The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
arresting reality. It represented a hideous and misshapen dwarf,
holding a couple of graceful greyhounds in a leash--an unhappy creature
who had made sport for the household of some Castilian grandee, and
whose gorgeous garments were ingeniously designed to emphasise the
physical degradation of his contorted body. This painting, appearing to
Julius too painful for habitual contemplation, had, at his request,
been removed from his study down-stairs to its present station. Just
now he fancied it looked forth at him queerly insistent. At this
distance he could distinguish little more than a flare of scarlet and
cloth-of-gold, and the white of the hounds' flanks and bellies under
the strong sunlight. But he knew the picture in all its details; and
was oppressed by the remembrance of tragic eyes in a brutal face, eyes
that protested dumbly against cruelty inflicted by nature and by
mankind alike. He, Julius, was not, so he feared, quite guiltless in
this matter. For had there not been a savour of cruelty in his ejection
of the portrait of this unhappy being from his peaceful study?
And thinking of this his discomfort augmented. He was assailed by an
unreasoning nervousness of something malign, something sinister, about
to befall or to become known to him.
"_Araignee du matin, chagrin_," he repeated involuntarily.
He laid the four little chap-books back hastily behind the outstanding
woodwork of the bookshelf, descended the steps, walked the length of
the gallery, and leaning against one of the stone mullions of the
great, eastern bay window looked out of the wide, open casement.
The prospect was, indeed, reassuring enough. The softly green square of
the troco-ground, the brilliant beds and borders of the brick-walled
gardens, the gray flags of the great terrace--its rows of little orange
trees, heavy with flower and fruit, set in blue painted tubs--lay below
him in a blaze of August sunshine. From the direction of the Long Water
in the valley, Richard Calmady rode up, between the thorn trees and the
beds of bracken, across the turf slopes of the park. It was a joy to
see him ride. The rider and horse were one, in vigour and in the repose
which comes of vigour--a something classic in the natural beauty and
sympathy of rider and of horse. Half-way up the slope Richard swerved,
turned towards the house, sat looking up, hat in hand, while Katherine
stood at the edge of the terrace looking down, speaking with him. The
warm breeze fluttered her full muslin skirts, rose and white, and the
white lace of her parasol. The rich tones of her voice and the ring of
her laughter came up to Julius, as he leant against the stone mullion,
along with the droning of innumerable bees, and the cooing of the
pink-footed pigeons--that bowed to one another, spreading their tails,
drooping their wings amorously, upon the broad, gray string-course
running along the house front just beneath. Mademoiselle de Mirancourt,
a small, neat, gray and black figure, was beside Katherine, and, now
and again, he heard the pretty staccato of her foreign speech. Then
Richard Calmady rode onward, turning half round in the saddle, looking
up for a moment at the woman he loved. His horse broke into a canter,
bearing him swiftly in and out of the shadow of the glistening, domed
oaks and ancient, stag-headed, Spanish chestnuts which crowned the
ascent, and on down the long, softly-shaded vista of the lime avenue.
While Camp, the bulldog, who had lain panting in the bracken, streaked
like a white flash up the hillside in pursuit of his well-beloved
master.
And Julius March moved away from the open window with a sigh. Yet what,
after all, of malign or sinister was perceptible, conceivable even, in
respect of this glorious morning and these happy people--unless, as he
reflected, something of pathos is of necessity ever resident in all
beauty, all happiness, the world being sinful, and existence so
prolific of pain and melancholy happenings? So he went back, climbed
the library steps again, and taking the little bundle of chap-books
from their dusty resting-place, set himself, in a somewhat penitential
spirit, to master their contents. If the occupation was distasteful to
him, the more wholesome to pursue it! So, supplying the deficiencies of
torn or defaced pages by reference to another of the copies, he arrived
by degrees at a clear understanding of the whole matter. The story was
set forth in rhyming doggerel. The poet was not blessed with a gift of
melody or of style. Absence of scansion tortured the ear. Coarseness of
diction offended the taste. And yet, as he read on, Julius reluctantly
admitted that the cruel tale gained credibility and moral force from
the very homeliness of the language in which it was chronicled.
Thus Julius learned how, during the closing years of the Commonwealth,
the young royalist gentleman, Sir Thomas Calmady, dwelling in enforced
seclusion at Brockhurst, relieved the tedium of country life by
indulgence in divers amours. He was large-hearted, apparently, and
could not see a comely face without attempting intimate acquaintance
with the possessor of it. Among other damsels distinguished by his
attentions was his head forester's handsome daughter, whom, under
reiterated promise of marriage, he seduced. In due time she bore him a
child, ideally beautiful, according to the poet of the chap-book,
blessed with "red-gold hair and eyes of blue," and many charms of
infantile healthfulness. And yet, notwithstanding the noble looks of
her little son, the forester's daughter still remained unwed. For just
now came the Restoration, and along with it a notable change in the
outlook of Sir Thomas Calmady and many another lusty young gallant,
since the event in question not only restored Charles the Second to the
arms of his devoted subjects, but restored such loyal gentlemen to the
by no means too strait-laced society of town and court. Thence, some
few years later, Sir Thomas--amiably willing in all things to oblige
his royal master--brought home a bride, whose rank and wealth,
according to the censorious chap-book, were extensively in excess of
her youth and virtue.
