CHAPTER I

RECORDING SOME ASPECTS OF A SMALL PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, says the comfortable proverb.

Which would appear to be but another manner of declaring that the law

of compensation works permanently in human affairs. All quantities,

material and immaterial alike, are, of necessity, stable; therefore the

loss or defect of one participant must--indirectly, no doubt, yet very

surely--make for the gain of some other. As of old, so now, the blood

of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

Julius March would, how gladly, have been among the martyrs! But the

lot fell otherwise. And--always admitting the harshness of the

limitations he had imposed on himself--the martyrdom of those he held

dearest, did, in fact, work to secure him a measure of content that had

otherwise been unattainable. The twelve years following the birth of

Lady Calmady's child were the most fruitful of his life. He filled a

post no other person could have filled; one which, while satisfying his

religious sense and priestly ideal of detachment, appeased the cravings

of his heart and developed the practical man in him. The contemplative

and introspective attitude was balanced by an active and objective one.

For he continued to live under his dear lady's roof, seeing her daily

and serving her in many matters. He watched her, admiring her clear yet

charitable judgment and her prudence in business. He bowed in reverence

before her perfect singleness of purpose. He was almost appalled,

apprehending, now and then, the secret abysses of her womanhood, the

immensity of her self-devotion, the swing of her nature from quick,

sensitive shrinking to almost impious pride. Man is the outcome of the

eternal common sense; woman that of some moment of divine folly.

Meanwhile the ways of true love are many; and Julius March, thus

watching his dear lady, discovered, as other elect souls have

discovered before him, that the way of chastity and silence,

notwithstanding its very constant heartache, is by no means among the

least sweet. The entries in his diaries of this period are

intermittent, concise, and brief--naturally enough, since the central

figure of Julius's mental picture had ceased, happily for him, to be

himself.

And not only Katherine's sorrows, but the unselfish action of another

woman went to make Julius March's position at Brockhurst tenable. A few

days after Ormiston's momentous interview with his sister, news came of

Mrs. St. Quentin's death. She had passed hence peacefully in her sleep.

Knowledge of the facts of poor, little Dickie Calmady's ill-fortune had

been spared her. For it would be more satisfactory--so Mademoiselle de

Mirancourt had remarked, not without a shade of irony--that if Lucia

St. Quentin must learn the sad fact at all, she should do so where _le

bon Dieu_ Himself would be at hand to explain matters, and so, in a

degree, set them right.

Early in April Mademoiselle de Mirancourt had gathered together her

most precious possessions and closed the pretty apartment in the rue de

Rennes. It had been a happy halting-place on the journey of life. It

was haunted by well-beloved ghosts. It cost not a little to bid it, the

neighbouring church of the St. Germain des Pres, where she had so long

worshipped, and her little _coterie_ of intimate friends, farewell. Yet

she set forth, taking with her Henriette, the hard-featured, old,

Breton maid, and _Monsieur Pouf_, the gray, Persian cat,--he protesting

plaintively from within a large Manilla basket,--and thus accompanied,

made pilgrimage to Brockhurst. And when Katherine, all the lost joys of

her girlhood assailing her at sight of her lifelong friend, had broken

down for once, and, laying her beautiful head on the elder woman's

shoulder, had sobbed out a question as to when this visit must end,

Marie de Mirancourt had answered--

"That, most dear one, is precisely as you shall see fit to decide. It

need not end till I myself end, if you so please."

And when Katherine, greatly comforted yet fearing to be over-greedy of

comfort, had reasoned with her, reminding her of the difference of

climate, the different habits of living in that gay, little Paris home

and this great English country house; reminding her, further, of her so

often and fondly expressed desire to retire from the world while yet in

the complete possession of her powers and prepare for the inevitable

close within the calm and sacred precincts of the convent--the other

replied almost gaily--

"Ah, my child! I have still a naughty little spirit of experiment in me

which defiles the barbarities of your climate. While as to the convent,

it has beckoned so long--let it beckon still! It called first when my

_fiance_ died,--God rest his soul,--worn out by the hardships he

endured in the war of La Vendee and I put from me forever all thought

of marriage. But then my mother, an emigrant here in London, claimed

all my care. It called me again when she departed, dear saintly being.

But then there were my brother's sons--orphaned by the guillotine--to

place. And when I had established them honourably, our beloved Lucia

turned to me, with her many enchantments and exquisite tragedy of the

heart. And, now, in my old age I come to you--whom I receive from her

as a welcome legacy--to remain just so long as I am not a burden to

you. Second childhood and first should understand one another. We will

play delightful games together, the dear baby and I. So let the convent

beckon. For the convent is perhaps, after all, but an impatient

grasping at the rest of paradise, before that rest is fairly earned. I

have a good hope that, after all, we give ourselves most acceptably to

God in thus giving ourselves to His human creatures."

