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Robert Hardley - "A Project for Flying"

Eugene Manlove Rhodes - "The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On"

Lilian Bell - "As Seen By Me"

Various - "Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884"

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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




In Catholic countries the World gives its children to the Church. In
Protestant countries the process is not infrequently reversed, the Church
giving its children to the World, and that with an alacrity which argues
remarkable faith and courage--of a sort! Archdeacon Verity had carefully
planned this visit for his son, although it obliged the young man to
leave home two days earlier than he need otherwise have done. It was
illuminating to note how the father brought all the resources of a fine
presence, an important manner and full-toned archidiaconal voice to bear
upon proving the expediency of the young man visiting this particular
relation, over whose career and reputation he had so often, in the past,
pursed up his lips and shaken his head for the moral benefit of the
domestic circle.

For the Archdeacon, in common with the majority of the Verity family, was
animated by that ineradicable distrust of anything approaching genius
which distinguishes the English country, or rather county, mind. And that
Sir Charles Verity had failed to conform to the family tradition of
solid, unemotional, highly respectable, and usually very wealthy,
mediocrity was beyond question. He had struck out a line for himself;
and, as the event disclosed, an illustrious one. This the Archdeacon,
being a good Conservative, disapproved. It worried him sadly, making him
actually, if unconsciously, exceedingly jealous. And precisely on that
account, by an ingenious inversion of reasoning, he felt he owed it to
abstract justice--in other words to his much disgruntled self--to make
all possible use of this offending, this renegade personage, when
opportunity of so doing occurred. Now, learning on credible authority
that Sir Charles's name was still one to conjure with in India, it
clearly became his duty to bid his son seek out and secure whatever
modicum of advantage--in the matter of advice and introductions--might be
derivable from so irritating a source.

All of which, while jumping with his own desires, caused Tom much sly
mirth. For might it not be counted among the satisfactory results of his
deposition of heavy baggage at Radley's that, for the first time in his
life, he was at liberty to regard even his father, Thomas Pontifex
Verity, Archdeacon of Harchester and Rector of Canton Magna, in a true
perspective? And he laughed again, though this time softly, indulgently,
able in the plenitude of youthful superiority to extend a kindly
tolerance towards the foibles and ingenuous hypocrisies of poor
middle-age.

But here the train, emerging from the broken hilly country on the
outskirts of the forest, roared along the embankment which carries the
line across the rich converging valleys of the Wilner and the Arne. Tom
ceased to think either of possible advantage accruing to his own
fortunes, or these defects of the family humour which had combined to
dictate his present excursion, his attention being absorbed by the beauty
of the immediate outlook. For on the left Marychurch came into view.

The great, grey, long-backed abbey stands on a heart-shaped peninsula of
slightly rising ground. Its western tower, land-mark for the valleys and
seamark for vessels making the Haven, overtops the avenue of age-old elms
which shade the graveyard. Close about the church, the red brick and
rough-cast houses of the little market-town--set in a wide margin of
salt-marsh and meadow intersected by blue-brown waterways--gather, as a
brood of chickens gathers about a mothering hen. Beyond lie the pale
glinting levels of the estuary, guarded on the west by gently upward
sloping cornlands and on the south by the dark furze and heath-clad mass
of Stone Horse Head. Beyond again, to the low horizon, stretches the
Channel sea.

The very simplicity of the picture gives it singular dignity and repose.
Classic in its clearness of outline and paucity of detail, mediaeval in
sentiment, since the great Norman church dominates the whole, its appeal
is at once wistful and severe. And, this afternoon, just as the nearness
of the sea tempered the atmosphere lifting all oppressive weight from the
brooding sunshine, so did it temper the colouring, lending it an ethereal
quality, in which blue softened to silver, grey to lavender, while green
seemed overspread by powdered gold. The effect was exquisite, reminding
Tom of certain water-colour drawings, by Danvers and by Appleyard,
hanging in the drawing-room of the big house at Canton Magna, and of
certain of Shelley's lyrics--both of which, in their different medium,
breathed the same enchantment of natural and spiritual loveliness, of
nameless desire, nameless regret. And, his nerves being somewhat strained
by the emotions of the day, that enchantment worked upon him strangely.
The inherent pathos of it, indeed, took him, as squarely as unexpectedly,
by the throat. He suffered a sharp recoil from the solicitation of the
future, an immense tenderness towards the past.--A tenderness for those
same years of tutelage and all they had brought him, not only in
over-flowing animal spirits, happy intercourse and intellectual
attainment; but in their limitation of private action, their security of
obligation, of obedience to authority, which at the time had seemed
irksome enough and upon release from which he had so recently
congratulated himself.

