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Various - "Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919"

John C. Symons - "The Village Sunday School"

Francis Galton - "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development"

Joseph C. Lincoln - "Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse"

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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard



DEADHAM HARD

A Romance

BY LUCAS MALET

(MARY ST. LEGER HARRISON)

Author of "Sir Richard Calmady," "The Wages of Sin," etc.

1919







"Youth has no boundaries, age has the grave."--BULGARIAN PROVERB




TO MY DEAR FRIEND ACROSS THE OCEAN C. E. O. VEVEY 1899 LONDON 1919




CONTENTS

BOOK I THE HOUSE OF THE TAMARISKS

CHAPTER

I. TELLING HOW, UNDER STRESS OF CIRCUMSTANCES, A HUMANIST TURNED
HERMIT

II. ENTER A YOUNG SCHOLAR AND GENTLEMAN OF A HAPPY DISPOSITION AND
GOOD PROSPECTS

III. THE DOUBTFULLY HARMONIOUS PARTS OF A WHOLE

IV. WATCHERS THROUGH THE SMALL HOURS

V. BETWEEN RIVER AND SEA

VI. IN WHICH THE PAST LAYS AN OMINOUS HAND ON THE PRESENT

VII. A CRITIC IN CORDUROY


BOOK II THE HARD SCHOOL OF THINGS AS THEY ARE

I. IN MAIDEN MEDITATION

II. WHICH CANTERS ROUND A PARISH PUMP

III. A SAMPLING OF FREEDOM

IV. OUT ON THE BAR

V. WHEREIN DAMARIS MAKES SOME ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE HIDDEN WAYS OF
MEN

VI. RECOUNTING AN ASTONISHING DEPOSITION

VII. A SOUL AT WAR WITH FACT

VIII. TELLING HOW TWO PERSONS, OF VERY DIFFERENT MORAL CALIBRE, WERE
COMPELLED TO WEAR THE FLOWER OF HUMILIATION IN THEIR RESPECTIVE
BUTTONHOLES

IX. AN EXPERIMENT IN BRIDGE-BUILDING OF WHICH TIME ALONE CAN FIX
THE VALUES

X. TELLING HOW MISS FELICIA VERITY UNSUCCESSFULLY ATTEMPTED A
RESCUE

XI. IN WHICH DAMARIS RECEIVES INFORMATION OF THE LOST SHOES AND
STOCKINGS--ASSUMPTION OF THE GOD-HEAD

XII. CONCERNING A SERMON WHICH NEVER WAS PREACHED AND OTHER MATTERS
OF LOCAL INTEREST


BOOK III THE WORLD BEYOND THE FOREST

I. AN EPISODE IN THE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE OF THE MAN WITH THE BLUE
EYES

II. TELLING HOW DAMARIS RENEWED HER ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE BELOVED
LADY OF HER INFANCY

III. WHICH CONCERNS ITSELF, INCIDENTALLY, WITH THE GRIEF OF A VICTIM
OF CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE RECEPTION OF A BELATED CHRISTMAS
GREETING

