THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE
Once, when I was a boy of twelve or so, there had come to stay at
Evercreech a little lady whom I hated with all my heart. This was Miss
Ira Christmas; but very remote from the charity and goodwill which her
name suggested, she had always appeared to me. She was a ward in
Chancery, as I understood, and as such committed to the custody of her
nearest kinsman, my stepfather. Her mother’s hand, as I came to learn,
had once been coveted by him for his son Charlie; but the lady had
decided to bestow her fortune elsewhere; and, by the very irony of
fate, the residue of her perversity, so to speak, was all that
reverted to him from that abortive scheme. Both she and her husband
died young, in short, and the orphan Christmas, heiress to an
intestate estate, was consigned to his charge for her education and
upbringing.
She was with us for only a few months before her transportation to
France and elsewhere for her finishing education; but the little
interlude of her presence at Evercreech awoke in me such a sense of
shame and mutiny as I had never suffered before. I knew nothing of her
parents but what might be gathered negatively from their reflection in
this detestable child. I call her so with every sense of my
responsibility to the present. She had all the instincts of an
infantile parvenue, and all the hypocrisy of an embryo Pharisee. Her
precocious sharpness was early in discovering the disfavour with which
Lady Skene regarded me, and in affecting a sympathy with the reasons
for that dislike. I was bad, sullen, one of the unelect on her little
tripping red tongue. I had no gratitude for the gifts of Providence in
so raising me from the mire to a position which was none of my
deserts, and which had come to be mine purely through the
instrumentality of an evangelical mother. I should be thankful, on the
contrary, for every crumb of condescension vouchsafed me--a feast, if
I could only come to realise in it a sense of my own insignificance.
She was always poking that in my teeth, viciously and by innuendo. I
wondered even that Lady Skene could stand it, since it reflected upon
herself; but she had truly no snobbism, and valued her creed above all
earthly aggrandisements. The abominable child played up to this
weakness, or strength, in her, and so secured her own position as
prime favourite with the real head of the establishment.
As to Lord Skene, I think, in his equitable old heart, he disliked his
ward as much as I loathed her. But there were other considerations to
influence him. She was at least the daughter of her mother, and might
have been so different had his plans not miscarried. His dead boy,
his shattered hope, for ever figured in the perspective of his past
life. That also, perhaps, might have been so different--might have
come to record no lapse upon ancient rogueries, had his hope duly
taken shape and maturity. But the son had disappeared, and the father
was left derelict. How it had all happened was a topic quite taboo in
these days. A portrait of the boy hung in his room--a fresh, saucy
young face, bright with a wholesome determination to live enjoyably,
but wilful and a little imperious. I used to love to look at it, when
I dared to steal in unobserved. It conveyed a sort of challenge and
help to me in one. And he had been dead--how long? Years piled on
years now; and no one knew where his bones lay. He had been climbing
in the Italian Alps with his tutor, a travelling comrade, and, it was
supposed, had fallen into a crevasse, or down a precipice while
exploring the heights alone, and thereafter had never been seen. Mr
Delane, the tutor, had given evidence of his parting with him on such
and such a day, and there was an end of the matter. Charlie Skene had
been wiped out, and with him all the elaborately compiled record of
his father’s schemes and ambitions for him.
“He was near twenty-one,” said Miss Christmas--“I know: and Lord Skene
wanted him to marry my mother. And where would you have been then, you
little low boy?”
“Where would you have been?” I retorted.
“Here, of course,” she said, “and the daughter of a lord. And my lord
wouldn’t have wanted to marry again then; and I’m sure I shouldn’t
have wanted you.”
“You wouldn’t have got me if you had,” I said. “I hate you?”
“O!” she cried, affectedly aghast, and ran off to Lady Skene to
complain of the dreadful language I had used.
She wore her hair in a bag-net, and I have always detested the
fashion. She might have been called pretty, I suppose, by those who
find a charm in pertness franked by large eyes, and a wicked dimple in
a smooth cheek. But childhood can see no beauty in what it dislikes.
