Richard had the house to himself. And this accentuation of solitude, combined with wider space wherein he could range without fear of observation, was far from unwelcome to him. Last night he had untied the tag of rusty, black ribbon binding together the packet of tattered, dog's-eared, little chap-books which for so long had reposed in the locked drawer of Julius March's study table beneath the guardianship of the bronze pietà. With very conflicting feelings he had mastered the contents of those same untidy, little volumes, and learned the sordid, and probably fabulous, tale set forth in them in meanest vehicle of jingling verse. Vulgarly told to catch the vulgar ear, pandering to the popular superstitions of a somewhat ignoble age, it proved repugnant enough—as Julius had anticipated—both to Richard's reason and to his taste. The critical faculty rejected it as an explanation absurdly inadequate. The cause was wholly disproportionate to the effect, as though a mouse should spring forth a mountain instead of a mountain a mouse. At least that was how the matter struck Richard at first. For the story was, after all, as he told himself, but a commonplace of life in every civilised community. Many a man sins thus, and many a woman suffers, and many bastards are yearly born into the world without—perhaps unfortunately—subsequent manifestation of the divine wrath and signal chastisement of the sinner, or of his legitimate heirs, male or female. Affiliation orders are as well known to magistrate's clerks, as are death-certificates of children bearing the maiden name of their mother to those of the registrar.
All that Richard could dispose of, if with a decent deploring of the frequency of it, yet composedly enough. But there remained that other part of it. And this he could not dispose of so cursorily. His own unhappy deformity, it is true, was amply accounted for on lines quite other than the fulfilment of prophecy, offering, as it did, example of a class of prenatal accidents which, if rare, is still admittedly recurrent in the annals of obstetrics and embryology. Nevertheless, the foretelling of that strange Child of Promise, whose outward aspect and the circumstances of whose birth—as set forth in the sorry rhyme of the chap-book—bore such startling resemblance to his own, impressed him deeply. It astonished, it, in a sense, appalled him. For it came so very near. It looked him so insistently in the face. It laid strong hands on him from out the long past, claiming him, associating itself imperatively with him, asserting, whether he would or no, the actuality and inalienability of its relation to himself. Science might pour scorn on that relation, exposing the absurdity of it both from the moral and physical point of view. But sentiment held other language. And so did that nobler morality which takes its rise in considerations spiritual rather than social and economic, and finds the origins and ultimates, alike, not in things seen and temporal, but in things unseen and eternal—things which, though they tarry long for accomplishment, can neither change, nor be denied, nor, short of accomplishment, can pass away.
And it was this aspect of the whole, strange matter—the thought, namely, of that same Child of Promise who, predestined to bear the last and heaviest stroke of retributive justice, should, bearing it rightly, bring salvation to his race—which obtained with Dickie on the fair Sunday morning in question. It refused to quit him. It affected him through all his being. It appealed to the poetry, the idealism, of his nature—a poetry and idealism not dead, as he had bitterly reckoned them, though sorely wounded by ill-living and the disastrous issues of his passion for Helen de Vallorbes. He seemed to apprehend the approach of some fruitful, far-ranging, profoundly-reconciling and beneficent event. As in the theatre at Naples, when Morabita sang, and to his fever-stricken, brain-sick fancy the dull-coloured multitude in the parterre murmured, buzzing remonstrant as angry swarming bees, so now a certain exaltation of feeling, exaltation of hope, came upon him. Yet having grown, through determined rebellion and unlovely experience, not a little distrustful of all promise of good, he turned on himself bitterly enough, asking if he would never learn to profit by hardly-bought, practical knowledge? If he would never contrive to cast the simpleton wholly out of him? He had been fooled many times, fooled there at Naples to the point of unpardonable insult and degradation. What so probable as that he would be fooled again, now?