Love of home, of England, of his own people--of the Archdeacon, in even
his most full-voiced and moralizing mood--love of things tested,
accustomed and friendly, touched him to the quick. Suddenly he asked
himself to what end was he leaving all these and going forth to encounter
untried conditions, an unknown Nature, a moral and social order equally
unknown? Looking at the peaceful, ethereally lovely landscape, set in
such close proximity and notable contrast to the unrest of that historic
highway of the nations, the Channel sea, he felt small and lonely,
childishly diffident and weak. All the established safety and comfort of
home, all the thoughtless irresponsible delights of vanished boyhood,
pulled at his heart-strings. He wanted, wanted wildly, desperately, not
to go forward but to go back.

Mind and body being healthy, however, the phase was a passing one, and
his emotion, though sincere and poignant, of brief duration. For young
blood--happily for the human story, which otherwise would read altogether
too sad--defies forebodings, gaily embraces risks; and, true soldier of
fortune, marches out to meet whatever fate the battlefield of manhood may
hold for it, a song in its mouth and a rose behind its ear.

Tom Verity speedily came to a steadier mind, pouring honest contempt upon
his momentary lapse from self-confidence. He was ashamed of it. It
amounted to being silly, simply silly. He couldn't understand, couldn't
account for it. What possessed him to get a regular scare like this? It
was too absurd for words. Sentiment?--Yes, by all means a reasonable
amount of it, well in hand and thus capable of translation--if the fancy
took you--into nicely turned elegiac verse; but a scare, a scare pure and
simple, wasn't to be tolerated! And he got up, standing astraddle to
brace himself against the swinging of the train, while he stretched,
settling himself in his clothes--pulled down the fronts of his waistcoat,
buttoned the jacket of his light check suit; and, taking off his
wide-awake, smoothed his soft, slightly curly russet-coloured hair with
his hand. These adjustments, and the assurance they induced that his
personal appearance was all which it should be, completed his moral
restoration. He stepped down on to the platform, into the serene light
and freshness, as engaging and hopeful a youth of three and twenty as any
one need ask to see.

"For The Hard? Very good, sir. Sir Charles's trap is outside in the
station yard. One portmanteau in the van? Quite so. Don't trouble
yourself about it, sir. I'll send a porter to bring it along."

This from the station-master, with a degree of friendly deference far
from displeasing to the recipient of it.

Whatever the defects of the rank and file of the Verity family in
respect of liberal ideas, it can safely be asserted of all its members,
male and female, clerical and lay, alike, that they belonged to the
equestrian order. Hence it added considerably to Tom's recovered
self-complacency to find a smart two-wheel dog-cart awaiting him, drawn by
a remarkably well-shaped and well-groomed black horse. The coachman was
to match. Middle-aged, clean-shaven, his Napoleonic face set as a mask,
his undress livery of pepper-and-salt mixture soberly immaculate. He
touched his hat when our young gentleman appeared and mounted beside him;
the horse, meanwhile, shivering a little and showing the red of its
nostrils as the train, with strident whistlings, drew out of the station
bound westward to Stourmouth and Barryport.

Later the horse broke up the abiding inertia of Marychurch High Street,
by dancing as it passed the engine of a slowly ambulant thrashing
machine; and only settled fairly into its stride when the three-arched,
twelfth century stone bridge over the Arne was passed, and the
road--leaving the last scattered houses of the little town--turned south
and seaward skirting the shining expanse of The Haven and threading the
semi-amphibious hamlets of Horny Cross and Lampit.




CHAPTER III

THE DOUBTFULLY HARMONIOUS PARTS OF A WHOLE


A long, low, rectangular and rather narrow room, supported across the
centre--where passage walls had been cut away--by an avenue of dumpy
wooden pillars, four on either side, leading to a glass door opening on
to the garden. A man's room rather than a woman's, and, judging by
appearances, a bachelor's at that.--Eighteenth-century furniture, not
ignoble in line, but heavy, wide-seated, designed for the comfort of
bulky paunched figures arrayed in long napped waistcoats and full-skirted
coats. Tabaret curtains and upholsterings, originally maroon, now dulled
by sea damp and bleached by sun-glare to a uniform tone in which colour
and pattern were alike obliterated. Handsome copperplate engravings of
Pisa and of Rome, and pastel portraits in oval frames; the rest of the
whity brown panelled wall space hidden by book-cases. These surmounted by
softly shining, pearl-grey Chinese godlings, monsters, philosophers and
saints, the shelves below packed with neatly ranged books.

