Читать книгу The Coward - Robert Hugh Benson - Страница 6

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JIMBO, the old fox-terrier, suddenly appeared in the doorway, stood for a moment blinking with something of a surly air at the golden level sunlight that struck straight down upon him from the west, across the sloping park; then he wheezed once or twice, and with a long sigh lay down half across the threshold, his head on his paws, to watch for the return of the riders. He was aware that the dressing-bell would ring presently.

The view he looked upon is probably as well known to house-worshippers as any in England; for he lay in the central doorway of Medhurst. Before him, on an exact level with his nose, stretched the platform-like wide paved space, enclosed by the two wings and the front of the Caroline house, broken only by the carefully planted saxifrages and small weed-like plants that burst out of every line between the great grey stones, and ending in the low terrace approached by two or three steps from the drive. It was extraordinarily inconvenient, this separation of the main entrance from the drive, on wet nights; but this lordly indifference to comfort had something of dignity about it. (Besides, the door in the south wing could always be used, if the rain were very heavy.) For the rest, the house is almost pure Caroline, except for a few rooms in the south wing that are Tudor. It is of grey weather-stained stone, of an extremely correct and rich architecture, restrained and grave, except where, over Jimbo’s head, the lintel breaks out into triumphant and flamboyant carving—two griffins clawing at one another over the Medd shield, surmounted again by wreaths and lines vaguely suggestive of incoherent glory. To the north of the north wing stand the great stables, crowned by a turret where a bell rings out for the servants’ breakfast, dinner, and tea; to the south of the south wing, the laundry, buried in gloomy cypresses and resembling a small pagan temple.

Altogether it is a tremendous place, utterly complete in itself, with an immemorial air about it; the great oaks of the park seem, and indeed are, nouveaux riches, beside its splendid and silent aristocracy, for Medhurst has stood here, built and inhabited by Medds, pulled down and rebuilt by Medds again and again, centuries before these oaks were acorns. For, as Herald’s College knows very well, though the Medds never speak of it, it is reasonably probable that a Medd lived here—after what fashion archæological historians only can relate—long before Saxon blood became tainted and debased by Norman.

It is remarkable that they have never become peers (a baronetcy has always, of course, been out of the question); but the serious fact seems to be that they have consistently refused this honour. It is not likely that they would have accepted such a thing from the upstart Conqueror; and after such a refusal as this, any later acceptance was of course impossible. In Henry VIII’s reign they remained faithful to the old religion, and consequently in Elizabeth’s reign were one of the few families in whose house their sovereign did not sleep at least one night of her existence; in fact they went abroad at that time and produced a priest or two, prudently handing over their property to a Protestant second cousin, whose heir, very honourably, handed it back when Charles I came to the throne. And then, when danger seemed more or less over, Austin Medd, about the time of the Oates Plot, in which he seems to have believed, solemnly changed his religion with as much dignity as that with which his grandfather had maintained it on a certain famous occasion which it would be irrelevant to describe.

Now when a Medd has done a thing, deliberately and strongly, it naturally becomes impious for later Medds to question the propriety of his action; and from thenceforth two or three traditions—moral heirlooms, so to speak—have been handed down at Medhurst. The objective reality of the Oates Plot, the essential disloyalty of Catholicism, the sacrosanctity of the National Church as a constitutional fact—these things are not to be doubted by any who bears legitimately the name of Medd.

And so the great family has lived, coming down through the centuries solemnly and graciously, each generation rising among the associations of a house and tradition whose equal is scarcely to be found in England, and each generation passing away again with the same dignity, and ending down there in the Norman church at the foot of the park, where Medds have filled long since the vaults of the south chapel, among whose dusty rafters a hundred hatchments have hung and dropped to pieces again. In the village itself—Medhurst Village, jealously so called, lest the House should lose the honour of the original name—the Medds are treated with the same kind of inevitable respect and familiarity as that which kings and gods obtain from their subjects and worshippers. Dynasties rise and pass away again; but the Medds go on. There are various kinds of pride—the noisy pride of the self-made man, the eloquent pride of the enthusiast, the steady assertive pride of the sovereign—but there is no pride in the universe such as that of the Medds, dead silent, claiming nothing, yet certain of everything. They have produced soldiers, priests, judges, statesmen, bishops, clergymen, and the portraits of these worthies throng the hall and the parlours; they have consented to hold the Garter three times, and have, more recently, refused it twice; a Medd has governed a certain Dominion, under pressure, in spite of his commoner rank; they have spent two fortunes on kings; a Medd has, twice at least, turned the fortune of a battle on whose issue hung the possession of a crown; there are relics at Medhurst which I simply dare not describe, because I should be frankly disbelieved—relics whose mention does not occur in any guide-book. Yet all these things are, honestly, but as dust in the scale to the Medd mind, compared with the fact of legitimate Medd blood ... And, indeed, it is something to be proud of ...