Читать книгу Cardboard Castle - P. C. Wren - Страница 11

For several years, Anthony Calderton lived almost happily in the shadow and society, the nurture and admonition, of Miss Mary Stuart, kindest and most understanding of governesses, and everything that Sir Arthur and Lady Calderton believed her to be.

All and a little more.

For Miss Mary Stuart, like so many other sane people, had a delightful and savingly mad corner to her well-ordered, disciplined and regulated mind. Her madness to some degree resembled that of a certain Mr. Dick, for upon the horizon of her blameless maiden life there hovered, in rare visions by day and occasional dreams by night, the head of the Martyr King.

When, for some usually inexplicable reason, Miss Stuart was visited by nightmare, she invariably beheld, with an inexpressible cold horror, King Charles's head, held aloft, alive, dripping, while the coarse voice of the brutal executioner boomed forth from beneath his mask,

"This is the head of a traitor."

Whereupon Miss Stuart awoke, bathed in cold sweat, trembling, and when the nightmare was particularly vivid, screaming.

It is an interesting thought that a picture studied and pondered in her childhood by a Highland girl, and a story oft-repeated with dramatic power and force by an aged Highland nurse, should have changed the fortunes of the ancient English house of Calderton; should so have affected little Mary Stuart that, in turn and in time, she should have so affected a child, a small English boy, that his whole life should have been coloured thereby, and the destiny of his family changed.

As a twig is bent the tree will grow. This, presumably, in spite of the fact that there is nevertheless a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.

As an impressionable, highly strung, somewhat neurotic little girl, Miss Mary Stuart had been mere wax in the hands of the aged and dour Scots nurse who had also been her mother's nurse, and who had, in her old age, ruled that Stuart family with a rod of iron.

Herself a Stuart, the old woman was inordinately proud of the established fact that her ancestors, near and remote, had been King's men from generation to generation, and had, in their time and turn, died under Lawrence, Havelock, and Outram in India; under Moore and Wellington in the Peninsula; at Waterloo; and back even to Flodden and Falkirk; that one of them had come South with King James V of Scotland, one of whose sons and grandsons had fought for that King's son and grandson, Charles I and Charles II.

And most sweetly grim, best enjoyed tribute of all, had not her very own great-grandfather died bloodily at Culloden? Had not old Nurse Stuart, when herself a girl, made the then difficult journey from Inverness to Culloden battlefield, and sat her down upon the stone marked with the name, Stuart, and wept--reserving a tear to drop upon those other pregnant stones marked respectively Mackenzie, Macdonald, Maclean, MacPherson....

And how frequently had she had young Mary Stuart weeping, by the time she had finished that dark tale, picturing the clansmen dying for their rightful King as their fathers had done before them, broken squares and groups of claymore-wielding Highland men dying where they stood, and being buried, by Clans, where they lay.

And the old woman would recite, in her deep musical and indeed beautiful voice,

'The Scottish spearmen still made good their dark impenetrable wood, Each man stepping where his comrade stood the instant that he fell.'

But of all the tales so grimly told to Mary Stuart by the history-and-legend-steeped crone, the piteous death of King Charles I made the deepest impression, an impression strengthened, rendered even deeper and more indelible by a picture that hung in the hall of her father's house, of the brave King standing on a snow-covered scaffold, calmly and courageously facing death at the hands of his... murderers--foul, base, black-hearted, treacherous murderers, according to old Elspeth Stuart.

Thus it is not remarkable that Miss Mary Stuart grew up not only a fanatic loyalist and devoted upholder of the monarchical principle, but a Legitimist, a White Rose Leaguer, and an almost worshipping devotee of the Martyr King.

Her favourite holidays were the pilgrimages she made to places historically interesting in connection with King Charles; visits to Carisbrooke, to Whitehall, to Windsor, to Oxford, to the battlefields of the Civil War.

She joined every Royal Stuart Society of which she heard, and annually assisted in the laying of a wreath at the base of the memorial statue of her Hero. Almost her only recreational reading--as distinct from dutiful reading for the improvement of her mind and the widening of her horizon--was historical, and concerned with the history of her hero, martyr and saint.

Not only had Miss Mary Stuart never married a man, she had never even been in love with one; but devoutly and unswervingly, from childhood, she had not only loved, but been in love with, an idealized, an apotheosized Lover, a Stuart figment of her imagination.

In this almost she resembled those nuns who, in their subconscious minds, are spiritual brides of their Lord.

Had all the facts and details of Miss Stuart's curious idiosyncrasy, her little madness, been fully known to her employers, it is doubtful whether they would have been greatly interested. Undoubtedly Sir Arthur Calderton would have experienced no more poignant emotion than a mild amusement, nor Lady Calderton have seen how her loyalty to a lost cause, her Stuart royalism, could have affected Anthony in any way. Certainly in no detrimental manner.

Recommended to them so highly, and appearing to be so obviously the type of person they wanted, Anthony's parents then quickly accepted Miss Stuart, and, as has been said, eventually left the child in her hands with every confidence.

How should they know that there was any special and particular significance in her earnest statement that it would give her particular and peculiar pleasure and gratification to have the training of young Anthony, the moulding of his infant mind and the formation of his character--and creed? The light that momentarily sparkled in her eye, as she made this profoundly truthful asseveration, was taken as a sign and token of her general professional enthusiasm. How should her employers, for one moment, imagine that Miss Stuart saw in the boy, not only a child to be taught, trained and educated as it should be, in all directions, but particularly in one special direction--History; true unbiased History, the history of the House of Stuart, the history of her Phantom Lover?

Nor, had the facts been miraculously revealed to them, was it probable that they would have been greatly concerned by the possibility of the youthful Anthony being briefly biased in favour of any such Legitimist hope as the eventual Restoration--of some descendant of the good King Rupprecht of Bavaria.

It is an interesting reflection, in the mellow light of the wisdom which follows the event, that, had they known, had they objected and acted upon their objection, denying themselves the benefit of Miss Stuart's services, they would have opened the door of the House of Calderton for the entrance of starkest Tragedy.