A dusky room, in spite of its rounded, outstanding sash-windows, two on
either side the glass door; the air of it holding, in permanent solution,
an odour of leather-bound volumes. A place, in short, which, though not
inhospitable, imposed itself, its qualities and traditions, to an extent
impossible for any save the most thick-skinned and thick-witted wholly to
ignore or resist.

Young Tom Verity, having no convenient armour-plating of stupidity,
suffered its influence intimately as--looking about him with quick
enquiring glances--he followed the man-servant across it between the
dumpy pillars. He felt self-conscious and disquieted, as by a smile of
silent amusement upon some watchful elderly face. So impressed, indeed,
was he that, on reaching the door, he paused, letting the man pass on
alone to announce him. He wanted time in which to get over this queer
sensation of shyness, before presenting himself to the company assembled,
there, in the garden outside.

Yet he was well aware that the prospect out of doors--its amplitude of
mellow sunlight and of space, its fair windless calm in which no leaf
stirred--was far more attractive than the room in the doorway of which he
thus elected to linger.

For the glass-door gave directly on to an extensive lawn, set out,
immediately before the house front, with scarlet and crimson geraniums in
alternating square and lozenge-shaped beds. Away on the right a couple of
grey-stemmed ilex trees--the largest in height and girth Tom had ever
seen--cast finely vandyked and platted shadow upon the smooth turf.
Beneath them, garden chairs were stationed and a tea-table spread, at
which four ladies sat--one, the elder, dressed in crude purple, the other
three, though of widely differing ages and aspect, in light coloured
summer gowns.

To the left of the lawn, a high plastered wall--masked by hollies, bay,
yew, and at the far end by masses of airy, pink-plumed tamarisk--shut off
the eastward view. But straight before him all lay open, "clean away to
the curve of the world" as he told himself, not without a pull of emotion
remembering his impending voyage. For, about sixty yards distant, the
lawn ended abruptly in a hard straight line--the land cut off sheer, as
it seemed, at the outer edge of a gravelled terrace, upon which two small
antiquated cannon were mounted, their rusty muzzles trained over swirling
blue-green tide river and yellow-grey, high-cambered sand-bar out to sea.

Between these innocuous engines of destruction, little black cannon balls
had been piled into a mimic pyramid, near to which three men stood
engaged in desultory conversation. One of them, Tom observed as markedly
taller, more commanding and distinguished in bearing, than his
companions. Even from here, the whole length of the lawn intervening,
his presence, once noted, became of arresting importance, focussing
attention as the central interest, the one thing which vitally mattered
in this gracious scene--his figure silhouetted, vertically, against those
long horizontal lines of river, sand-bar, and far-away delicate junction
of opal-tinted sea with opal-tinted sky.

Whereupon Tom became convicted of the agreeable certainty that no
disappointment awaited him. His expectations were about to receive
generous fulfilment. This visit would prove well worth while. So
absorbed, indeed, was he in watching the man whom he supposed--and
rightly--to be his host, that he failed to notice one of the ladies rise
from the tea-table and advance across the lawn, until her youthful
white-clad form was close upon him, threading its way between the glowing
geranium beds.

Then--"You are my cousin, Thomas Verity?" the girl asked, with a grave
air of ceremony.

"Yes--and you--you are my cousin Damaris," he answered as he felt
clumsily, being taken unaware in more respects than one, and, for all his
ready adaptability, being unable to keep a note of surprise out of his
voice and glance.

He had known of the existence of this little cousin, having heard--on
occasion--vaguely irritated family mention of her birth at a time when
the flame of the Mutiny still burned fiercely in the Punjab and in Oudh.
To be born under such very accentuated circumstances could, in the eyes
of every normal Verity, hardly fail to argue a certain obtrusiveness and
absence of good taste. He had heard, moreover, disapproving allusions to
the extravagant affection Sir Charles Verity was said to lavish upon this
fruit of a somewhat obscure marriage--his only surviving child. But the
said family talk, in Tom's case, had gone in at one ear and out at the
other--as the talk of the elder generation mostly does, and will, when
the younger generation is solidly and wholesomely convinced of the
overwhelming importance of its own personal affairs. Consequently, in
coming to Deadham Hard, Tom had thought of this little cousin--in as far
as it occurred to him to think of her at all--as a child in the
schoolroom who, beyond a trifle of good-natured notice at odd moments,
would not enter into the count or matter at all. Now, awakening to the
fact of her proximity, he awoke to the further fact that, with one
exception, she mattered more than anything or anybody else present.