IV. BLOWING ONE'S OWN TRUMPET PRACTISED AS A FINE ART

V. IN WHICH HENRIETTA PULLS THE STRINGS

VI. CARNIVAL--AND AFTER

VII. TELLING HOW DAMARIS DISCOVERED THE TRUE NATURE OF A CERTAIN
SECRET TO THE DEAR MAN WITH THE BLUE EYES

VIII. FIDUS ACHATES

IX. WHICH FEATURES VARIOUS PERSONS WITH WHOM THE READER IS ALREADY
ACQUAINTED

X. WHICH IT IS TO BE FEARED SMELLS SOMEWHAT POWERFULLY OF BILGE
WATER

XI. WHEREIN DAMARIS MEETS HERSELF UNDER A NOVEL ASPECT

XII. CONCERNING ITSELF WITH A GATHERING UP OF FRAGMENTS

XIII. WHICH RECOUNTS A TAKING OF SANCTUARY


BOOK IV THROUGH SHADOWS TOWARDS THE DAWN

I. WHICH CARRIES OVER A TALE OF YEARS, AND CARRIES ON

II. RECALLING, IN SOME PARTICULARS, THE EASIEST RECORDED THEFT IN
HUMAN HISTORY

III. BROTHER AND SISTER

IV. WHEREIN MISS FELICIA VERITY CONCLUSIVELY SHOWS WHAT SPIRIT SHE
IS OF

V. DEALING WITH EMBLEMS, OMENS AND DEMONSTRATIONS

VI. SHOWING HOW SIR CHARLES VERITY WAS JUSTIFIED OF HIS LABOURS

VII. TELLING HOW CHARLES VERITY LOOKED ON THE MOTHER OF HIS SON

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH WHICH IS ALSO CHAPTER THE LAST




BOOK I

THE HOUSE OF THE TAMARISKS




CHAPTER I

TELLING HOW, UNDER STRESS OF CIRCUMSTANCE, A HUMANIST TURNED HERMIT


A peculiar magic resides in running water, as every student of earth-lore
knows. There is high magic, too, in the marriage of rivers, so that the
spot where two mingle their streams is sacred, endowed with strange
properties of evocation and of purification. Such spots go to the making
of history and ruling of individual lives; but whether their influence is
not more often malign than beneficent may be, perhaps, open to doubt.

Certain it is, however, that no doubts of this description troubled the
mind of Thomas Clarkson Verity, when, in the closing decade of the
eighteenth century, he purchased the house at Deadham Hard, known as
Tandy's Castle, overlooking the deep and comparatively narrow channel by
which the Rivers Arne and Wilner, after crossing the tide-flats and
salt-marsh of Marychurch Haven, make their swift united exit into
Marychurch Bay. Neither was he troubled by the fact that Tandy's
Castle--or more briefly and familiarly Tandy's--for all its commonplace
outward decency of aspect did not enjoy an unblemished moral or social
reputation. The house--a whitewashed, featureless erection--was planted
at right angles to the deep sandy lane leading up from the shore, through
the scattered village of Deadham, to the three-mile distant market town
of Marychurch.

Standing on a piece of rough land--bare, save for a few stunted Weymouth
pines, and a fringe of tamarisk along the broken sea-wall--Tandy's, at
the date in question, boasted a couple of bowed sash-windows on either
side the front and back doors; and a range of five other windows set flat
in the wall on the first floor. There was no second storey. The slate
roofs were mean, low-pitched, without any grace of overshadowing eaves.
At either end, a tall chimney-stack rose like the long ears of some
startled, vacant-faced small animal. Behind the house, a thick plantation
of beech and sycamore served to make its square blank whiteness visible
for a quite considerable distance out to sea. Built upon the site of some
older and larger structure, it was blessed--or otherwise--with a system
of vaults and cellars wholly disproportionate to its existing size. One
of these, by means of a roughly ceiled and flagged passage, gave access
to a heavy door in the sea-wall opening directly on to the river
foreshore.

Hence the unsavoury reputation of the place. For not only did it supply a
convenient receiving house for smuggled goods, but a convenient
rendezvous for the more lawless characters of the neighbourhood--a
back-of-beyond and No Man's Land where the devil could, with impunity,
have things very much his own way. In the intervals of more serious
business, the vaults and cellars of Tandy's frequently resounded to the
agonies and brutal hilarities of cock-fights, dog-fights, and other
repulsive sports and pastimes common to the English--both gentle and
simple--of that virile but singularly gross and callous age. Nevertheless
to Thomas Clarkson Verity, man of peace and of ideas, Tandy's
represented--and continued to represent through over half a
century--rescue, security, an awakening in something little short of
paradise from a long-drawn nightmare of hell. He paid an extortionate
price for the property at the outset, and spent a small fortune on the
enlargement of the house and improvement of the grounds, yet never
regretted his bargain.

For, in good truth, when, in the spring of 1794, the soft, nimble,
round-bodied, very polite, learned and loquacious little gentleman first
set eyes upon its mean roofs, prick ears and vacant whitewashed
countenance, he had been horribly shocked, horribly scared--for all the
inherited valour of his good breeding--and, above all, most horribly
disappointed. History had played very dirty pranks with him, which he
found it impossible as yet to forgive.

