Dickie and Ormiston then set out together in a dog-cart from Brockhurst. Ormiston buckles a broad safety strap around the boy to secure him on the seat—an arrangement that wounds Dickie’s pride even as it reassures his body. They drive through the long fir avenue and out into the lanes and village of Sandyfield, Dickie drinking in every detail of the passing countryside. Beyond a long white-railed bridge, Ormiston opens into an allegory of Bluebeard’s locked room, confessing that most men carry within them a private chamber of ugly memories they must visit alone, and that only one person in the world can truly help them. Their drive ends at the Cathcart house, where Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart are absent, but Mary Cathcart herself comes to meet them. Ormiston unbuckles the strap and carries Dickie indoors. A long-awaited romantic reconciliation unfolds: Ormiston and Mary confess that they have cared for each other all these years, and Mary accepts his proposal. Dickie, watching them, feels dazzled yet strangely desolate, learning that those he loves have lives and passions beyond him.
As April softens into May, Dickie enjoys fishing expeditions with Ormiston, Mary, and the estate men, finding enchantment in the streams and meadows. Then, in a venial act of disobedience driven by his desire to disprove his limitations, Dickie turns his pony-carriage toward the racing stables. He defies the coachman Chaplin and meets Tom Chifney, the trainer, who shows him the horses—Vinedresser, Sahara, Verdigris, and others—recounting their genealogies and past victories as he carries the boy from stall to stall. Chifney is deeply moved, seeing in Dickie the “chip of the old block,” and vows to make a thorough-paced sportsman of him. The section closes with Chifney in his snug back parlor, declaring to his wife that he forgives Lady Calmady for shooting the Clown and expressing his joy at finally meeting the young master of the stables.
KAPITEL V. – CHAPTER I
On a summer evening at Brockhurst, Sir Richard “Dickie” Calmady returns home as the sun sets, his imagination glowing with the secret of his first visit to the racing-stable. Winter the butler and the coachman Chaplin greet him with mild disapproval. In the rose-lit Chapel-Room, guests have gathered: Roger and Mary Cathcart, and—unexpectedly—Richard’s aunt Mrs. Charlotte Ormiston and her daughter Helen, a girl of Dickie’s age wearing a white hat garlanded with blush-roses. Mrs. Ormiston, observing Dickie, makes a cutting remark about deformities “in the wrong rank of life.” Helen, however, is charmed, begging Dickie to show her the house. He agrees, eager to assert himself.
The attempt ends in catastrophe. As Dickie laboriously crosses the floor, Helen bursts into laughter, flying toward her mother to exclaim in French that her maid had called him an “avorton”—a dwarf—and that she now sees he is indeed a “monstre.” She dances around him in cruel mockery. Katherine Calmady reacts with savage maternal fury, sweeping the child aside (a forehead cut and bleeding as a result) and banishing Mrs. Ormiston and Helen from the house forever. The child hisses that she will hate Katherine always. Later, alone, Dickie weeps and asks whether everyone will mock him. The episode marks the first open, public confrontation with his deformity.
The crisis drives Katherine into spiritual anguish. Her anger at God resurfaces, and she wrestles with the feeling that virtue and divine justice may be illusions. When Dr. John Knott, the physician, arrives to test mechanical legs on Richard, Katherine must concede that her son must face his condition without her constant protection. Knott, blunt and unsentimental, insists that Richard learn to bear his lot independently, lest he grow “peevish” and “morbid.” In the meantime, a private exchange between Katherine and Julius March, the priest and tutor, reveals that March has long loved a woman he cannot marry because of his clerical vows—a confession that unsettles Katherine, who had relied on his impassive devotion.
In the sickroom, Dickie tells Katherine that the mechanical legs have failed and that “my feet are in the way”—the first time he has named his deformity aloud. He asks whether she will ever despise him. Katherine reassures him with passionate tenderness, vowing that her love is inexhaustible. Dickie then requests two acts of independence: a male valet (preferably Winter), and permission to ride. Katherine recoils at the thought of horsemanship, haunted by her husband’s death in a riding accident, but ultimately yields, weeping as she promises to be brave alongside him.
A subsequent episode finds Dickie at Farley Row, where the saddler Josiah Appleyard constructs a special saddle with holster-like supports. Here Dickie encounters Jackie Deeds, a broken-down postboy lingering in the dead coaching town, and is revolted by a traveling fair where human deformity is exhibited for money. He drives home through a thunderstorm, his mood shifting from pity to fierce defiance. That evening he claims his father’s place at the dinner table, deposing Colonel Ormiston, and insists on attending prayers in his father’s stall. In bed he questions his mother about wealth and security, having suddenly perceived how exposed the powerless can be.
In the autumn of 1862 Richard goes up to Oxford, accompanied by Julius March, Winter, Chaplin, and a contingent of grooms with horse-boxes. The custom saddle, ugly but effective, transforms his life: he rides fearlessly across the stubble fields, hunts with spaniels and ferrets, and rises early to watch the racehorses train. At the university, his wealth and curious figure attract notice, but he is older in thought and younger in bodily experience than his peers. His true friend is Ludovic Quayle, younger son of Lord Fallowfeild, a superfine young man whose devotion to Richard proves lasting. Channeling his competitive spirit into scholarship, Richard wins liberal honours in his final two years. At Brockhurst, meanwhile, Marie de Mirancourt dies peacefully in February of Richard’s second year. Two pieces of news reach Katherine: her niece Helen Ormiston is to marry the Comte de Vallorbes, and her goddaughter Honoria St. Quentin has inherited a fortune from Lady Tobemory. In the spring of 1865 Richard leaves Oxford, and by autumn 1866 he has served six months as a Justice of the Peace for the county of Southampton.
An autumn ride home from Quarter Sessions at Westchurch deepens Richard’s sense of isolation. He is stared at and mocked on the canal bridge by loafers; on the bench he clashes with Lemuel Image, a vulgar brewer of rising fortunes. The day’s principal case—a young servant girl imprisoned for pawning her mistress’s goods to feed her illegitimate child—leaves him sickened. He broods on the cruelty of circumstance and the limits of human justice, recalling the old postboy’s bitter jest that “God Almighty had His jokes too.”
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