And so, in effort to shake off both the dominion of unfounded hope, and the gnawing ache of inward emptiness which made that hope at once so cruel and so dear, as the sound of wheels dying away along the lime avenue assured him that the goodly company of church-goers had, verily and indeed, departed, he set forth on a pilgrimage through the great, silent house. Passing through the two libraries, the antechamber and state drawing-room—with its gilded furniture, fine pictures and tapestries—he reached the open corridor at the stair-head. Here the polished, oak floor, the massive balusters, and tall, carven newel-posts—each topped by a guardian griffin, long of tail, ferocious of beak, and sharp of claw—showed with a certain sober cheerfulness in the pleasant light. For, through all the great windows of the eastern front, the sun slanted in obliquely. While in the Chapel-Room beyond, situated in the angle of the house and thus enjoying a southern as well as eastern aspect, Richard found a veritable carnival of misty brightness, so that he moved across to the oriel-window—whose gray, stone mullions and carved transomes showed delicately mellow of tone between the glittering, leaded panes—in a glory of welcoming warmth and sunlight. Frost and snow might linger in the hollows, but here in the open, on the upland, spring surely had already come.
With the help of a brass ring, riveted by a stanchion into the space of paneling below the stone window-sill—placed there long ago, when he was a little lad, to serve him in such case as the present—Richard drew himself up on to the cushioned bench. He unfastened one of the narrow, curved, iron-framed casements, and, leaning his elbows on the sill, looked out. The air was mild. The smell of the earth was sweet, with a cleanly, wholesome sweetness. The sunshine covered him. And somehow, whether he would or no, hope reasserted its dominion, and that exaltation of feeling entered into possession of him once again, as he rested, gazing away over the familiar home scene, over this land, which, as far as sight carried, had belonged to his people these many generations, and was now his own.
Directly below, at the foot of the descending steps of the main entrance, lay the square, red-walled space of gravel and of turf. He looked at it curiously, for there, with the maiming and death of Thomas Calmady's bastard, if legend said truly, all this tragic history of disaster had begun. There, too, the Clown, race-horse of merry name and mournful memory, had paid the penalty of wholly involuntary transgression just thirty years ago. That last was a rather horrible incident, of which Richard never cared to think. Chifney had told him about it once, in connection with the parentage of Verdigris—had told him just by chance. To think of it, even now, made a lump rise in his throat. Across the turf—offering quaint contrast to those somewhat bloody memories—the peacocks, in all their bravery of royal blue-purple, living green and gold, led forth their sober-clad mates. They had come out from the pepper-pot summer-houses to sun themselves. They stepped mincingly, with a worldly and disdainful grace, and, reaching the gravel, their resplendent trains swept the rounded pebbles, making a small, dry, rattling sound, which, so deep was the surrounding quiet, asserted itself to the extent of saluting Dickie's ears. Beyond the red wall the parallel lines of the elm avenue swept down to the blue and silver levels of the Long Water, the alder copses bordering which showed black-purple, and the reed-beds rusty as a fox, against thin stretches of still unmelted snow. The avenue climbed the farther ascent to the wide archway of the red and gray gate-house, just short of the top of the long ridge of bare moorland. The grass slopes of the park, to the left, were backed by the dark, sawlike edge of the fir forest, and a soft gloom of oak woods, gray-brown and mottled as a lizard's belly and back, closed the end of the valley eastward. On the right the terraced gardens, with their ranges of glittering conservatories, fell away to the sombre pond in the valley, home of loudly-discoursing companies of ducks. The gentle hillside above was clothed by plantations, and a grove of ancient beech trees, whose pale, smooth boles stood out from among undergrowth of lustrous hollies and the warm russet of fallen leaves. And over it all brooded the restfulness of the Sabbath, and the gladness of a fair and equal light.
And the charm of the scene worked upon Richard, not with any heat of excitement, but with a temperate and reasonable grace. For the spirit of it all was a spirit of temperance, of moderation, of secure tranquillity—a spirit stoic rather than epicurean, ascetic rather than hedonic, yet generous, spacious, nobly reasonable, giving ample scope for very sincere, if soberly-clad pleasures, and for activities by no means despicable or unmanly, though of a modest, unostentatious sort. Dickie had tried not a few desperate adventures, had conformed his thought and action to not a few glaring patterns, rushing to violences of extreme colour, extreme white and black. All that had proved preeminently unsuccessful, a most poisonous harvest of Dead Sea fruit. What, he began to ask himself, if he made an effort to conform it to the pattern actually presented to him—mellow, sun-visited, with the brave red of weather stained masonry in it, blue and silver of water and sky, lustre of sturdy hollies, as well as the solemnity of leafless woods, finger of frost in the hollows, and bleakness of snow?
