them even the harmless spectacle of a country neighbourhood at play,
let alone the spectacle of the human comedy generally, is singularly
confusing.
He sought the soothing companionship of books with even heightened
relief one fair morning some three weeks later. For Mrs. St. Quentin
and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had arrived at Brockhurst the day
previously, and Julius had been sensible of certain perturbations of
mind in meeting these two ladies, one of whom was a devout Catholic by
inheritance and personal conviction; while the other, though nominally
a member of his own communion, was known to temper her religion with a
wide, if refined, philosophy. Conversation had drifted towards serious
subjects in the course of the evening, and Mrs. St. Quentin had
admitted, with a playful deprecation of her dear friend's rigid
religious attitude, that no one creed, no one system, offered an
adequate solution of the infinite mystery and complexity of life--as
she knew it. The serene adherence of one charming and experienced woman
to an authority which he had rejected, the almost equally serene
indifference on the part of the other to the revelation he held as
absolute and final, troubled Julius. Small wonder then, that early,
after a solitary breakfast, he retired upon the society of the odd
volumes cluttering the shelves of the Long Gallery, that he sorted,
arranged, catalogued, grateful for that dulling of thought which
mechanical labour brings with it.
But fate was malicious, and elected to make a sport of Julius this
morning. Unexpectedly importunate human drama obtruded itself, the deep
places of the story--such as, in the innocence of his ascetic
refinement, he had never dreamed of--began to reveal themselves.
He had climbed the wide, carpeted steps of the library ladder and
seated himself on the topmost one, at right angles to a topmost shelf
the contents of which he proposed to investigate, duster and note-book
in hand. The vast perspective of the gallery lengthened out before him,
cool, faint-tinted, full of a diffused and silvery light. The
self-coloured, unpainted paneling of the walls and bookcases--but one
shade warmer in tone than that of the stone mullions and transomes of
the lofty windows--gave an indescribable delicacy of effect to the
atmosphere of the room. Through the many-paned, leaded lights of the
eastern bay, the sunshine--misty, full of dancing notes--streamed in
obliquely, bringing into quaint prominence of light and shadow a very
miscellaneous collection of objects.--A marble Buddha, benign of
aspect, his right hand raised in blessing, seated, cross-legged upon
the many-petalled lotus. A pair of cavalier's jack-boots, standing just
below, most truculent and ungainly of foot-gear, wooden, hinged,
leather-covered. A trophy of Polynesian spears, shields, and canoe
paddles. A bronze Antinous, seductive of bearing and dainty of limb,
but roughened by green rust. A collection of old sporting prints,
softly coloured, covering a bare space of wall, beneath a moose skull,
from the broad flat antlers of which hung a pair of Canadian
snow-shoes. Along the inside wall of the great room, placed at regular
intervals, were consol tables bearing tall oriental jars and huge bowls
of fine porcelain, filled with potpourri; so that the scent of dried
rose leaves, bay, verbena, and many spices impregnated the air. The
place was, in short, a museum. Whatever of strange, grotesque, and
curious, Calmadys of past generations had collected in their
wanderings, by land and sea, found lodgment here. It was a home of
half-forgotten histories, of valorous deeds grown dim through the lapse
of years; a harbour of refuge for derelict gods, derelict weapons,
derelict volumes, derelict instruments which had once discoursed sweet
enough music, but the fashion of which had now passed away. The
somewhat obsolete sentiment of the place harmonised with the thin,
silvery light and the thin sweetness of spices and dead roses which
pervaded it. It seemed to smile, as with the pitying tolerance of the
benign image of Buddha, at the heat and flame, the untempered scarlet
and purple of the fleeting procession of individual lives, that had
ministered to its furnishing. For how much vigorous endeavour, now over
and done with, never to be recalled, had indeed gone to supply the
furnishing of that room!--And, after all, is not the most any human
creature dare hope for the more or less dusty corner of some museum
shelf at last? The passion of the heart testified to by some battered
trinket, the sweat of the brain by some maggot-eaten manuscript, the
agony of death, at best, by some round shot turned up by the
ploughshare? And how shall any one dare complain of this, since have
not empires before now only been saved from oblivion by a few buried
potsherds, and whole races of mankind by childish picture-scratchings
on a reindeer bone? _Tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse._ The
individual--his arts, his possessions, his religion, his
civilisation--is always as an envelope, merely, to be torn asunder and
cast away. Nothing subsists, nothing endures but life itself, endlessly
self-renewed, endlessly one, through the endless divergencies of its
manifestations. And, as Julius March was to find, hide from it, deny
it, strive to elude it as we may, the recognition of just that is bound
to grip us sooner or later and hold us with a fearful and dominating
power from which there is no escape.
