Читать книгу The Coil of Carne - John Oxenham - Страница 4

If by any chance you should ever sail on a low ebb-tide along a certain western coast, you will, if you are of a receptive humour and new to the district, receive a somewhat startling impression of the dignity of the absolutely flat.

Your ideas of militant and resistant grandeur may have been associated hitherto with the iron frontlets and crashing thunders of Finisterre or Sark, of Cornwall or the Western Isle. Here you are faced with a repressive curbing of the waters, equal in every respect to theirs, but so quietly displayed as to be somewhat awesome, as mighty power in restraint must always be.

As far as eye can reach--sand, nothing but sand, overpowering by reason of its immensity, a very Sahara of the coast. Mighty levels stretching landward and seaward--for you are only threading a capricious channel among the banks which the equinoctials will twist at their pleasure, and away to the west the great grim sea lies growling in his sandy chains until his time comes. Then, indeed, he will swell and boil and seethe in his channels till he is full ready, and come creeping silently over his barriers, and then--up and away over the flats with the speed of a racehorse, and death to the unwary. You may see the humping back of him among the outer banks if you climb a few feet up your mast. Then, if you turn towards the land, you will see, far away across the brown ribbed flats, a long rim of yellow sand backed by bewildering ranges of low white hummocks, and farther away still a filmy blue line of distant hills.

Here and there a fisherman's cottage accentuates the loneliness of it all. At one point, as the sun dips in the west, a blaze of light flashes out as though a hidden battery had suddenly unmasked itself; and if you ask your skipper what it is, he will tell you that is Carne. Then, if he is a wise man, he will upsail and away, to make Wytham or Wynsloe before it is dark, for the shifting banks off Carne are as hungry as Death, and as tricky as the devil.

For over three hundred years the grim gray house of Carne has stood there and watched the surface of all things round about it change with the seasons and the years and yet remain in all essential things the same. When the wild equinoctials swept the flats till they hummed like a harp, the sand-hills stirred and changed their aspects as though the sleeping giants below turned uneasily in their beds. For, under the whip of the wind, grain by grain the sand-hills creep hither and thither and accommodate themselves to circumstances in strange and ghostly fashions. So that, after the fury of the night, the peace of the morning looked in vain for the landmarks of the previous day.

And the cold seabanks out beyond were twisted and tortured this way and that by the winds and waves, and within them lay many an honest seaman, and some maybe who might have found it difficult to prove their right to so honourable a title. But the banks were always there, silent and deadly even when they shimmered in the sunshine.

And generations of Carrons had held Carne, and had even occupied it at times, and had passed away and given place to others. But Carne was always there, grim and gray, and mostly silent.

The outward aspects of things might change, indeed, but at bottom they remained very much the same, and human nature changed as little as the rest, though its outward aspects varied with the times. What strange twist of brain or heart set its owner to the building of Carne has puzzled many a wayfarer coming upon it in its wide sandy solitudes for the first time. And the answer to that question answers several others, and accounts for much.

It was Denzil Carron who built the house in the year Queen Mary died. He was of the old faith, a Romanist of the Romanists, narrow in his creed, fanatical in his exercise of it, at once hot- and cold-blooded in pursuit of his aims. When Elizabeth came to the throne he looked to be done by as he had done, and had very reasonable doubts as to the quality of the mercy which might be strained towards him. So he quietly withdrew from London, sold his houses and lands in other counties, and sought out the remotest and quietest spot he could find in the most Romanist county in England. And there he built the great house of Carne, as a quiet harbourage for himself and such victims of the coming persecutions as might need his assistance.

But no retributive hand was stretched after him. He was Englishman first and Romanist afterwards. Calais, and the other national crumblings and disasters of Mary's short reign, had been bitter pills to him, and he hated a Spaniard like the devil. He saw a brighter outlook for his country, though possibly a darker one for his Church, in Elizabeth's firm grip than any her opponents could offer. So he shut his face stonily against the intriguers, who came from time to time and endeavoured to wile him into schemes for the subversion of the Crown and the advancement of the true Church, and would have none of them. And so he was left in peace and quietness by the powers that were, and found himself free to indulge to the full in those religious exercises on the strict observance of which his future state depended.

