Читать книгу The Honourable Jim - Baroness Emmuska Orczy - Страница 3

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I have often wished to tell of those three—the woman, and the two men—playmates, enemies, lovers in turn—but my great difficulty was to get at the truth. It seemed well-nigh impossible to attempt the isolation of the one sentimental thread from the tangled skein of passions and of hate which seventeenth century England hath flung to us out of the whirlpool of civil war and of bitter strife.

Indeed, had it not been for the unremitting patience of my kind friend, Lord Saye and Sele, I doubt if the present chronicle of the adventures of his romantic forebear would ever have been written. In the midst of the modernisms and aggressive realism of to-day the life and doings of James Fiennes appear intangible, ununderstandable, a mere creation of fancy.

But at Broughton Castle where he lived, it is different. There between the splendid grey walls in the stately halls, and along the labyrinthine passages, the intriguing personality of the Honourable Jim at once loses its dream-like quality. In his own old home James Fiennes at once becomes Jim—a real Jim—alive! Oh! Very much alive. And not only he, but Mistress Barbara, and Squire Brent, General Fairfax and Colonel Scrope, they all live at Broughton Castle, as they lived three hundred years ago. Nay! One soon becomes conscious there that they are the real people, and we but puppets and shadows, that only haunt by sufferance those same historic places which are their own inalienable property.

The old pile rings now as it did then with the clash of arms and the jingle of spurs: the stones echo the clatter of horses’ hoofs, the champing of bits, the trumpet-blast, the roar and bombilation of men who are preparing to fight. And the lazy waters of the moat are gently stirred by the clap of oars wielded by unseen, but very real hands. And in June when the crimson roses emblazon the grey walls with vivid splashes of colour and the water-lilies mirror their white corollas in the moat, it is, in very truth, fair. Mistress Barbara, who wanders silent and thoughtful along the gravel-walks of the old-fashioned garden; she who gathers an armful of lilies to set in the big crystal bowl in the old Tudor hall: it is the man with the scarred hand, the mysterious haunter of the great castle who watches her movements from behind the clipped yew hedge, or who glides into the water like some amphibious monster and is lost amongst the reeds again. They are the real people who live at Broughton Castle and we are but the shadows: watchers permitted to gaze upon the moving pictures of their lives.