Thus did Marie de Mirancourt, for love's sake, condemn herself to

exile, thereby rendering possible--among other things--Julius's

continued residence at Brockhurst. For Captain Ormiston had held true

to his resolve of scorning the delights of idleness, the smiles of

ladies more kind than wise, and all those other pleasant iniquities to

which idleness inclines the young and full-blooded, of bidding farewell

to London and Windsor, and proceeding to "live laborious days" in some

far country. He had offered to remain indefinitely with Katherine if

she needed him. But she refused. Let him be faithful to the noble

profession of arms and make a name for himself therein.

"Brockhurst has ceased to be a place for a soldier," she said. "Leave

it to women and priests!" And then, repenting of the bitterness of her

speech, she added:--"Really there is not more work than I can manage,

with Julius to help me at times. Iles is a good servant if a little

tediously pompous, and Chifney must see to the stables."--Lady Calmady

paused, and her face grew hard. But for her husband's dying request,

she would have sold every horse in the stud, razed the great square of

buildings to the ground and made the site of it a dunghill. "Work is a

drug to deaden thought. So it is a kindness to let me have plenty of

it, dear old man. And I fear, even when the labour of each day is done,

and Dickie is safe asleep,--poor darling,--I shall still have more than

enough of time for thought, for asking those questions to which there

seems no answer, and for desires, vain as they are persistent, that

things were somehow, anyhow, other than they are!"

Therefore it came about that a singular quiet settled down on

Brockhurst--a quiet of waiting, of pause, rather than of

accomplishment. But Julius March, for reasons aforesaid, and

Mademoiselle de Mirancourt, in virtue of her unclouded faith in the

teachings of her Church,--which assures its members of the beneficent

purpose working behind all the sad seeming of this world,--alike

rejoiced in that. A change of occupations and of interests came

naturally with the change of the seasons, with the time to sow and

reap, to plant saplings, to fell timber, to fence, to cut copsing, to

build or rebuild, to receive rents or remit them, to listen to many

appeals, to readjust differences, to feed game or to shoot it, to

bestow charity of meat and fuel, to haul ice in winter to the ice-house

from the lake. But beyond all this there was little going or coming at

Brockhurst. The magnates of the countryside called at decent intervals,

and at decent intervals Lady Calmady returned their civilities. But

having ceased to entertain, she refused to receive entertainment. She

shut herself away in somewhat jealous seclusion, defiant of possibly

curious glances and pitying tongues. Before long her neighbours,

therefore, came to raise their eyebrows a little in speaking of her,

and to utter discreet regrets that Lady Calmady, though handsome and

charming when you saw her, was so very eccentric, adding--"Of course

every one knows there is something very uncomfortable about the little

boy!" Then would follow confidences as to the disastrous results of

popish influences and Romanising tendencies; and an openly expressed

conviction--more especially on the part of ladies blessed with

daughters of marriageable age--that it would have been so very much

better for many people if the late Sir Richard Calmady had looked

nearer home for a bride.

But these comments did not affect Katherine. In point of fact they

rarely reached her ears. Alone among her neighbours, Mary Cathcart, of

the crisp, black hair and gipsy-like complexion, was still admitted to

some intimacy of intercourse. And the girl was far too loyal either to

bring in gossip or to carry it out. Brockhurst held the romance of her

heart. And, notwithstanding the earnest wooing--as the years went

on--of more than one very eligible gentleman, Brockhurst continued to

hold it.

Meanwhile the somewhat quaint fixed star around which this whole system

of planets, large and small, very really revolved, shone forth upon

them all with a cheerful enough light. For Dickie by no means belied

the promise of his babyhood. He was a beautiful and healthy little boy,

with a charming brilliance of colouring, warm and solid in tone. He had

his mother's changeful eyes, though the blue of them was brighter than

hers had now come to be. He had her dark eyebrows and eyelashes too,

and her finely curved lips. While he bore likeness to his father in the

straight, square-tipped nose and the close-fitting cap of bright, brown

hair with golden stains in it, growing low in short curling locks on

the broad forehead and the nape of the neck--expressing the shape of

the head very definitely, and giving it something of antique nobility

and grace.