Five years earlier, fired, like many another generous spirit, by
extravagant hope of the coming regeneration of mankind, he hurried off to
Paris after the opening of the National Assembly and fall of the
Bastille. With the overture to the millennium in full blast, must he not
be there to hear and see? Associating himself with the Girondist party he
assisted, busily enthusiastic, at the march of tremendous events, until
the evil hour in which friend began to denounce friend, and heads, quite
other than aristocratic--those of men and women but yesterday the idols
and chosen leaders of the people--went daily to the filling of _la veuve_
Guillotine's unspeakable market-basket. The spectacle proved too
upsetting both to Mr. Verity's amiable mind and rather queasy stomach.
Faith failed; while even the millennium seemed hardly worth purchasing at
so detestable a cost. He stood altogether too close to the terrible
drama, in its later stages, to distinguish the true import or progression
of it. Too close to understand that, however blood-stained its cradle,
the goodly child Democracy was veritably, here and now, in the act of
being born among men. Rather did he question whether his own fat little
neck was not in lively danger of being severed; and his own head--so full
of ingenious thoughts and lively curiosity--of being sent flying to join
those of Brissot and Verginaud, of wayward explosive Camille and sweet
Lucile Desmoulins, in that same unspeakable basket.

And to what end? For could he suppose the human race would be nearer, by
the veriest fraction of a millimetre, to universal liberty, equality, and
prosperity, through his insignificant death? Modesty, and a natural
instinct of self-preservation alike answered, "never a jot." Whereupon
with pertinacious, if furtive, activity he sought means of escape. And,
at length, after months of hiding and anxious flitting, found them in the
shape of a doubtfully seaworthy, and undoubtedly filthy, fishing-smack
bound from Le Havre to whatever port it could make on the English south
coast. The two days' voyage was rough, the accommodation and company to
match. Mr. Verity spent a disgusting and disgusted forty-eight hours, to
be eventually put ashore, a woefully bedraggled and depleted figure, in
the primrose, carmine, and dove-grey of a tender April morning on the wet
sand just below the sea-wall of Tandy's Castle.

Never was Briton more thankful to salute his native land, or feel the
solid earth of it under his weary and very shaky feet. He, an epicure,
ate such coarse food, washed down by such coarse ale, as Tandy's could
offer with smiling relish. Later, mounted on a forest pony--an
ill-favoured animal with a wall-eye, pink muzzle, bristly upper and
hanging lower lip, more accustomed to carry a keg of smuggled spirits
strapped beneath its belly than a cosmopolitan savant and social reformer
on its back--he rode the three miles to Marychurch, proposing there to
take the coach to Southampton and, after a measure of rest and refitting,
a post-chaise to Canton Magna, his elder brother's fine place lying in a
fold of the chalk hills which face the Sussex border.

The pony moved slowly and sullenly; but its rider felt no impatience. His
humour was of the kindliest. His heart, indeed, came near singing for
joy, simply, spontaneously, even as the larks sang, climbing up and
upward from salt marsh and meadow, on either side the rutted road, into
the limpid purity of the spring sky. A light wind flapped the
travel-stained, high-collared blue cloth cloak which he wore; and brought
him both the haunting fetid-sweet reek of the mud flats--the tide being
low--and the invigorating tang of the forest and moorland, uprolling
there ahead, in purple and umber to the pale northern horizon. Against
that sombre background, fair and stately in the tender sunlight as a
church of vision or dream, Marychurch Abbey rose above the roofs and
chimneys of the little town.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, not only were
religious systems very much at a discount among persons of intelligence,
but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea,
becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the
humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity
did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of
disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly offensive forms.
The existence of the Supreme Being might be, (probably was) so he feared,
but "a fond thing vainly imagined". Yet such is the constitution of the
human mind that age confers a certain prestige and authority even upon
phantoms and suspected frauds. Hence it followed that Mr. Verity, in the
plenitude of his courtesy, had continued to take off his hat--secretly
and subjectively at all events--to this venerable theological delusion,
so dear through unnumbered centuries to the aching heart and troubled
conscience of humanity.