She was, in truth, young--he had been quite right there. Yet, like the
room in the doorway of which he still lingered, like the man standing on
the terrace walk--to whose tall figure the serene immensities of sea and
sky acted as back-cloth and setting--she imposed herself. Whether she was
pretty or plain, Tom was just now incapable of judging. He only knew
that her eyes were wonderful. He never remembered to have seen such
eyes--clear, dark blue-grey with fine shading of eyelash on the lower as
well as the upper lid. Unquestionably they surpassed all ordinary
standards of prettiness. Were glorious, yet curiously embarrassing; too
in their seriousness, their intent impartial scrutiny--under which last,
to his lively vexation, the young man felt himself redden.

And this, considering his superiority in age, sex, and acquirements, was
not only absurd but unfair somehow. For did not he, as a rule, get on
charmingly well with women, gentle and simple, old and young, alike? Had
he not an ingratiating, playfully flirtatious way with them in which he
trusted? But flirtatiousness, even of the mildest description, would not
do here. Instinctively he recognized that. It would not pay at all--in
this stage of the acquaintance, at all events. He fell back on civil
speeches; and these rather laboured ones, being himself rather
discountenanced.

"It is extremely kind of you and Sir Charles to take me on trust like
this," he began. "Believe me I am very grateful. Under ordinary
circumstances I should never have dreamed of proposing myself. But I am
going out to India for the first time--sailing in the _Penang_ the day
after to-morrow. And, as I should be so near here at Southampton, it was,
I own, a great temptation to ask if I might come for a night. I felt--my
father felt--what a privilege it would be for me, a really tremendous
piece of luck, to meet Sir Charles before I started. Such a rare and
memorable send off for me, you know!"

"We were very glad you should propose yourself," Damaris answered, still
with her grave air of ceremony.

"Awfully good of you, I'm sure," the young man murmured.--No, she didn't
stare. He could not honestly call it staring. It was too calm, too
impersonal, too reserved for that. She looked, with a view to arriving
at conclusions regarding him. And he didn't enjoy the process--not in
the least.

"My father is still interested in everything connected with India," she
went on. "He will like to talk to you. We have people with us this
afternoon whom he could not very well leave, or he would have driven into
Marychurch himself to fetch you. Dr. McCabe, who we knew at Bhutpur long
ago, came over unexpectedly from Stourmouth this morning; and my Aunt
Harriet Cowden telegraphed that she and Uncle Augustus would bring Aunt
Felicia, who is staying with them at Paulton Lacy, here to tea.--But, of
course, you know them quite well--Uncle Augustus, I mean, and my aunts."

"Do I not know them!" Tom replied with meaning; while, humour getting the
upper hand thanks to certain memories, he smiled at her.

And, even at this early period in his career, it must be conceded that
Tom Verity's smile was an asset to be reckoned with. Mischievous to the
verge of impudence; but confidential, too, most disarmingly friendly--a
really vastly engaging smile, which, having once beheld, most persons
found themselves more than ready to behold often again.

Under its persuasive influence Damaris' gravity relaxed. She lowered her
eyes, and the soft warm colour deepened in her cheeks.

Her steady gaze removed, the young man breathed more freely. He
congratulated himself. Intercourse was in act of becoming normal and
easy. So far it had been quite absurdly hind-leggy--and for him, _him_,
to be forced into being hind-leggy by a girl of barely eighteen! Now he
prepared to trot gaily, comfortably, off on all fours, when she spoke,
bringing him up to the perpendicular again with a start.

"I love Aunt Felicia very dearly," she announced, as though in protest
against some implied and subtle disloyalty.

"But don't we all love Cousin Felicia?" he returned, promptly, eager to
maintain his advantage. "Isn't she kindness incarnate, Christian
charity personified? As for me, I simply dote on her; and with reason,
for ever since those remote ages in which I wore scratchy pinafores and
horrid little white socks, she has systematically and pertinaciously
spoiled me whenever she stayed at Canton Magna.--Oh! she is an
institution. No family should be without her. When I was small she gave
me chocolates, tin soldiers, pop-guns warranted to endanger my
brothers' and sisters' eyesight. And now, in a thousand ways, conscious
and unconscious," he laughed quietly, naughtily, the words running over
each other in the rapidity of his speech--"she gives me such a blessed
good conceit of myself!"

And Damaris Verity, caught by the wave of his light-heartedness and
inherent desire to please, softened again, her serious eyes alight for
the moment with answering laughter. Whereupon Tom crossed the threshold
and stood close beside her upon the grass in the brooding sunshine, the
beds of scarlet and crimson geraniums ranging away on glowing perspective
to left and right. He glanced at the three ladies seated beneath the
giant ilexes, and back at his companion. He felt absurdly keen further to
excite her friendliness and dispel her gravity.