Julius lingered a little in contemplation of the quaint wood-cut
representing the arrival of this lady at Brockhurst. Clothed in a
bottle-green bodice--very generously _decolletee_, her head adorned by
a portentous erection of coronet and feathers, a sanguine dab of colour
on her cheek, she craned a skinny neck out of the window of the family
coach. Apparently she was engaged in directing the movements of
persons--presumably footmen--clad in canary-coloured coats and armed
with long staves. With these last, they treated a female figure in blue
to, as it seemed, sadly rough usage. And the context informed Julius,
in jingling verse, how that poor Hagar, the forester's daughter,
inconveniently defiant of custom and of common sense, had stoutly
refused to be cast forth into the social wilderness, along with her
small Ishmael and a few pounds sterling as price of her honour and
content, until she had stood face to face with Sarah, the safely
church-wed, if none too reputable, wife. It informed him, further, how
the said small Ishmael--whether alarmed by the violence of my lady's
men-servants, or wanting merely, childlike, to welcome his returning
father--ran to the coach door and clambered on the step; whence, thanks
to a vicious thrust--so declares the chap-book--from "the painted
Jezebel within," he fell, while the horses plunging forward caused the
near hind wheel of the heavy, lumbering vehicle to pass over his legs,
almost severing them from his body just above the knee.
Thereupon--and here the homely language of the gutter poet rose to a
level of rude eloquence--the outraged mother, holding the mangled and
dying child in her arms, cursed the man who had brought this ruin upon
her. Cursed him and his descendants, to the sixth and seventh
generations, good and bad alike. Declaring, moreover, that as judgment
on his perfidy and lust, no owner of Brockhurst should reach the life
limit set by the Psalmist, and die quiet and Christianly in his bed,
until a somewhat portentous event should have taken place--namely,
until, as the jingling rhyme set forth:--
"--a fatherless babe to the birth shall have come,
Of brother or sister shall he have none,
But red-gold hair and eyes of blue
And a foot that will never know stocking or shoe.
If he opens his purse to the lamenter's cry,
Then the woe shall lift and be laid for aye."
Julius March, his spare, black figure crouched together, sat on the top
step of the library ladder musing. His first movement had been one of
refined and contemptuous disgust. Sensuality and the tragedies
engendered by it were so wholly foreign to his nature and mental
outlook, that it was difficult to him to reckon with them seriously and
admit the very actual and permanent part which they play and always
have played in the great drama of human life. It distressed, it, in a
sense, annoyed him that the legend of Brockhurst, which had caused him
elaborate imaginative terrors during his childhood, should belong to
this gross and vulgar order of history. Yet indubitably--as he
reluctantly admitted--each owner of Brockhurst had very certainly found
death in the midst of life, and that according to some rather brutal
and bloody pattern. This might, of course, be judged the result of
merest coincidence. Had he leisure and opportunity to search them out,
he could find, no doubt, plausible explanation of the majority of
cases. Only that fact of persistent violence, persistent accident, did
remain. It stared him in the face, so to speak, defiant of denial. And
the deduction, consequent upon it, stared him in the face likewise. He
was constrained to confess that the first clause of the deeply wronged
mother's prediction had found ample fulfilment.--Julius paused, shifted
his position uneasily, somewhat fearful of the conclusions of his own
reasoning.
For how about the second clause of that same prediction? How about the
advent of that strange child of promise, who preordained in his own
flesh to bear the last and heaviest stroke at the hands of retributive
justice, should, rightly bearing it, bring salvation both to himself
and to his race? Behind the coarse and illiterate presentiment of the
chap-book, Julius began dimly to apprehend a somewhat majestic moral
and spiritual tragedy, a tragedy of vicarious suffering crowned by
triumphant emancipation. Thus has God, as he reflected with a
self-condemnatory emotion of humility, chosen the base things of the
world and those which are despised--yea, and the things which are not,
to bring to nought the things which are.--His heart, hungry of all
martyrdom, all saintly doings, went forth to welcome the idea. But
then, he asked himself almost awed, in this sceptical, rationalistic
age, are such semi-miraculous moral examples still possible? And
answered, with strong exultation--as one finding practical
justification of a long, though silently, cherished conviction--yes,
that even now, nineteen centuries after the death of that divine Saving
Victim to whose service he had devoted his life and the joys of his
manhood, such nobly sad and strange happenings may still be.
And even while he thus answered, his eyes were drawn involuntarily to
the portrait of the unsightly dwarf, painted by Velasquez. The broad
shaft of sunlight had crept backward, away from it, leaving the canvas
unobtrusive, no longer harshly evident either in violence of colour or
grotesqueness of form. It had become part of the great whole, merely
modulated to gracious harmony with the divers objects surrounding it,
and like them softly overlaid by a diffused and silvery light.
CHAPTER V