His wife died before the migration, leaving him one son, Denzil, to bring up according to his own ideas. And a dismal time the lad had of it. Surrounded by black jowls and gloomy-faced priests, tied hand and foot by ordinances which his growing spirit loathed, all the brightness and joy of life crushed out by the weight of a religion which had neither time nor place for such things, he lived a narrow monastic life till his father died. Then, being of age, and able at last to speak for himself, he quietly informed his quondam governors that he had had enough of religion to satisfy all reasonable requirements of this life and the next, and that now he intended to enjoy himself. Carne he would maintain as his father had maintained it, for the benefit of those whom his father had loved, or at all events had materially cared for. And so, good-bye, Black-Jowls! and Ho for Life and the joy of it!

He went up to London, bought an estate in Kent, ruffled it with the best of them, married and had sons and daughters, kept his head out of all political nooses, fought the Spaniards under Admiral John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and died wholesomely in his bed in his house in Kent, a very different man from what Carne would have made him.

And that is how the grim gray house of Carne came to be planted in the wilderness.

Now and again, in the years that followed, the Carron of the day, if he fell on dolorous times through extravagance of living--as happened--or suffered sudden access of religious fervour--as also happened, though less frequently--would take himself to Carne and there mortify flesh and spirit till things, financial and spiritual, came round again, either for himself or the next on the rota. And so some kind of connection was always maintained between Carne and its owners, though years might pass without their coming face to face.

The Master of Carne in the year 1833 was that Denzil Carron who came to notoriety in more ways than one during the Regency. His father had been of the quieter strain, with a miserly twist in him which commended the wide, sweet solitude and simple, inexpensive life of Carne as exactly suited to his close humour. He could feel rich there on very little; and after the death of his wife, who brought him a very ample fortune, he devoted himself to the education of his boy and the enjoyment, by accumulation, of his wealth. But a short annual visit to London on business affairs afforded the boy a glimpse of what he was missing, and his father's body was not twelve hours underground before he had shaken off the sands of Carne and was posting to London in a yellow chariot with four horses and two very elevated post-boys, like a silly moth to its candle.

There, in due course, by processes of rapid assimilation and lavish dispersion, he climbed to high altitudes, and breathed the atmosphere of royal rascality refined by the gracious presence of George, Prince of Wales. For the replenishment of his depleted exchequer he married Miss Betty Carmichael, only daughter and sole heiress of the great Calcutta nabob. She died in child-birth, leaving him a boy whose education his own diversions left him little time or disposition to attend to. He won the esteem, such as it was, of the Prince Regent by running through the heart the Duke of Astrolabe, who had, in his cups, made certain remarks of a quite unnecessarily truthful character concerning Mrs. Fitzherbert, whom he persisted in calling Madame Bellois; and lost it for ever by the injudicious insertion of a slice of skinned orange inside the royal neckcloth in a moment of undue elevation, producing thereby so great a shock to the royal system and dignity as to bring it within an ace of an apoplexy and the end of its great and glorious career.

Under the shadow of this exploit Carron found it judicious to retire for a time to the wilderness, and carried his boy with him. He had had a racketing time, and a period of rest and recuperation would be good both for himself and his fortunes.

He had hoped and believed that his trifling indiscretion would in time be forgotten and forgiven by his royal comrade. But it never was. The royal cuticle crinkled at the very mention of the name of Carron, and Sir Denzil remained in retirement, embittered somewhat at the price he had had to pay for so trivial a jest, and solacing himself as best he could.

Once only he emerged, and then solely on business bent.

In the panic year, when thousands were rushing to ruin, he gathered together his accumulated savings, girded his loins, and stepped quietly and with wide-open eyes into the wild mêlée. He played a cautious, far-sighted game, and emerged triumphant over the dry-sucked bodies of the less wary, with overflowing coffers and many gray hairs. He was prepared to greet the royal beck with showers of gold once more. But the royal neck, though it now wore the ermine in its own right, could not forget the clammy kiss of the orange, and Carron went sulkily back to Carne.