And, as he sat meditating thus, breathing the clear air, feeling the tempered, yet genial, sun-heat, many questions began to resolve themselves. He seemed to look, as down a long, cloudy vista—beyond the tumult and unruly clamour, the wayward resistance and defiant sinning, the craven complainings, the ever-repeated suspicions and misapprehensions of man—away into the patient, unalterable purposes of God. And looking, for the moment, into those purposes, he saw this also—namely, that sorrow, pain, and death, are sweet to whosoever dares, instead of fighting with, or flying from them, to draw near, to examine closely, to inquire humbly, into their nature and their function. He began to perceive that these three reputed enemies—hated and feared of all men—are, after all, the fashioners and teachers of humanity, to whom it is given to keep hearts pure, godly and compassionate, to purge away the dross of pride, hardness, and arrogance, to break the iron bands of ambition, self-love, and vanity, to purify by endurance and by charity, welding together—as with the cunning strokes of the master-craftsman's hammer—the innumerable individual atoms into a corporate whole, of fair form, of supreme excellence of proportion, the image and example of a perfect brotherhood, of a republic more firmly based and more beneficent than even that pictured by the divine Plato himself—since that was consolidated by exclusion, this by inclusion and pacification of those things which men most dread.—Perceived that, without the guiding and chastening of these three lovely terrors, humanity would, indeed, wax wanton, and this world become the merriest court of hell, lust and corruption have it all their own foul way, the flesh triumph, and all bestial things come forth to flaunt themselves gaudily, greedily, without remonstrance and without shame in the light of day.—Perceived in these three, a Trinity of Holy Spirits, bearing forever the message of the divine mercy and forgiveness.—Perceived how, of necessity, only the Man of Sorrows can truly be the Son of God.
And, perceiving all this, Richard's attitude towards his own unhappy deformity began to suffer modification. The sordid, yet extravagant, chap-book legend no longer outraged either his moral or his scientific sense. He recalled his emotions in the theatre at Naples when Morabita sang, remembering how wholly welcome had then been to him that imagined approaching-act of retributive justice. He recalled, too, the going forth of love towards his supposed executioners which he had experienced, his reverence for, and yearning towards, the dull-coloured working-bees of the parterre. How he had longed to be at one with them, partaker of their corporate action and corporate strength! How he had rejoiced in the conviction that the final issues are subject to their ruling, that the claims of want are stronger than those of wealth, that labour is more honourable than sloth, intelligence than privilege, liberty more abiding than tyranny—the idea of equality, of fellowship, more excellent than the aristocratic idea, that of born master and of born serf! And both that welcome of the accomplishment of a signal act of justice, and that desire to participate in the eternal strength of the children of labour as against the ephemeral and fictitious strength of the children of idleness and wealth, found strange confirmation in the chap-book legend.
For it seemed to Richard that, taking all that singular matter both of prophecy and of cure simply—as believers take some half-miraculous, scripture tale—he had already, in his own person, in right of the physical uncomeliness of it, paid part, at all events, of the price demanded by the Eternal Justice for his ancestors' sinning and for his own. It was not needful that the bees should swarm and the dull-coloured multitude revenge itself on the indolent, full-fed larvæ peopling the angular honey-cells, as far as he, Richard Calmady, was concerned. That revenge had been taken long ago, in a mysterious and rather terrible manner, before his very birth. While, in the stern denunciation, the adhering curse, of the outraged and so-soon-to-be-childless mother, he found the just and age-old protest, the patient faith in the eventual triumph of the proletariat—of the defenseless poor as against the callous self-seeking and sensuality of the securely guarded rich. By the fact of his deformity he was emancipated from the delusions of his class, was made one, in right of the suffering and humiliation of it, with the dull-coloured multitudes whose corporate voice declares the ultimate verdict, who are the architects and judges of civilisation, of art, even of religion, even, in a degree, of nature herself. Salvation, according to the sorry yet inspiring rhyme of the chap-book, was contingent upon precisely this recognition of brotherhood with, and practice of willing service towards, all maimed and sorrowful creatures. His America was here or nowhere, his vocation clearly indicated, his work immediate and close at hand.