Instinctive sympathy with itself, with its moods and difficulties, is
its criterion of loveliness.
This girl, and a certain Pugsley, were my morbid aversions of those
days. The reverend Mr Pugsley had been translated--through the
instrumentality of Lord Skene and the influence of his lady--from a
suburban cure to the living of St Luke’s, Market Grazing. He had
belonged, I believe, to the “Clapham Sect,” or what, in his time,
constituted the remnants of that dour and depressing body. Its spirit,
indeed, still so dwelt in him, morally and physically--in his narrow
convictions, as in his dismal dyspeptic face, sloping shoulders, and
general joyless aspect--that a question as to his well-being might at
any time have been answered by him in the words of the notorious Dr
Jekyll, “I am very low, Utterson; very low.” Very low a churchman he
was, in fact; so low that he crawled, symbolically, in the dust, and
called himself a worm. I never disputed that half so much as his
calling me one. But his professional terminology gathered no
inspiration with the years, and its eternal limitations were, it
seemed, satisfying to Lady Skene, who was his main prop and patroness.
It began with wrath and the blood of lambs, and foundered in mud among
worms and serpents. The principle of pre-election is very comforting
to one’s sense of moral responsibility. It narrows it to the
consideration of that small body, which, after all, it need not
consider, since it is booked for Paradise. It seems a cruelty of
supererogation to taunt the unelect with their doom. But Mr Pugsley
gave me little hope. I was a worm, a brand; “baptised in fire that I
might inherit ever-lasting fire.” I suppose that very early I showed a
scorn of his nonsense; and that put his spiritual back up. Moreover I
parodied him; and no man, though a priest, likes to be laughed at for
his convictions. Sir Maurice Carnac, before mentioned, happened to
alight on the stuff without my knowledge; and he made a huge
spluttering joke of it. Here it is, founded on a Pugsleyite hymn:
“When with the heavenly hosts I sit down
Sure of my dinner and decked with my crown,
O what a blessing and O what a grace
To think that my faith has reserved me this place!
Though enough is as good as a feast,
Having conquered the gluttonous beast,
As elect I may stuff on more than enough,
And not be disturbed in the least.
“When I am safe on the infinite shore,
Free to do naught, if I like, but adore,
O what a blessing and O what a good
To think I may temper the praise to the mood!
For enough is as good as a feast,
In this limited transit at least;
And I feel more and more that the thing that’s a bore
In the West, might be so in the East.
“To sleep or to venture, to feast or to fast;
No excess possible, boredom, nor caste--
O what a blessing and O what a bliss
If Faith at discretion should bring me to this!
No enough that’s as good as a feast,
Nor nausea rising like yeast;
But, free as the air to praise or to pair,
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.
But in truth, for all my mood I spent my time as much in dreaming as
in brooding. I was at the romantic age, the soft shadows of life on
one side, its infinite heights on the other. The repinings of
misunderstood youth appeal, I think, much more sentimentally to the
kind observer than they deserve. A thousand compensations of wonder
and expectation are always at the service of the most oppressed young
manhood. I found plenty for myself in that strange solitary life--the
knowledge of woods at dawn; the intimacy of venturesome birds; the
cosy lamp-lit room, my own, and shelves of glistening books. I owed
most of the last to the good-natured kindness of Lord Skene, who had
sent me down a small library of volumes at the latter end of my
furnishing. These were generally tied into bundles of a dozen or so,
and had been bought years before, as he told me when I went to thank
him for his gift, at a sale following the decease of a young neighbour
of his. They had never, for the most part, been opened since, and it
was my pleasure to untie the dusty strings which restored their
treasures to the light. They have their part in the development of the
strange story, whose opening chapter was now to date itself from the
date of my entrance into the lodge in the Caddle.
I shall never forget the weird experience of my first night there--the
intense humid darkness; the awful emphasis the dead silence received
from the fitful creeping and falling sounds incidental to a wooded
solitude. I hardly slept at all. The echo of a rare footfall in the
highroad beyond was always first a solace and then a terror. I would
listen for its coming, mark its passing, and when that, owing to the
muffling foliage, was seemingly halted or delayed, my heart thickened
to a panic of expectation that the thread would be taken up close
by--stealthy shufflings about the walls; a scratch on a window-pane.
