ACQUAINTING THE READER WITH A FAIR DOMAIN AND THE MAKER THEREOF

In that fortunate hour of English history, when the cruel sights and
haunting insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and while, as
yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow
over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil
Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone
house upon the southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which
ranges northward to the confines of Windsor Forest and eastward to the
Surrey Hills. And this he did in no vainglorious spirit, with purpose
of exalting himself above the county gentlemen, his neighbours, and
showing how far better lined his pockets were than theirs. Rather did
he do it from an honest love of all that is ingenious and comely, and
as the natural outgrowth of an inquiring and philosophic mind. For
Denzil Calmady, like so many another son of that happy age, was
something more than a mere wealthy country squire, breeder of beef and
brewer of ale. He was a courtier and traveler; and, if tradition speaks
truly, a poet who could praise his mistress’s many charms, or wittily
resent her caprices, in well-turned verse. He was a patron of art,
having brought back ivories and bronzes from Italy, pictures and china
from the Low Countries, and enamels from France. He was a student, and
collected the many rare and handsome leather-bound volumes telling of
curious arts, obscure speculations, half-fabulous histories, voyages,
and adventures, which still constitute the almost unique value of the
Brockhurst library. He might claim to be a man of science, moreover–of
that delectable old-world science which has no narrow-minded quarrel
with miracle or prodigy, wherein angel and demon mingle freely, lending
a hand unchallenged to complicate the operations both of nature and of
grace–a science which, even yet, in perfect good faith, busied itself
with the mysteries of the Rosy Cross, mixed strange ingredients into a
possible Elixir of Life, ran far afield in search for the Philosopher’s
Stone, gathered herbs for the confection of simples during auspicious
phases of the moon, and beheld in comet and meteor awful forewarnings
of public calamity or of Divine Wrath.

From all of which it may be premised that when, like the wise king, of
old, in Jerusalem, Denzil Calmady “builded him houses, made him gardens
and orchards, and planted trees in them of all kind of fruits”; when he
“made him pools of water to water therewith the wood that bringeth
forth trees”; when he “gathered silver and gold and the treasure of
provinces,” and got him singers, and players of musical instruments,
and “the delights of the sons of men,”–he did so that, having tried
and sifted all these things, he might, by the exercise of a ripe and
untrammeled judgment, decide what amongst them is illusory and but as a
passing show, and what–be it never so small a remnant–has in it the
promise of eternal subsistence, and therefore of vital worth; and that,
having so decided and thus gained an even mind, he might prepare
serenely to take leave of the life he had dared so largely to live.

Commencing his labours at Brockhurst during the closing years of the
reign of Queen Elizabeth, Denzil Calmady completed them in 1611 with a
royal house-warming. For the space of a week, during the autumn of that
year,–the last autumn, as it unhappily proved, that graceful and
scholarly prince was fated to see,–Henry, Prince of Wales,
condescended to be his guest. He was entertained at Brockhurst–as
contemporary records inform the curious–with “much feastinge and many
joyous masques and gallant pastimes,” including “a great slayinge of
deer and divers beastes and fowl in the woods and coverts thereunto
adjacent.” It is added, with unconscious irony, that his host, being a
“true lover of all wild creatures, had caused a fine bear-pit to be
digged beyond the outer garden wall to the west.” And that, on the
Sunday afternoon of the Prince’s visit, there “was held a most mighty
baitinge,” to witness which “many noble gentlemen of the neighbourhood
did visit Brockhurst and lay there two nights.”

Later it is reported of Denzil Calmady, who was an excellent
churchman,–suspected even, notwithstanding his little turn for
philosophy, of a greater leaning towards the old Mass-Book than towards
the modern Book of Common Prayer,–that he notably assisted Laud, then
Bishop of St. David’s, in respect of certain delicate diplomacies. Laud
proved not ungrateful to his friend; who, in due time, was honoured
with one of King James’s newly instituted baronetcies, not to mention
some few score seedling Scotchfirs, which, taking kindly to the light
moorland soil, increased and multiplied exceedingly and sowed
themselves broadcast over the face of the surrounding country.

And, save for the vigorous upgrowth of those same fir trees, and for
the fact that bears and bear-pit had long given place to race-horses
and to a great square of stable buildings in the hollow lying back from
the main road across the park, Brockhurst was substantially the same in
the year of grace 1842, when this truthful history actually opens, as
it had been when Sir Denzil’s workmen set the last tier of bricks of
the last twisted chimney-stack in its place. The grand, simple masses
of the house–Gothic in its main lines, but with much of Renaissance
work in its details–still lent themselves to the same broad effects of
light and shadow, as it crowned the southern and western sloping
hillside amid its red-walled gardens and pepper-pot summer-houses, its
gleaming ponds and watercourses, its hawthorn dotted paddocks; its
ancient avenues of elm, of lime, and oak. The same panelings and
tapestries clothed the walls of its spacious rooms and passages; the
same quaint treasures adorned its fine Italian cabinets; the same air
of large and generous comfort pervaded it. As the child of true lovers
is said to bear through life, in a certain glad beauty of person and of
nature, witness to the glad hour of its conception, so Brockhurst, on
through the accumulating years, still bore witness to the fortunate
historic hour in which it was planned.

Yet, since in all things material and mortal there is always a little
spot of darkness, a germ of canker, at least the echo of a cry of
fear–lest life being too sweet, man should grow proud to the point of
forgetting he is, after all, but a pawn upon the board, but the sport
and plaything of destiny and the vast purposes of God–all was not
quite well with Brockhurst. At a given moment of time, the diabolic
element had of necessity obtruded itself. And, in the chronicles of
this delightful dwelling-place, even as in those of Eden itself, the
angels are proven not to have had things altogether their own gracious
way.