Meanwhile, his occupation was tranquil enough, comfortably remote, as
it seemed, from all such profound and disquieting matters. For the top
shelf proved not very prolific of interest; and one book after another,
examined and rejected as worthless, was dropped--with a reproachful
flutter of pages and final thud--into the capacious paper-basket
standing on the floor below. Then, at the far end of the said shelf, he
came unexpectedly upon a collection of those quaint chap-books which
commanded so wide a circulation during the eighteenth century.
Julius, with the true bibliophile's interest in all originals, examined
his find carefully. The tattered and dogs-eared, little volumes,
coarsely printed and embellished by a number of rough, square woodcuts,
had, he knew, a distinct value. He soon perceived that they formed a
very representative selection. He glanced at _The famous History of Guy
of Warwick_; at that of _Sir Bevis of Southampton_; at _Joaks upon
Joaks_, a lively work regarding the manners and customs of the
aristocracy at the period of the Restoration; at the record of the
amazing adventures of that lusty serving-wench _Long Meg of
Westminster_; and at that refreshing piece of comedy known as _Merry
Tales concerning the Sayings and Doings of the Wise Men of Gotham_.
Finally, hidden behind the outstanding frame of the bookcase, he
discovered four tiny volumes tied together with a rusty, black ribbon.
A heavy coating of dust lay upon them. A large spider, moreover, darted
from behind them. Dust clung unpleasantly to its hairy and ill-favoured
person. It was a matter of principle with Julius never to take life;
yet instinctively he drew back his hand from the book in disgust.
"_Araignee du matin, chagrin_," he said, involuntarily, while he
watched the insect make good its escape over the top of the bookcase.
Then he flicked uneasily at the little parcel with his duster, causing
a cloud of gray atoms to float up and out into the room. Julius was
perhaps absurdly open to impressions. It took him some seconds to
recover from his sense of repulsion and to untie the rusty ribbon
around the little books. They proved all to be ragged and imperfect
copies of the same work. The woodcuts in them were splotched with crude
colour. The title-page was printed in assorted type--here a line of
Roman capitals, there one in italics or old English letters. The
inscription, consequently, was difficult to decipher, causing him to
hold the tattered page very close to his short-sighted eyes. It ran
thus--
"Setting forth a true and particular account of the dealings of
Sir Thomas Calmady with the forester's daughter and the bloody
death of her only child. To which is added her prophecy and curse."
Julius had been standing, so as to reach the length of the shelf. Now
he sat down on the top step of the ladder again. A whole rush of
memories came upon him. He remembered vaguely how, long ago, in his
childhood, he had heard legends of this same curse. Staying here at
Brockhurst, as a baby-child with his mother, maids had hinted at it,
gossiping over the nursery fire at night; and his mind, irresistibly
attracted, even then, by the supernatural, had been filled at once by
desperate curiosity and by panic fear. He paused, thinking back,
singularly moved, as one on the edge of the satisfaction of
long-desired knowledge, yet slightly self-contemptuous, both of his own
emotion and of the rather vulgar means by which that knowledge promised
to be obtained.
The shafts of sunshine fell more obliquely across the eastern end of
the gallery. Benign Buddha had passed into shadow; while a painting by
Murillo, standing on an easel near by caught the light, starting into