But in the present glad hour of restored security--his head no longer in
danger of plopping, hideously bodiless, into _la veuve's_ basket, his
inner-man, moreover, so recently and rackingly evacuated by that
abominable Channel passage, now comfortably relined with Tandy's meat and
drink--he went further in the way of acknowledgment. A glow of very vital
gratitude swept over him, so that looking at the majestic church--secular
witness to the soul's faith in and need of Almighty God's protective
mercy and goodness--he took off his hat, no longer metaphorically but
actually, and bowed himself together over the pommel of the saddle with
an irresistible movement of thanksgiving and of praise.

Recovering himself after a minute or so--"Almost thou persuades! me
to be a Christian," he said aloud, shaking his head remonstrantly at
the distant church, while tears started to his busy, politely
inquisitive eyes.

Then, striving by speech to bring his spirits to their accustomed
playfulness and poise, he soliloquized thus, still aloud:

"For, to be candid, what convincing argument can I advance, in the light
of recent experience, to prove that Rousseau, my friends the
Encyclopeadists, or even the great M. de Voltaire, were really wiser in
their generation, truer lovers of the people and safer guides, than St.
Benedict--of blessed memory, since patron of learning and incidentally
saviour of classic literature--whose pious sons raised this most
delectable edifice to God's glory seven hundred years ago?--The tower is
considerably later than the transepts and the nave--fifteenth century I
take it,--Upon my soul, I am half tempted to renounce my allegiance and
to doubt whether our modern standards of civilization surpass, in the
intelligent application of means to ends, those of these mediaeval
cenobites, and whether we are saner philanthropists, deeper philosophers,
more genial humanists than they!"

But here his discourse suffered mortifying interruption. He became aware
the pony stood stock-still in the middle of the road; and, turning its
head, so that he beheld its pink muzzle, bristly upper and hanging lower
lip in disagreeable profile, regarded him with malevolent contempt out of
its one sound eye, as who should say:

"What's the silly fellow trumpeting like this about? Doesn't the veriest
noodle contrive to keep a quiet tongue in his head out on the highway?"

Sensible of a snub, Mr. Verity jerked at the reins and clapped his heels
into the creature's sides, as smartly as fatigue and native civility
permitted, sending it forward at a jog-trot. Nevertheless his
soliloquy--a silent one now--continued, and that with notable
consequences to others besides himself.

For his thought still dallied with the subject of the monastic life, as
lived by those same pious Benedictines here in England long ago. Its
reasoned rejection of mundane agitations, its calm, its leisure, its
profound and ardent scholarship were vastly to his taste,--A man touching
middle-age might do worse, surely, than spend his days between worship
and learning, thus?--He saw, and approved, its social office in offering
sanctuary to the fugitive, alms to the poor, teaching to the ignorant,
consolation to the sick and safe passage heavenward to the dying. Saw,
not without sympathy, its more jovial moments--its good fellowship,
shrewd and witty conversation, well salted stories--whereat a man laughs
slyly in his sleeve--its good cheer, too, with feasts on holy-days and
high-days, rich and succulent.--And in this last connection, as he
reflected, much was to be said for the geographical position of
Marychurch; since if river mists and white dullness of sea fog, drifting
in from the Channel, were to hand, so, also, in their season, were fresh
run salmon, snipe, wood-cock, flocks of wild duck, of plover and other
savoury fowl.

For in this thankfulness of awakening from the hellish nightmare of the
Terror, Mr. Verity's facile imagination tended to run to another extreme.
With all the seriousness of which he was capable he canvassed the notion
of a definite retirement from the world. Public movements, political and
social experiments ceased to attract him. His appetite for helping to
make the wheels of history go round had been satisfied to the point of
nausea. All he desired was tranquillity and repose. He was free of
domestic obligations and close family ties. He proposed to remain
so--philosophy his mistress, science his hand-maid, literature his
pastime, books (remembering the bitter sorrows of the tumbril and
scaffold in Paris) in future, his closest friends.

