CHAPTER II

TELLING HOW DICKIE'S SOUL WAS SOMEWHAT SICK, AND HOW HE MET FAIR WOMEN

ON THE CONFINES OF A WOOD

RICHARD CALMADY rode homeward through the autumn woods, and the aspect

of them was very lovely. But their loveliness was hectic, a loveliness

as it seemed, at all events at first sight, of death and burial, rather

than of life and hope. The sky was overcast, and a chill clung to the

stream side and haunted the hollows. The young man's humour,

unfortunately, was only too much in harmony with the more melancholy

suggestions of the scene. For Richard was by nature something of a

poet, though he but rarely wrote verses, and usually burned them as

soon as written, being scholar enough to know and feel impatient of the

"second best." And this inherent strain of poetry in him tempered the

active and practical side of his character, making wealth and position,

and all those things which the worldly-minded seek, seem of slight

value to him at times. It induced in him many and very varying moods.

It carried him back often, even now in the strength of his young

manhood, to the fine fancies and exquisite unreason of the fairy world

in which those so sadly ill-balanced footsteps of his had first been

set. To-day had proved, so far, an unlucky one, prolific of warfare

between his clear brain and all too sensitive heart. For it was the

burden of Richard's temperament--the almost inevitable result of that

ever-present thorn in the flesh--that he shrunk as a poet, even as a

woman, while as a man, and a strong one, he reasoned and fought.

It fell out on this wise. He had attended the Quarter Sessions at

Westchurch; and a certain restlessness, born of the changing seasons,

being upon him, he had ridden. His habit, when passing outside the

limits of his own property, was to drive. He became aware--and angrily

conscious his groom was aware also--that his appearance afforded a

spectacle of the liveliest interest to the passers-by; that persons of

very various age and class had stopped and turned to gaze at him; and

that, while crossing the bridge spanning the dark, oily waters of the

canal, in the industrial quarter of the pushing, wide-awake, county

town, he had been the subject of brutal comment, followed by a hoarse

laugh from the collarless throats of some dozen operatives and bargees

loitering thereupon.

The consequence was that the young man arrived in court, his eyes

rather hard and his jaw set. Rich, well-born, not undistinguished too

for his attainments, and only three and twenty, Dickie had a fine fund

of arrogance to draw upon yet. He drew upon it this morning, rather to

the confusion of his colleagues upon the bench. Mr. Cathcart, the

chairman, was already present, and stood talking with Mr. Seymour, the

rector of Farley, a shrewd, able parson of the old sporting type.

Captain Fawkes of Water End was there too; and so was Lemuel Image,

eldest son of the Mr. Image, sometime mayor of Westchurch, who has been

mentioned in the early pages of this chronicle.

In the last twenty years, supported by ever-increasing piles of

barrels, the Image family had mounted triumphantly upward in the social

scale. Lemuel, the man in question, married a poor and distant relation

of Lord Aldborough, the late lord lieutenant of the county; and had by

this, and by a rather truculent profession of high Tory politics,

secured himself a seat on the bench. He had given a fancy price, too,

for that pretty, little place, Frodsmill, the grounds of which form

such an exasperating Naboth's vineyard in the heart of the Newland's

property. Neither his person, nor his politics, nor his absence of

culture, found favour in Richard Calmady's sight. And to-day, being

somewhat on edge, the brewer's large, blustering presence and

manner--at once patronising and servile--struck him as peculiarly

odious. Image betrayed an evil tendency to emphasise his remarks by

slapping his acquaintances upon the back. He was also guilty of

supposing a defect of hearing in all persons older than, or in any

measure denied the absolute plethora of physical vigour so conspicuous

in, himself. He invariably raised his voice in addressing Richard. In

return for which graceful attention Dickie most cordially detested him.

"Image is a bit of a cad, and certainly Calmady makes no bones about

letting him know it," Captain Fawkes remarked to Mr. Seymour, as they

drove back to Farley in the latter's dog-cart. "Fortunately he has a

hide like a rhinoceros, or we should have had a regular row between

them more than once this morning. Calmady's generally charming; but I

must say, when he likes, he can be about the most insolent fellow I've

ever met, in a gentleman-like way."

"A great deal of that is simply self-protective," the clergyman

answered. "It is not difficult to see how it comes about, when you take

his circumstances into account. If I was him, God forgive me, I know I

shouldn't be half so sweet tempered. He bears it wonderfully well, all

things considered."

Nor did the disturbing incidents of the day end with the familiarities

of the loud-voiced brewer. The principal case to be tried was a

melancholy one enough--a miserable history or wayward desire, shame and

suffering, followed by a despairing course of lies and petty thieving

to help support the poor baby whose advent seemed so wholly a curse.

The young mother--a pretty, desperate creature--made no attempt at

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

imprisoned, and therefore doubtless very naughty, loves. The colours

have grown faint by action of insweeping wind and weather; but this

lends a pathos to the light-hearted, highly-artificial art, emphasising

the contrast between it and its immediate surroundings.

For the Temple stands on a platform of turf at the extreme point of the

spur of table-land. The hillside, clothed with heather and bracken,

fringed lower down with a coppice of delicate birches, falls steeply

away in front and on either hand. Outstretched below, besides the

panorama of the great woods, lies all the country about Farley, on to

Westchurch, and beyond again--pasture and cornlands, scattered hamlets

and red-roofed farms half-hidden among trees, the glint of streams set

in the vivid green of water-meadows, and soft blue range behind range

of distance to that pale uprising of chalk down in the far south. Upon

the right, some quarter of a mile away, blocking the end of an avenue

of ancient Scotch firs, the eastern facade of Brockhurst House shows

planted proudly upon the long gray and red lines of the terrace.

Richard checked his horse, pausing to look for a moment at that

well-beloved home. Then musing, he let his horse go forward along the

level turf-ride. The glistering, gray dome and white columns of the

Temple standing out against the spacious prospect--the growing

brightness of this last, still chastened by the delicious autumn

haze--captivated his imagination. There was, seen thus, a simplicity

and distinction altogether classic in the lonely building. To him it

appeared not unfit shrine for the worship of that same all-pervasive

spirit of mystery, not unfit spot for the revelation of that same glad,

yet cunningly elusive secret, of which he suffered the so fond

obsession.

And so it was that when, coming abreast of the building, the sound of

young voices--women's voices--and finely modulated laughter saluted his

ear, though startled for no stranger had the right of entry to the

park, he was by no means displeased. This seemed but part of the

all-pervasive magic of this strange afternoon. Richard smiled at the

phantasies of his own mood; yet he forgot to be shy, forgot the

distressing self-consciousness which made him shrink from the

observation of strangers--specially those of the other sex. The

adventure tempted his fancy. Even familiar things had put on a new and

beguiling vesture in the last half hour, so there were miracles abroad,

perhaps. Anyhow he would satisfy himself as to the aspect of those

sweet voiced and, as yet, unseen trespassers. He let his horse go

forward slowly across the platform of turf.