And the little lad's appearance afforded, in these pleasant early days

at all events, fair index to his temperament. He was gay-natured,

affectionate, intelligent, full of a lively yet courteous curiosity,

easily moved to laughter, almost inconveniently fearless and

experimental; while his occasional thunderbursts of passion cleared off

quickly into sunshine and blue sky again. For as yet the burden of

deformity rested upon him very lightly. He associated hardly at all

with other children, and had but scant occasion to measure his poor

powers of locomotion against their normal ones. Lady Fallowfeild it is

true, in obedience to suggestions on the part of her kindly lord and

master, offered tentatively to import a carriage load--little Ludovic

Quayle was just the same age as Dickie--from the Whitney nurseries to

spend the day.

"Good fellow, Calmady. I liked Calmady," Lord Fallowfeild had said to

her. His conversation, it may be observed, was nothing if not

interjectional. "Pretty woman, Lady Calmady---terrible thing for her

being left as she is. Always shall regret Calmady. Very sorry for her.

Always have been sorry for a pretty woman in trouble. Ought to see

something of her, my dear. The two estates join, and, as I always have

said, it's a duty to support your own class. Can't expect the masses to

respect you unless you show them you're prepared to stand by your own

class. Just take some of the children over to see Lady Calmady. Pretty

children, do her good to see them. Rode uncommonly straight did

Calmady. Terribly upsetting thing his funeral. Never shall forget it.

Always did like Calmady--good fellow, Calmady. Nasty thing his death."

But Katherine's pen was fertile in excuses to avoid the invasion from

Whitney. Lady Fallowfeild's small brains and large domestic complacency

were too trying to her. And that noble lady, it must be owned, was

secretly not a little glad to have her advances thus firmly, though

gently, repulsed. For she was alarmed at Lady Calmady's reported

acquaintance with foreign lands and with books; added to which her

simple mind harboured much grisly though vague terror concerning the

Roman Church. Picture all her brood of little Quayles incontinently

converted into little monks and nuns with shaven heads! How such sudden

conversion could be accomplished Lady Fallowfeild did not presume to

explain. It sufficed her that "everybody always said Papists were so

dreadfully clever and unscrupulous you never could tell what they might

not do next."

Once, when Dickie was about six years old, Colonel St. Quentin brought

his young wife and two little girls to stay at Brockhurst. Katherine

had a great regard for her cousin, yet the visit was never repeated. On

the flat poor Dick could manage fairly well, his strangely shod feet

traveling laboriously along in effort after rapidity; his hands hastily

outstretched now and again to lay hold of door-jamb or table-edge,

since his balance was none of the securest. But in that delightfully

varied journey from the nursery, by way of his mother's bed-room, the

Chapel-Room next door, the broad stair-head,--with its carven

balusters, shiny oak flooring, and fine landscapes by Claude and

Hobbema,--the state drawing-room and libraries, to that America of his

childish dreams, that country of magnificent distances and large

possibility of discovery, the Long Gallery, he was speedily distanced

by the three-year-old Betty, let alone her six-year-old sister Honoria,

a tall, slim, little maiden, daintily high-bred of face and fleet of

foot as a hind. This was bad enough. But the stairways afforded yet

more afflicting experiences--the descent of even the widest and

shallowest flights presented matter of insuperable difficulty; while

the ascent was only to be achieved by recourse to all-fours, against

the ignominy of which mode of progression Dickie's soul revolted. And

so the little boy concluded that he did not care much about little

girls; and confided to his devoted play-fellow Clara--Mrs. Denny's

niece and sometime second still-room maid, now promoted, on account of

her many engaging qualities, to be Dickie's special attendant--that:--

"They went so quick, they always left him behind, and it was not nice

to be left behind, and it was very rude of them to do it; didn't Clara

think so?"

And Clara, as in duty and affection bound, not without additional

testimony in a certain dimness of her pretty, honest, brown eyes, did

indeed very much think so. It followed, therefore, that Dickie saw the

St. Quentin family drive away, nurses and luggage complete, quite

unmoved. And returned with satisfaction and renewed self-confidence to

the exclusive society of all those dear grown-up people--gentle and

simple--who were never guilty of leaving him behind; to that of Camp,

the old, white bulldog, and young Camp, his son and heir, who, if they

so far forgot themselves as to run away, invariably ran back again and

apologised, fawning upon him and pushing their broad, ugly, kindly

muzzles into his hands; and to that of _Monsieur Pouf_, the gray

Persian cat, who, far from going too quickly, displayed such majestic

deliberation of movement and admirable dignity of waving fluffed tail,

that it required much patient coaxing on Dickie's part ever to make him

leave his cushion by the fire and go at all.

But, with the above-mentioned exception, the little boy's self-content

suffered but slight disturbance. He took himself very much for granted.