When the Sailor Prince stepped up from quarter-deck to throne, he returned to London and took his place in society once more. But ten years in the desert had placed him out of touch with things; and with reluctance he had to admit to himself that if the star of Carron was to blaze once more, it must be in the person of the next on the roll.

And so, characteristically enough, he set himself to the dispersal of the flimsy cloudlet of disgrace which attached to his name by seeking to win for his boy what the royal disfavour had denied to himself.

Now, indeed, that the royal sufferer was dead, the rising generation, when they recalled it, rather enjoyed the crinkling of the royal skin. They would even have welcomed the crinkler among them as a reminder of the hilarities of former days. But the fashion of things had changed. He did not feel at home with them as he had done with their fathers, and he who had shone as a star, though he had indeed disappeared like a rocket, had no mind to figure at their feasts as a lively old stick.

Young Denzil's education had been of the most haphazard during the years his father was starring it in London. On the retirement to Carne, however, Sir Denzil took the boy in hand himself and inculcated in him philosophies and views of life, based upon his own experiences, which, while they might tend to the production of a gentleman, as then considered, left much to be desired from some other points of view.

He bought him a cornetcy in the Hussars, supplied him freely with money, and required only that his acquaintance should be confined to those circles of which he himself had once been so bright an ornament.

The young man was a success. He was well-built and well-featured, and his manners had been his father's care. He had all the family faults, and succeeded admirably in veiling such virtues as he possessed, with the exception of one or two which happened to be fashionable. He was hot-headed, free-handed, jovial, heedless of consequences in pursuit of his own satisfactions, incapable of petty meanness, but quite capable of those graver lapses which the fashion of the times condoned. With a different upbringing, and flung on his own resources, Denzil Carron might have gone far and on a very much higher plane than he chose.

As it was, his career also ended somewhat abruptly.

At eight-and-twenty he had his captaincy in the 8th Hussars, and was in the exuberant enjoyment of health, wealth, and everything that makes for happiness--except only those things through which alone happiness may ever hope to be attained. He had been in and out of love a score of times, with results depressing enough in several cases to the objects of his ardent but short-lived affections. It was the fashion of the times, and earned him no word of censure. He loved and hated, gambled and fought, danced and drank, with the rest, and was no whit better or worse than they.

At Shole House, down in Hampshire, he met Lady Susan Sandys, sister of the Earl of Quixande--fell in love with her through pity, maybe, at the forlornness of her state, which might indeed have moved the heart of a harder man. For Quixande was a warm man, even in a warm age, and Shole was ante-room to Hades. Carron pitied her, liked her--she was not lacking in good looks--persuaded himself, indeed, that he loved her. For her sake he summarily cut himself free from his other current feminine entanglements, carried her hotfoot to Gretna--a labour of love surely, but quite unnecessary, since her brother was delighted to be rid of her, and Sir Denzil had no fault to find either with the lady or her portion--and returned to London a married, but very doubtfully a wiser, man.

Lady Susan did her best, no doubt. She was full of gratitude and affection for the gallant warrior who had picked her out of the shades, and set her life in the sunshine. But Denzil was no Bayard, and it needed a stronger nature than Lady Susan's to lift him to the higher level.

For quite a month--for thirty whole days and nights, counting those spent on the road to and from Gretna--Lady Susan kept her hold on her husband. Then his regimental duties could no longer be neglected. They grew more and more exigent as time passed, and the young wife was left more and more to the society of her father-in-law. Sir Denzil accepted the position with the grace of an old courtier, and did his duty by her, palliated Captain Denzil's defections with cynical kindness, and softened her lot as best he might. And the gallant captain, exhausted somewhat with the strain of his thirty days' conservatism, resumed his liberal progression through the more exhilarating circles of fashionable folly, and went the pace the faster for his temporary withdrawal.

The end came abruptly, and eight months after that quite unnecessary ride to Gretna Lady Susan was again speeding up the North Road, but this time with her father-in-law, their destination Carne. Captain Denzil was hiding for his life, with a man's blood on his hands; and his father's hopes for the blazing star of Carron were in the dust.