Читать книгу Cardboard Castle - Percival Christopher Wren - Страница 12

Table of Contents

Now if King Charles’s Head lent horror to Miss Stuart’s nightmares, and haunted her day-dreams, affecting a mind otherwise sane and sober, sturdy and stable, it was the Wicked Man of the Calderton portrait who haunted that of her charge; a mind, especially at that age, extremely impressionable, sensitive and over-imaginative, the mind of a somewhat melancholy introvert.

Most imaginative children have a bogey, a pet terror of their own devising; a ghost, a goblin, a clutching hand, a terrible and feral beast, a witch; a wicked robber, with gleaming or blood-stained knife; or—still less fortunate—a silent shadow, almost palpable, moving, pursuing, yet unthrown by living object, ineffable, terrible, and, to the stricken childish mind, ghastly beyond description or belief.

To Anthony Calderton, hitherto reasonably unafraid, though definitely inclined to dislike the creakings, crackings and groanings of old furniture and ancient boards, and markedly averse from ‘ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggity beasties and things that go wump in the night,’ now came a private and personal horror to invade his sleeping-chamber.

With a small boy aged four not very much can be done in the way of biased historical teaching, any more than a great deal can be done in the matter of theology. Incidentally, this latter fact was brought home the more strongly to Miss Stuart, when she discovered that the first of the two prayers taught to Anthony by the nurse or the nursery-maid recently in charge of him, began, quite definitely and distinctly,

“Gentle Jesus, weak and wild”; and beyond per-adventure of a doubt, contained the line,

“Pity mice implicitly.”

This sort of thing would want proper handling. There was a great deal of misunderstanding, misconception and rubbish to be removed, and then proper teaching must take its place. All very difficult, with so young a child.

And as far as historical teaching went, the gradual introduction of King Charles’s head to the prominent place which it should permanently occupy in the child’s mind, would be a real and splendid starting-point. And again, for that introduction, there already existed a real and splendid starting-point.

For, actually, over the vast marble fireplace in the big drawing-room, hung the original and famous oil-painting of the man known to history as the Great Protector, and to Miss Mary Stuart as the Great Traitor.

Excellent. Here should history begin from a concrete object, the contemporary reproduction in oils of the face and form of one of the protagonists in the greatest drama of English History.

Admittedly the concentric method of teaching history was one of the best, if not the best of all, and Anthony’s history should start with this, widen to embrace the Stuart period, spread down to present times, and then begin again with Pictish and Scottish history, leading again, by way of Macbeth, William Wallace and Robert Bruce, to the Stuart Kings of Scotland who added England to their domain.

Now the great drawing-room of Calderton House was somewhat of a terra incognita to Anthony. His presence was not requested when it was in use by night, and tea was for him a nursery and schoolroom occasion.

Nor had he yet formed the habit of studying pictures hung upon the walls high above his head. Picture-books were the proper place for pictures, and in books he looked for them.

But no sooner had the exploring Miss Stuart beheld, with something approaching a shock, and with definite hatred, if not horror, the magnificent portrait of Oliver Cromwell, than she introduced it to Anthony’s notice; impressed it upon his mind, brought it into his daily life, and made it a part thereof.

Proceeding to the nursery and receiving him washed, arrayed and anointed, fresh and vernal from the hands of the adoring nursery-maid who prepared him for his morning session with his governess, Miss Stuart led him to the room, haunted and polluted by that evil painted presence.

Seating herself in a deep armchair, straight in front of the picture, she took the child on her lap, and pointing an accusing finger, said,

“That is a Bad Man. A very, very Wicked Man. The worst man, but one, that ever lived.”

For the sole concession that Miss Stuart was wont to make in Oliver Cromwell’s favour was that he ranked second to Judas Iscariot (“second but bracketed with”).

“What did he do?” enquired Anthony, eyeing the unattractive wart-infested face of the Great Protector.

“He ... killed ... his ... King,” whispered Miss Stuart with bated breath; and then sat silent, considering the portrait with a fierce glare of concentrated hate.

“How?” enquired Anthony, himself a killer of noisy giants, blow-lamp mouthed dragons, deceitful wolves, ever-hungry bears and such undesirable what-nots.

“He ... cut ... his ... head ... off,” whispered Miss Stuart.

“Fighting?”

“No. Oh, no. The poor King was his prisoner. He killed the poor defenceless King, although he was so kind, so good and gentle.

“And brave,” added Miss Stuart, divining that the attributes that she had mentioned were not perhaps those that appealed first and most highly to Anthony Calderton.

“Couldn’t the King draw his sword and...”

“No.”

And Miss Stuart did then and there give young Anthony his first history lesson, by telling him her version of the story of the doings of the Wicked Man in the picture.

And on that subject she was eloquent, inspired. At the end of that first long lesson, the first of an endless series spread over several years, the Wicked Man in the picture was firmly established with the Giant Blunderbore, the hypocritical Wolf and the ever-hungry Bear, as a living evil; one of the Powers of Darkness that, in the darkness, grow so powerful; one of the Things to be fought with a sword in the garden by day, and to be hidden from, beneath the bed-clothes, by night. By day, indignation, hatred and vengeance; by night, quaking terror.

