Quit of the doctor and priest!”
I am remotest from wishing to excuse the doggerel, or to defend its profanity. But, if not inspired, it was wrung from an intolerable sense of injury, and its effect was at least to make me feel that I had won my spiritual attainder at last. Little Miss Christmas came to hear of it, and was very cross because it had been destroyed. She wanted substantial proof of my wickedness, and the verbal means to retort upon my abuse of her dear Mr Pugsley, whom she adored, the odious little humbug. But, as for me, I gloried in my unregeneracy, and wrote more verses, which I came to be wise enough to burn.
The little wretch, as I say, came and went; but Mr Pugsley went on for ever. I grew apart from him, however; and at this day it is a wonder to me that his memory affects me with anything but a sense of humour. He spoke what he believed, after all, and I only mention him as an indifferent detail in the context of great events.
I come now to the time when I retired upon my hermitage in the Caddle woods.
Evercreech—the house, that is to say—stands on pretty high ground, which on all sides falls away into dense thickets. It is a fine old Tudor building, gabled, and with mullioned windows; but the different or indifferent fancies of generations have loaded it with incongruous excrescences. Time, however, has assimilated these to a reposeful uniformity of stain and line, and ivy has welded the mass. It was a compact beautiful pile in my earliest knowledge of it, fitting crown to its own verdant slopes.
Nowhere are its surrounding thickets denser than to the north, where the Caddle, or wildered, woods press up against the high road to Footover, turning a steep, naked shoulder of turf to the view of passers-by. Here had once run the main drive to the house, now, in the time of which I write, long abandoned in favour of a shorter approach southernward, and primeval tangle had utterly reclaimed the spot to Nature. But the ancient iron gates, moss-eaten and corroded, yet hung purposeless in the hedgerow, and gave some direction to the trend of the green track which passed under the tree branches within. A little wicket, for private coming and going, had been set thereby, high on the bank above the road, to which grassy steps descended; and at a short stone’s throw from the wicket stood the old lodge.
It was so embedded in foliage as to be hardly discernible from the gate—a little square stone building, and stone-tiled. There had never been a time when I was not familiar with it—its cold chimneys, its abandoned little rooms, the growth, and development, and flight, and renewal of the myriad insect life with which it swarmed. The dank brooding little place had always had a curious attraction for me; and now it was my own, my retreat, whose stagnant solitudes I could use to whatever processes of thought and reflection they might inspire. They surged formlessly in me the first time I stood to claim and regard my acquisition. The place had been cleaned, ordered, furnished, of course. All my scant belongings lay heaped within disorderly. But, beyond necessary clearances, I had insisted that its green surroundings should be respected. No ruthless loppings had disgraced my advent. The lodge remained the undesecrated shrine to this haunt of leaf-loving spirits—an old, old moss-grown temple to the eternal antiquity of Nature.
The fantastic note which speaks in me here I felt throbbing in my veins, soft but enchaining, from my first possession of the place. It was to speak strange things to me before it was done. Already it was a call, but at first far and faint, to a green resolution of independence. At the outset I had no thought but to spend my days here, as a good Catholic goes into retreat, and to return dutifully to the house at night, like any other homing cattle. But that purpose came early to dissolve. The arrival of the little stranger—which happened in the second week of my self-exile—banished all thought and consideration of me from the central ménage. I came to my resolve instantly, procured a camp bedstead, food, drink, and cooking utensils from Footover, and settled permanently into my hermitage. No one observed or protested. My heart was justified of its utmost bitterness, my will of its emancipation. Henceforth I would possess myself—no profitable acquirement for one in my then condition of mind.
Yet, on the whole, these days were the happiest I had known since I left school, though what termination I proposed to them did not figure in my wild philosophy. That, I am afraid, was not sound, for it harped on grievance. It was nourished on the sense of a hundred wrongs, fruit of lovelessness. I was moved for the first time to marshal these resolutely before my mind’s eye. I did not believe in original sin, Some babies were saints and some demons at a month old. I was conscious of no inherent baseness in myself, nor of a necessity to apologise for my own existence. Yet the impression enforced upon me, the atmosphere in which I had grown, had always seemed weighted with the necessity of that self-consciousness. I had been tolerated, and made to feel the fact; and lack of servile acknowledgment on my part had been counted to a graceless disposition. Yet was I not my mother’s son? And what manner of mother was this who would not have her child share in her exaltation, but was perpetually reminding him by implication of the baseness of that beginning which he owed to her? And I could have been slave to her loveliness; her patient catechumen, even, in the vulgar pietistic creed which sufficed her soul, had she ever once spoken a word of affection, played a mother’s part to me. But when I suffered, her eye was as cold as Cleopatra’s. She neither read me, nor could, perhaps, nor wanted to. I thought myself the perpetual hateful reminder to her of something she would forget; and I would not cringe, nor be mean, nor play the self-obliterating part expected of me, except in so far as my love of nature and solitude kept me aloof. But as I grew up strong—even wonderfully strong, I think—and tall and brown and passable in the face, with no hypocritical sense of shortcomings, but a feeling that at least I might be held to do a parent no discredit, I believed I should come to hate where I was hated; and, if so, I would shrink from using no part of the strength, mental and physical, with which Nature had endowed me. I wonder Lady Skene never saw the danger of her system; but her perceptives were narrow to a degree.
Now I did not know who she had been, nor how married before made a widow, nor what had been my father’s character or business. But all at once these things began to exercise my mind, when, in the first days of my complete separation from the house, I seemed to realise myself as something cut away from the main stem, a runner pinned down and then severed, and responsible for its own future development. In fact, I began to think on my own account, as was my engagement with Lord Skene; only, at the outset, I am afraid, with little concern for a possible vocation. Choice of that, I considered, whether for brain or hand, might follow on a certain knowledge of my origin; and whoever my father had been, I had no intention to insult his memory by a pretence to better dues than his. On the contrary, I rather hoped, in my savage misanthropy, to discover how my origin justified me in digging for my living.