The pierced stone parapet, which runs round three sides of the house,
and constitutes, architecturally, one of its most noteworthy features,
is broken in the centre of the north front by a tall, stepped and
sharply pointed gable, flanked on either hand by slender, four-sided
pinnacles. From the niche in the said gable, arrayed in sugar-loaf hat,
full doublet and trunk hose, his head a trifle bent so that the tip of
his pointed beard rests on the pleatings of his marble ruff, a
carpenter’s rule in his right hand, Sir Denzil Calmady gazes
meditatively down. Delicate, coral-like tendrils of the Virginian
creeper, which covers the house walls, and strays over the bay windows
of the Long Gallery below, twine themselves yearly about his ankles and
his square-toed shoes. The swallows yearly attempt to fix their gray,
mud nests against the flutings of the scallop-shell canopy sheltering
his bowed head; and are yearly ejected by cautious gardeners armed with
imposing array of ladders and conscious of no little inward reluctance
to face the dangers of so aerial a height.

And here, it may not be unfitting to make further mention of that same
little spot of darkness, germ of canker, echo of the cry of fear, that
had come to mar the fair records of Brockhurst For very certain it was
that among the varying scenes, moving merry or majestic, upon which Sir
Denzil had looked down during the two and a quarter centuries of his
sojourn in the lofty niche of the northern gable, there was one his
eyes had never yet rested upon–one matter, and that a very vital one,
to which had he applied his carpenter’s rule the measure of it must
have proved persistently and grievously short.

Along the straight walks, across the smooth lawns, and beside the
brilliant flower-borders of the formal gardens, he had seen generations
of babies toddle and stagger, with gurglings of delight, as they
clutched at glancing bird or butterfly far out of reach. He had seen
healthy, clean-limbed, boisterous lads and dainty, little maidens laugh
and play, quarrel, kiss, and be friends again. He had seen ardent
lovers–in glowing June twilights, while the nightingales shouted from
the laurels, or from the coppices in the park below–driven to the most
desperate straits, to visions of cold poison, of horse-pistols, of
immediate enlistment, or the consoling arms of Betty the housemaid, by
the coquetries of some young lady captivating in powder and patches, or
arrayed in the high-waisted, agreeably-revealing costume which our
grandmothers judged it not improper to wear in their youth. He had seen
husband and wife, too, wandering hand in hand at first, tenderly
hopeful and elate. And then, sometimes, as the years lengthened,–they
growing somewhat sated with the ease of their high estate,–he had seen
them hand in hand no longer, waxing cold and indifferent, debating
even, at moments, reproachfully whether they might not have invested
the capital of their affections to better advantage elsewhere.

All this and much more Sir Denzil had seen, and doubtless measured, for
all that he appears so immovably calm and apart. But that which he had
never yet seen was a man of his name and race, full of years and
honours, come slowly forth from the stately house to sun himself,
morning or evening, in the comfortable shelter of the high, red-brick,
rose-grown garden walls. Looking the while, with the pensive
resignation of old age, at the goodly, wide-spreading prospect. Smiling
again over old jokes, warming again over old stories of prowess with
horse and hound, or rod and gun. Feeling the eyes moisten again at the
memory of old loves, and of those far-away first embraces which seemed
to open the gates of paradise and create the world anew; at
remembrances of old hopes too, which proved still-born, and of old
distresses, which often enough proved still-born likewise,–the whole
of these simplified now, sanctified, the tumult of them stilled, along
with the hot, young blood which went to make them, by the kindly torpor
of increasing age and the approaching footsteps of greatly reconciling
Death.

For Sir Denzil’s male descendants, one and all,–so says tradition, so
say too the written and printed family records, the fine monuments in
the chancel of Sandyfield Church, and more than one tombstone in the
yew-shaded church-yard,–have displayed a disquieting incapacity for
living to the permitted “threescore years and ten,” let alone
fourscore, and dying decently, in ordinary, commonplace fashion, in
their beds. Mention is made of casualties surprising in number and
variety; and not always, it must be owned, to the moral credit of those
who suffered them. It is told how Sir Thomas, grandson of Sir Denzil,
died miserably of gangrene, caused by a tear in the arm from the antler
of a wounded buck. How his nephew Zachary–who succeeded him–was
stabbed during a drunken brawl in an eating-house in the Strand. How
the brother of the said Zachary, a gallant young soldier, was killed at
the battle of Ramillies in 1706. Dueling, lightning during a summer
storm, even the blue-brown waters of the Brockhurst Lake in turn claim
a victim. Later it is told how a second Sir Denzil, after hard fighting
to save his purse, was shot by highwaymen on Bagshot Heath, when riding
with a couple of servants–not notably distinguished, as it would
appear, for personal valour–from Brockhurst up to town.

Lastly comes Courtney Calmady, who, living in excellent repute until
close upon sixty, seemed destined by Providence to break the evil chain
of the family fate. But he too goes the way of all flesh, suddenly
enough, after a long run with the hounds, owing to the opening of a
wound, received when he was little more than a lad, at the taking of
Frenchtown under General Proctor, during the second American war. So he
too died, and they buried him with much honest mourning, as befitted so
kindly and honourable a gentleman; and his son Richard–of whom more
hereafter–reigned in his stead.