Die Geschichte von Sir Richard Calmady: Eine Romanze

THE CLOWN – CHAPTER VI

The novel opens by establishing the ancient pedigree of misfortune attached to Brockhurst House, the great red-brick and freestone estate on the southern verge of the moorland bordering Windsor Forest and the Surrey Hills. Denzil Calmady, esquire, began building the house in the closing years of Elizabeth I’s reign, completing it in 1611 with a royal house-warming for Henry, Prince of Wales. By 1842 the house retains much of its Tudor character, though bears and bear-pit have given way to racehorses and a great square of stable buildings. A narrator’s note makes clear from the outset that no male heir of the line has reached the Biblical “threescore years and ten” and died quietly in his bed. The chancel monuments of Sandyfield Church and the family records recall, among others, Sir Thomas the grandson, who died of gangrene from a buck’s antler; Zachary, stabbed in a brawl in the Strand; a young soldier killed at Ramillies in 1706; a second Sir Denzil, shot by highwaymen on Bagshot Heath; and Courtney Calmady, Richard’s father, who died when a wound taken at the taking of Frenchtown under General Proctor during the second American war reopened during a hunt.

The cause of this catalogue is traced to a brutal episode in the closing years of the Commonwealth. A young royalist, Sir Thomas Calmady, seduced his head forester’s daughter under repeated promises of marriage. She bore him a son idealized in the old chap-book verse as having “red-gold hair and eyes of blue.” At the Restoration, Sir Thomas brought home a wealthy bride; when the forester’s daughter confronted her at the coach door, the new lady’s canary-coated footmen beat her off with staves. The little boy ran to the step and was pushed down; the hind wheel of the heavy coach nearly severed his legs above the knee. The dying mother thereupon cursed Sir Thomas and his line, declaring that no owner of Brockhurst should die peacefully in his bed until a “fatherless babe” should be born into the line, with no brother or sister, with red-gold hair, with eyes of blue, and with a foot that would “never know stocking or shoe”—a child who, opening his purse to the lamenter’s cry, would lift the woe forever.

The main narrative begins in August 1842 with the homecoming of Sir Richard Calmady, third and last of the baronetcy, and his bride. Katherine Ormiston, only daughter of a Yorkshire ironmaster at Ormiston Castle and his deceased wife, had been reared by her great-aunt Mrs. St. Quentin, a Dublin-born beauty and wit who had witnessed the French Revolution and the First Empire. Katherine met Richard at Ormiston Castle in the summer of 1841, was followed by him to Paris, accepted him after the ball at the British Embassy, married him in London some five months later, and traveled up the Rhine and through Italy before returning to Brockhurst. As the last guests depart on a soft August evening, Katherine, alone on the troco-ground, confides to her husband that she is with child.

Into this setting the novel introduces Julius March, Richard’s cousin and a clergyman of delicate constitution. He had been educated at Oxford thirteen years earlier, had thrown himself into the Tractarian Movement, joined the austere community at Littlemore, and wrestled long with the question of submission to Rome. Choosing to remain within the Anglican Church, he accepted a position at Brockhurst as domestic chaplain and librarian, the dry upland air being recommended for his chronic asthma. He kept elaborate private diaries recording his religious struggles and his self-imposed, unwitnessed vow of chastity. The arrival of Mrs. St. Quentin and Mademoiselle de Mirancourt at Brockhurst, the news of Katherine’s pregnancy, and Julius’s overhearing a tender exchange between the two women, together precipitate a deep emotional crisis. Watching Richard and Katherine embrace by moonlight on the terrace, Julius weeps and acknowledges to himself that he loves Katherine—though he never doubts the inviolability of his vow.

While cataloguing the library, Julius discovers four tattered eighteenth-century chap-books tied with a rusty black ribbon. He reads the legend of Sir Thomas Calmady, the forester’s daughter, and her curse, and learns that the saviour foretold in the prophecy is to be a child of the house—fatherless of brothers or sisters, with red-gold hair, blue eyes, and a foot that would never know stocking or shoe, “half angel, half monster.” Appalled, he hides the books away, having already glimpsed the connection to Katherine’s unborn child.

Chapter VI, “Accident or Destiny, According to Your Humour,” is set on 18 October 1842, St. Luke’s Day, and depicts the death of Sir Richard Calmady. Four days earlier, Richard had been carried back to Brockhurst from a steeplechase course after a fall from the horse Clown, championed by his brother-in-law Captain Roger Ormiston, Katherine’s brother. With anaesthetics not yet in use, Dr. Knott and Mr. Thoms of Westchurch amputated the right leg in the dining-room while Katherine paced outside, once beating her head against the wall in unutterable grief. Mortification set in within forty-eight hours. By the small hours of the 18th, the red drawing-room has been cleared to make way for Richard’s narrow camp-bed, medical equipment arranged on a what-not at its head, and the household gathered for the end: Dr. Knott, Julius March, Roger Ormiston, Mrs. Denny the housekeeper, and most centrally Katherine, who maintains her watch with quiet fortitude, her white dressing-gown spotless, her hair carefully dressed, in conscious refusal of slovenly grief.

Richard drifts in and out of consciousness. Katherine tries in vain to feed him a few drops of champagne from a china feeding-cup; most of it spills. In a moment of lucidity he reflects on his thirty years of life and on his gratitude for Katherine. When she begs to die with him, he refuses, urging her to remember the child and absolving her in advance from any future tie. He laments his helplessness and drifts through fragmented thoughts—Eton jokes shared with Roger, the small windows of the new lodge, Lord Fallowfeild’s vague letters—before dozing. He dreams vividly of riding whole and vigorous across flowering pastures toward a great light streaming from the throne of God. Waking, he gives practical instructions: the stables to be carried on under Chifney, Roger to keep an eye on things, the next Richard Calmady, if a boy, to be taught to ride straight. As the autumn dawn floods through a casement opened by Ormiston, with the sounds of the racehorses being ridden out to exercise, Richard briefly mistakes his state for troubled sleep, calls for his son, smiles at Katherine, and then passes away.