Yet, after all, nothing visited me but ghosts, and with those I was
familiar. They came out of dusky nooks and corners, taunting me with
my inefficiency, my loneliness, speaking unutterable things of my
despicable position, and the neglect which had devoted me to it. Faint
glimmering vistas into the past they showed me--glimpses of memory,
which flickered only to close. Had I, indeed, always been thus, a
burden, an intruder? I knew nothing of it all. My mother, in all my
conscious memory of her, had never been my mother but in name. And was
there nothing behind her--no shadow, even, of a father’s brief
devotion? Sometimes a strange old face, evil and curious, would seem
to bend down over me; but it always dissolved before it could be
secured. I did not like to think I owed my life to that. And when I
slept, I fought and sobbed and struggled in bewildering mists; and the
cry was for ever in my heart: “Who am I? Who was my father? Why does
she hate me so--on his account or my own?”
Well, enough of these moods. I am not built of the stuff which harps
on self-grievances to win sympathy. Soon, and very soon, I was to
become “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” and from the
first moment of my command, I never voluntarily relinquished it.
The baby, a poor peakish little male fellow, was born, I say; and I
was forgotten. When at last I was remembered, development of nerve and
character had so fastened me to my position, that there was no
question of ousting me from it against my will. Nor was there much
attempt. Lady Skene ignored me; her husband, fatuous father now,
laughingly acquiesced in my wilfulness.
“Go your own way, Gaskett,” he said. “You’ll come to me when you want
me, no doubt.”
No doubt at all; but not in the way he foresaw. In the meantime I led
the life of a free-forester, and was more genially content than I had
been for long. And then one day came the first of the change.
It was October, and the baby had been born in March. I had seen him
once or twice at a distance, and that was all. There was a path
running through that slope of the thickets which led up towards the
house, and this path ended in the pleasant bosky sward known as the
“Baby’s Garden” before mentioned. It was a lovely quiet spot, and
thither the honourable Master Skene was often carried by his nurse for
air and exercise. I could easily at will command a view of them
without being seen myself. The life of the wild man had taught me many
a trick of cunning concealment, and I never scrupled to practise an
espionage which was, after all, only a necessary habit of savage
precaution. There was an old dead ash, bordering on the thin fringe of
the woods, into whose hollow I could slip from above, and thence
observe through a spy-hole in the trunk. It was so close and
unregarded in that silent chamber of green, that every word spoken
from the latter was audible to me in my eyrie.
One morning I was watching thence (for I had a morbid attraction to my
successor), when he and his nurse appeared before me. She was singing
to him, as she walked in a sort of rhythmical march. An odd pang of
jealousy, as always, seized me in their nearness, Was I not his
mother’s son, too? I felt a thickness in my throat, and swallowed it
down fiercely. Presently the nurse, carrying her charge, went away at
the farther end; and I came out of my hiding and stood at the foot of
the tree, my eyes bent on the place of their going, though, indeed, my
eyes saw little. A feeling of shame and melancholy dimmed them; even
obscured their vision so far that it was not for a moment or two I
realised that the pair had come back, and that I was discovered. I
started, and bent my brow in a fury; and then I saw to my wonder that
it was not the nurse who carried the child, but a young woman--a young
lady, in fact; a vision of frills, and golden hair, and heliotrope
raiment. She had evidently met the nurse on her way out, and taken the
baby from her, and returned with it to the garden, the other
following.
Now all of a sudden she saw me, and came towards me at once, holding
out her burden. Her eyes were mirthful and conciliatory; a smile
quivered on her lips.
“Won’t you kiss your brother?” she said.
My brother! I had never yet realised the relationship. My heart
drummed thickly. All of a sudden I caught her eyes fixed on mine.
“Yes, I am Ira,” she said, “educated, and repentant, and come back to
be punished.”
Without a word, I turned on my heel and went away through the woods.