He was very curious of outside things, very much amused. Moreover, he

was king of a far from contemptible kingdom; and in the blessed

ignorance of childhood--that finds pride and honour in things which a

wider and sadder knowledge often proves far from glad or glorious--it

appeared to him not unnatural that a king should differ, even to the

point of some slightly impeding disabilities, from the rank and file of

his obedient and devoted subjects. For Dickie, happily for him, was as

yet given over to that wholly pleasant vanity, the aristocratic idea.

The rough justice of democracy, and the harsh breaking of all purely

personal and individualistic dreams that comes along with it, for him,

was not just yet.

And Richard's continued and undismayed acquiescence in his physical

misfortune was fostered, indirectly, by the captivating poetry of myth

and legend with which his mind was fed. He had an insatiable appetite

for stories, and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt was an untiring

_raconteuse_. On Sunday afternoons upon the terrace, when the park lay

bathed in drowsy sunshine and sapphire shadows haunted the under edge

of the great woods, the pretty old lady--her eyes shining with gentle

laughter, for Marie de Mirancourt's faith had reached the very perfect

stage in which the soul dares play, even as lovers play, with that it

holds most sacred--would tell Dickie--the fairy tales of her Church.

Would tell him of blessed St. Francis and of Poverty, his sweet, sad

bride; of his sermon to the birds dwelling in the oak groves along

Tiber valley; of the mystic stigmata, marking as with nail prints his

hands and feet, and of that indomitable love towards all creatures,

which found alike in the sun in heaven and the heavy-laden ass,

brothers and friends. Or she would tell him of that man of mighty

strength and stature, St. Christopher, who, in the stormy

darkness,--yielding to its reiterated entreaties,--set forth to bear

the little child across the wind-swept ford. How he staggered in

midstream, amazed and terrified under the awful weight of that,

apparently so light, burden; to learn, on struggling ashore at last,

that he had borne upon his shoulder no mortal infant, but the whole

world and the eternal maker of it, Christ Himself.

These and many another wonder tale of Christian miracle did she tell to

Dickie--he squatting on a rug beside her, resting his curly head

against her knees, while the pink-footed pigeons hurried hither and

thither, picking up the handfuls of barley he scattered on the flags,

and the peacocks sunned themselves with a certain worldly and

disdainful grace on the hand-rails of the gray balustrades, and young

Camp, after some wild skirmish in search of sport, flung himself down

panting, his tongue lolling out of his grinning jaws, by the boy's

side.

And Katherine, putting aside her cares as regent of Dickie's kingdom

and the sorrow that lay so chill against her heart, would tell him

stories too, but of a different order of sentiment and of thought. For

Katherine was young yet, and her stories were gallant--since her own

spirit was very brave--or merry, because it delighted her to hear the

boy laugh. And often, as he grew a little older, she would sit with her

arm round him, in the keen, winter twilights before the lamps were lit,

on the broad cushioned bench of the oriel window in the Chapel-Room.

Outside, the stars grew in number and brightness as the dusk deepened.

Within, the firelight played over the white-paneled walls, revealing

fitfully the handsome faces of former Calmadys--short-lived, passing

hence all unsated with the desperate joys of living--painted by Vandyke

and Sir Peter Lely, or by Romney and Sir Joshua. Then she would tell

him not only of Aladdin, of Cinderella, and time-honoured

Puss-in-Boots, but of Merlin the great enchanter, and of King Arthur

and his company of noble knights. And of the loves of Sigurd the

Niblung and Brunhilda the wise and terrible queen, and of their

lifelong sorrow, and of the fateful treasure of fairy gold which lies

buried beneath the rushing waters of the Rhine. Or she would tell him

of those cold, clear, far-off times in the northern sojourning places

of our race--tell him of the cow Audhumla, alone in the vast plain at

the very beginning of things, licking the stones crusted over with hoar

frost and salt, till, on the third day, there sprung from them a

warrior named Bur, the father of Boer, the father of Odin, who is the

father of all the gods. She would tell him of wicked Loki too, the

deceiver and cunning plotter against the peace of heaven. And of his

three evil children--here Dickie would, for what reason he knew not,

always feel his mother hold him more closely, while her voice took a

deeper tone--Fenrir the wolf, who, when Thor sought to bind him, bit

off the brave god's right hand; and Joermungand the Midgard serpent,

who, tail in mouth, circles the world; and Hela, the pale queen, who

reigns in Niflheim over the dim kingdoms of the dead. And of Baldur the

bright shining god, joy of Asgard, slain in error by Hoeder his blind

twin-brother; for whom all things on earth--save one--weep, and will

weep, till in the last days he comes again. And of All-Father Odin

himself, plucking out his right eye and bartering it for a draught of

wisdom-giving water from Mirmir's magic well. Again, she would tell him

of the End--which it must be owned frightened Dickie a little, so that

he would stroke her cheek, and say softly, "But, mummy, you really are

sure, aren't you, it won't happen for a good while yet?"--Of Ragnaroek,

the Twilight of the Gods; of the Fimbul winter, and cheerless sun and

hurrying, blood-red moon, and all the direful signs which must needs go

before the last great battle between good and evil.