But, unfortunately, though the great church in all its calm grave,
beauty still held the heart the fair landscape, the monastery, which
might have sheltered his renunciation, had been put to secular uses or
fallen into ruin long years ago. If he proposed to retire from the
world, he must himself provide suitable environment. Marychurch Abbey,
at the end of the eighteenth century, had very certainly nothing to
offer him under that head.

And then, with a swiftness of conception and decision possible only to
mercurial-minded persons, his thought darted back to Tandy's, that
unkempt, morally malodorous back-of-beyond and No Man's Land. Its vacant
whitewashed countenance and long-eared chimney-stacks had welcomed him,
if roughly and grudgingly, to England and to peace. Was he not in some
sort thereby in debt to Tandy's bound by gratitude to the place? Should
he not buy it--his private fortune being considerable--and there plant
his hermitage? Should he not renovate and transform it, redeeming it from
questionable uses, by transporting thither, not himself only but his fine
library, his famous herbarium, his cabinets of crystals, of coins, and of
shells? The idea captivated him. He was weary of destruction, having seen
it in full operation and practised on the gigantic scale. Henceforth he
would devote all the energy he possessed to construction--on however
modest and private a one--to a building up, as personal protest against
much lately witnessed wanton and chaotic pulling-down.

In prosecution of which purpose, hopeful once more and elate, bobbing
merrily cork-like upon the surface of surrounding circumstance--although
lamentably deficient, for the moment, in raiment befitting his position
and his purse--Mr. Verity spent two days at the Stag's Head, in
Marychurch High Street. He made enquiries of all and sundry regarding
the coveted property; and learned, after much busy investigation that
the village, and indeed the whole Hundred of Deadham, formed an outlying
and somewhat neglected portion of his acquaintance, Lord Bulparc's
Hampshire estate.

Here was solid information to go upon. Greatly encouraged, he took the
coach to Southampton, and thence up to town; where he interviewed first
Lord Bulparc's lawyers and then that high-coloured, free-living
nobleman himself.

"Gad, sir," the latter assured him, "you're heartily welcome to the damn
little hole, as far as I'm concerned, if you have the bad taste to fancy
it. I suppose I ought to speak to my son Oxley about this just as a
matter of form. Not that I apprehend Oxley will raise any difficulties as
to entail--you need not fear that. We shall let you off easy enough--only
too happy to oblige you. But I warn you, Verity, you may drop money
buying the present tenant out. If half my agent tells me is true, the
fellow must be a most confounded blackguard, up to the eyes in all
manner of ungodly traffic. By rights we ought to have kicked him out
years ago. But," his lordship chuckled--"I scruple to be hard on any man.
We're none of us perfect, live and let live, you know. Only my dear
fellow, I'm bound to put you on your guard; for he'll stick to the place
like a leech and blood-suck you like a leech too, as long as there's a
chance of getting an extra guinea out of you by fair means or foul."

To which process of blood-sucking Mr. Verity was, in fact, rather
scandalously subjected before Tandy's Castle passed into his possession.
But pass into his possession it finally did, whereupon he fell joyously
to the work of reconstructive redemption.

First of all he ordered the entrance of the underground passage, leading
to the river foreshore, to be securely walled up; and, with a fine
disregard of possible unhealthy consequences in the shape of choke-damp,
the doorways of certain ill-reputed vaults and cellars to be filled with
solid masonry. Neither harborage of contraband, cruel laughter of man, or
yell of tortured beast, should again defile the under-world of
Tandy's!--Next he had the roof of the main building raised, and given a
less mean and meagre angle. He added a wing on the left containing
pleasant bed-chambers upstairs, and good offices below; and, as crowning
act of redemption, caused three large ground-floor rooms, backed by a
wide corridor, to be built on the right in which to house his library and
collections. This lateral extension of the house, constructed according
to his own plans, was, like its designer, somewhat eccentric in
character. The three rooms were semicircular, all window on the southern
garden front, veritable sun-traps, with a low sloped roofing of
grey-green slate to them, set fan-wise.

