Chapter III: 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.