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.
第五章 – 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.
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