Such was the house at Deadham Hard when Mr. Verity's labours were
completed. And such did it remain until a good eighty years later, when
it was visited by a youthful namesake and great-great nephew, under
circumstances not altogether unworthy of record.




CHAPTER II

ENTER A YOUNG SCHOLAR AND GENTLEMAN OF A HAPPY DISPOSITION AND
GOOD PROSPECTS


The four-twenty down train rumbled into Marychurch station, and Tom
Verity stepped out of a rather frousty first-class carriage on to the
platform. There hot still September sunshine, tempered by a freshness off
the sea, met him. The effect was pleasurable, adding delicate zest to the
enjoyment of living which already possessed him. Coming from inland, the
near neighbourhood of the sea, the sea with its eternal invitation,
stirred his blood.

For was not he about to accept the said invitation in its fullest and
most practical expression? Witness the fact that, earlier in the day, he
had deposited his heavy baggage at that house of many partings, many
meetings, Radley's Hotel, Southampton; and journeyed on to Marychurch
with a solitary, eminently virgin, cowhide portmanteau, upon the
yellow-brown surface of which the words--"Thomas Clarkson Verity,
passenger Bombay, first cabin R.M.S. _Penang_"--were inscribed in the
whitest of lettering. His name stood high in the list of successful
candidates at the last Indian Civil Service examination. Now he reaped
the reward of past endeavour. For with that deposition of heavy baggage
at Radley's the last farewell to years of tutelage seemed to him to be
spoken. Nursery discipline, the restraints and prohibitions--in their
respective degrees--of preparatory school, of Harchester, of Oxford; and,
above all and through all, the control and admonitions of his father, the
Archdeacon, fell away from him into the limbo of things done with,
outworn and outpaced.

This moved him as pathetic, yet as satisfactory also, since it set him
free to fix his mind, without lurking suspicion of indecorum, upon the
large promise of the future. He could give rein to his eagerness, to his
high sense of expectation, while remaining innocent of impiety towards
persons and places holding, until now, first claim on his obedience and
affection. All this fell in admirably with his natural bent.
Self-reliant, agreeably egotistical, convinced of the excellence of his
social and mental equipment, Tom was saved from excess of conceit by a
lively desire to please, an even more lively sense of humour, and an
intelligence to which at this period nothing came amiss in the way of new
impressions or experiences.

And, from henceforth, he was his own master, his thoughts, actions,
purposes, belonging to himself and to himself alone. Really the position
was a little intoxicating! Realizing it, as he sat in the somewhat stuffy
first-class carriage, on that brief hour's journey from Southampton to
Marychurch, he had laughed out loud, hunching up his shoulders saucily,
in a sudden outburst of irrepressible and boyish glee.

But as the line, clearing the purlieus of the great seaport, turns
south-westward running through the noble oak and beech woods of Arnewood
Forest, crossing its bleak moorlands--silver pink, at the present season,
with fading heather--and cutting through its plantations of larch and
Scotch fir, Tom Verity's mood sobered. He watched the country reeling
away to right and left past the carriage windows, and felt its peculiarly
English and sylvan charm. Yet he saw it all through a dazzle, as of
mirage, in which floated phantom landscapes strangely different in
sentiment and in suggestion.--Some extravagantly luxuriant, as setting to
crowded painted cities, some desert, amazingly vacant and desolate; but,
in either case, poetic, alluring, exciting, as scenes far removed in
climate, faith and civilization from those heretofore familiar can hardly
fail to be. India, and all which India stands for in English history,
challenged his imagination, challenged his ambition, since in virtue of
his nationality, young and inexperienced though he was, he went to her as
a natural ruler, the son of a conquering race. And this last thought
begot in him not only exultation but an unwonted seriousness. While, as
he thus meditated, from out the dazzle as of mirage, a single figure grew
into force and distinctness of outline, a figure which from his childhood
had appealed to him with an attraction at once sinister and heroic--that,
namely, of a certain soldier and ex-Indian official, his kinsman, to pay
a politic tribute of respect to whom was the object of his present
excursion.