So impressive was Miss Stuart’s discourse on this almost daily recurrent subject, that ere long Oliver Cromwell was the child’s Private Enemy Number One, as it were; ranking before, and far ahead of, Giant Blunderbore in wickedness, malice and power; a terror that stalked by night, making night itself a terror; so that in course of time, young Anthony Calderton was as richly and completely endowed with a Cromwell-complex as was Miss Mary Stuart herself.

And Fate was thorough.

For it was Anthony’s kismet that he should be taught to ride by a favourite old groom, one Michael Houlihan, a warped and wizened little Irishman who, cleanly spoken and not given to blasphemy, had but one oath, an objurgation picked up from the admired master in whose stables he had first learned his trade as stable-boy, groom and jockey.

As everyone is aware who knows, and what hunting man and race-horse owner does not know, the great Patrick Murphy—whose horses were famous in every Irish hunt and in not a few English, as well as in every Irish Horse Show and on every Irish race-course, as well as in the Grand National—had but one oath, and, by its frequency, made up for its singularity:

“The carrse of Cromwell on it” or “on ye,” as the case might be.

How many times had not the stable-boy, groom and jockey, Michael Houlihan, been cursed by the great Patrick Murphy in those terms?

“Phwat? Ye worthless little spalpeen! The carrse of Cromwell on ye.”

And in humble imitation of the greatest man he had ever known, Michael Houlihan passed it on to his horses.

“Come over, ye baste. The carrse o’ Cromwell on ye.”

And in Michael Houlihan, Anthony had a teacher who, if he cared less than nothing for the fate of any King of England, had an inherited, a cherished, an unbelievably bitter hatred of the cruel and savage brute who had been responsible for the appalling slaughters in which Houlihan’s ancestors had perished.

Well might people speak of the Curse of Cromwell. When, in all the days of all the world, had a bigger curse been put upon an innocent people? Had not the bloody-minded villain proscribed the Roman Catholic religion? Had he not sold three million acres of Irish land to English adventurers, so that he might use the money for the raising of more troops for the further conquest and massacre of the unoffending Irish?

Had he not herded the priests of God into their own churches and there burned them alive with the weeping women and innocent children who had fled to the sanctuary of their altars?

What need of further oath or curse while human tongue could blister with the words,

“The Curse of Cromwell ... !”

So that, on the subject of the wrongs of Ireland and on Oliver Cromwell, the little old man was as eloquent as was Miss Stuart on those of the Stuart Kings, and on the noble Loyalist lords and ladies persecuted and slain by the Monstrous Regicide.

Illiterate and otherwise ignorant as Houlihan was, he had a remarkably detailed knowledge of the true story of the brutish slaughter of the inhabitants of his native town of Drogheda, after Cromwell had taken it by storm; the tale of the wanton slaying of innocent defenceless men, women, and children; and of the savage martyrdom of the priests. About similar dreadful deeds in Wexford and other scenes of massacre he knew, and to him there was no more bloodstained monster in all history than Oliver Cromwell, the creature whose accursed name ranked even before that of a Pharaoh, a Herod or a Nero.

About Attila and Genghis Khan, Houlihan had never heard, but had he read of their lives and doings, the sinister light that illuminates their names would have paled to the dullest glow beside that which kept the name of Cromwell for ever burning. Burning in Hell.

Between the teachings of the highly educated and very accomplished lady, and those of the ignorant untutored groom, young Anthony Calderton received an ineradicable impression that if the Devil and Oliver Cromwell were not one and the same person, they must be sufficiently similar in evil nature and evil-doing to be indistinguishable; and if they were indeed separate and distinct, Oliver Cromwell was the worse character of the two.

“Was Oliver Cromwell the Devil in human form, do you suppose, Houlihan?” he asked one day, when the groom called down the curse of Cromwell upon his horse which had pecked and stumbled.

“He was that,” was the reply. “Indade an’ he was. An’ whoilst Oliver Cromwell was trampling the green grass of Oireland and turnin’ it black beneath his cloven hooves, Hell had no master.”

And so in fear and in hatred of the coarse and cruel face that disfigured the drawing-room, the boy grew; hatred increasing, if that were possible, as fear decreased, if decrease it did. And even up to the time when the slightly unbalanced Miss Stuart took her departure, her duty done; and the savagely vindictive old groom finished his long course, galloped into the straight, and passed the winning-post where even Cromwells cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, Anthony Calderton exhibited, from time to time, signs of the kink, the complex, with which these two people so different, so mutually antagonistic, had independently and unintentionally united to afflict him.

Of this curious obsession his parents continued to know nothing, though of other results of his ten years of training and teaching by Miss Mary Stuart they could not be quite unaware. Admirable as her work in almost all directions had been, it was clear to his mother, and yet more to his father, that what the boy now wanted was masculine society and guidance.

School having proved, for a second and a third time, to be not only a failure but out of the question, Sir Arthur and Lady Calderton determined that, for the next period of their absence abroad, their boy should have a tutor; and strove to assure themselves and one another that the right sort of tutor, working on the right lines, would be, if not as good as School, at least the next best thing.

Hence the advent of Mr. Henry Waring.