"Only one must admit cousin Harriet is quite another story," he went on
softly, saucily. "Any conceit our dear Felicia rubs in to you, Harriet
most effectually rubs out. Isn't it so? I am as a worm, a positive worm
before her--can only 'tremble and obey' like the historic lady in the
glee. She flattens me. I haven't an ounce of kick left in me. And then
why, oh why, tell me, Damaris, does she invariably and persistently
clothe herself in violet ink?"

"It is her colour," the girl said, her eyes still laughing, her lips
discreetly set.

"But why, in heaven's name, should she have a colour?" he demanded. "For
identification, as I have a red and white stripe painted on my steamer
baggage? Really that isn't necessary. Can you imagine losing cousin
Harriet? Augustus Cowden mislaying her, for example; and only recovering
her with joyful cries--we take those for granted in his case, of
course--at sight of the violet ink? Not a bit of it. You know as well as
I do identification marks can't ever be required to secure her return,
because under no conceivable circumstances could she ever be lost. She is
there, dear lady, lock, stock, and barrel, right there all the time. So
her raiment of violet amounts to a purely gratuitous advertisement of a
permanently self-evident fact.--And such a shade too, such a positively
excruciating shade!"

But here a movement upon the terrace served, indirectly, to put a term to
his patter. For Sir Charles Verity, raising his voice slightly in passing
emphasis, turned and moved slowly towards the little company gathered at
the tea-table. His two companions followed, the shorter of them
apparently making answer, the words echoing clearly in genial richness of
affirmation across the intervening space--"And so it was, General, am I
not recalling the incident myself? Indeed you're entirely right."

"Come," Damaris said, with a certain brevity as of command.

"And feel a worm?"

"No--come and speak to my father."

"Ah! I shall feel a worm there too," the young man returned, an engaging
candour in his smiling countenance; "and with far better reason, unless I
am greatly mistaken."




CHAPTER IV

WATCHERS THROUGH THE SMALL HOURS


Love, ill-health and debt being, as yet, unknown quantities to young Tom
Verity, it followed that insomnia, with its thousand and one attendant
miseries, was an unknown quantity likewise. Upon the eve of the stiffest
competitive examination those, now outlived, years of tutelage had
imposed on him, he could still tumble into bed secure of lapsing into
unconsciousness as soon as his head fairly touched the pillow. Dreams
might, and usually did, visit him; but as so much incidental music
merely to the large content of slumber--tittering up and down, too
airily light-footed and evanescent to leave any impress on mind or
spirits when he woke.

This night, at Deadham Hard, marked a new departure; sleep proving a less
absolute break in continuity of sensation, a less absolute barrier
between day and day.

The Honourable Augustus and Mrs. Cowden, and Felicia Verity, not without
last words, adjurations, commands and fussings, started on their
twelve-mile drive home to Paulton Lacy about six o'clock. A little later
Dr. McCabe conveyed himself, and his brogue, away in an ancient hired
landau to catch the evening train from Marychurch to Stourmouth. Dinner
followed, shortly after which Damaris vanished, along with her
governess-companion, Miss Theresa Bilson--a plump, round-visaged,
pink-nosed little person, permanently wearing gold eyeglasses, the
outstanding distinction of whose artless existence consisted, as Tom
gathered from her conversation, in a tour in Rhineland and residence of
some months' duration at the university town of Bonn.

Then, at last, came the harvest of the young man's excursion, in the
shape of first-hand records of war and government--of intrigue and of
sedition, followed by stern retributive chastisement--from that famous
soldier, autocratic and practised administrator, his host.

In the opinion of a good many persons Tom Verity's bump of reference
showed very insufficient development. Dons, head-masters, the pedagogic
and professorial tribe generally, he had long taken in his stride quite
unabashed. Church dignitaries, too, left him saucily cool. For--so at
least he argued--was not his elder brother, Pontifex, private chaplain to
the Bishop of Harchester? And did not this fact--he knowing poor old
Ponty as only brother can know brother--throw a rather lurid light upon
the spiritual and intellectual limitations of the Bench? In respect of
the British aristocracy, his social betters, he also kept an open mind.
For had not Lord Bulparc's son and heir, little Oxley, acted as his fag,
boot-black and bacon-frier, for the best part of a year at school?
Notwithstanding which fact--Lord Oxley was of a mild, forgiving
disposition--had not he, Tom, spent the cricket week several summers
running at Napworth Castle; where, on one celebrated occasion, he bowled
a distinguished Permanent Under-Secretary first ball, and, on another,
chided a marquis and ex-Cabinet Minister for misquoting Catullus.