"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 éternelle, mais celle çi 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.