And through all of these stories, of Christian and heathen origin

alike, Richard began dimly, almost unconsciously, to trace, recurrent

as a strain of austere music, the idea--very common to ages less soft

and fastidious than our own--of payment in self-restraint and labour,

or in actual bodily pain, loss, or disablement, for all good gained and

knowledge won.

He found the same idea again when, under the teaching of Julius March,

he began reading history, and when his little skill in Greek and Latin

carried him as far as the easier passages of the classic poets. Dick

was a very apt, if somewhat erratic and inaccurate, scholar. His

insatiable curiosity drove him forward. He scurried, in childish

fashion by all shortcuts available, to get at the heart of the

matter--a habit of mind detestable to pedants, since to them the letter

is the main object, not the spirit. Happily Julius was ceasing to be a

pedant, even in matters ecclesiastical. He loved the little boy, the

mingled charm and pathos of whose personality held him as with a spell.

With untiring patience he answered, to the best of his ability,

Dickie's endless questions, of how and why. And, perhaps, he learned

even more than he taught, under this fire of cross-examination. He had

never come intimately in contact with a child's mind before; and

Dickie's daring speculations and suggestions opened up very surprising

vistas at times. The boy was a born adventurer; a gaily audacious

sceptic moreover, notwithstanding his large swallow for romance, until

his own morsel of reason and sense of dramatic fitness were satisfied.

And so, having once apprehended that idea of payment, he searched for

justification of it instinctively in all he saw and read. He found it

again in the immortal story of the siege of Troy, and in the long

wanderings and manifold trials of that most experimental of

philosophers, the great Ulysses. He found it too in more modern and

more authentic history--in the lives of Galileo and Columbus, of Sir

Walter Raleigh and many another hero and heroine, of whom, because of

some unusual excellence of spirit or attainment, their fellow-men, and,

as it would seem, the very gods themselves, have grown jealous, not

enduring to witness a beauty rivalling or surpassing their own.

The idea was all confused as yet, coloured by childish fancies,

instinctive merely, not realised. Yet it occupied a very actual place

in the little boy's mind. He lingered over it silently, caressing it,

returning to it again and again in half-frightened delight. It lent a

fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and unsightly

creatures--to blind worms and slow-moving toads; to trapped cats and

dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged sea-gull, property of

Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners, that paced, picking up loathsome

living in the matter of slugs and snails, about the cabbage beds, all

the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of the freedom of the sea

in its wild, pale eyes.

It further provoked Dickie to expend all his not inconsiderable gift of

draughtsmanship, in the production of long processions of half-human

monsters of a grotesque and essentially uncomfortable character. He

scribbled these upon all available pieces of paper, including the

fly-leaves of Todhunter's Arithmetic, and of his Latin and Greek

primers. In an evil hour, for the tidiness of his school-books, he came

across the ballad of "Aiken-Drum," with its rather terrible mixture of

humour, realism, and the supernatural. From thenceforth for some

weeks--though he adroitly avoided giving any direct account of the

origin of these grisly imaginative freaks--many margins were adorned,

or rather defaced, by fancy portraits of that "foul and stalwart

ghaist" the Brownie of Badnock.

So did Dickie dwell, through all his childhood and the early years of

youth, in the dear land of dreams, petted, considered, sheltered with

perhaps almost cruel kindness, from the keen winds of truth that blow

forever across the world. Which winds, while causing all to suffer and

bringing death to the weak and fearful, to the lovers of lies and the

makers of them, go in the end to strengthen the strong who dare face

them, and fortify these in the acceptance of the only knowledge really

worth having--namely, the knowledge that romance is no exclusive

property of the past, or eternal life of the future, but that both

these are here immediately and actually for whoso has eyes to see and

courage to possess.

The fairest dreams are true. Yet it is so ordered that to know that we

must awake from them. And the awakening is an ugly process enough, too

often. When Dickie was about thirteen, the awakening began for him. It

came in time-honoured forms--those of horses and of a woman.