CHAPTER V.

THE PROPHECY OF THE OAK.

Ralph Kildhurm--that bold-spoken youngster who bearded his father at the castle gate--had a grand career. His life covers the period of the Puritan Revolution. He was a devoted adherent of King Charles; probably not more from personal sympathy with that unhappy monarch, than because he knew that the Stuarts' cause would have been his mother's, had she been alive. He met his death valiantly at Naseby. But he had married two years previously, and two sons came of the union, one of whom was born six months after his decease. This younger son was destined to be his successor.

Our affair being the story of the Oak, and of the family mainly in so far as it was involved therewith, I can give few further details about Sir Ralph. He was the first baronet of his line. Ralph, it is said, had always taken great interest in the growth of the infant oak tree; as was no wonder, considering that it had been planted by his mother under circumstances so darkly impressive. At the time of Sir Brian's death, the tree had grown to about the height of a man: it flourished with strange vigour. The story of its origin was not unknown in the neighbourhood, and many quaint and fantastic sayings and prophecies concerning it were rife among the people of the neighbourhood. Its rapid growth was plausibly ascribed to the blood which had drenched the soil at its planting; and it was affirmed that this blood had been absorbed into the life and substance of the tree, imparting to it a kind of semi-human vitality; so that, although in outward semblance an oak, much like other oaks, it was in reality a species of oak man--an offspring, in fact, of the valiant race of Kildhurm, born of the alleged unhallowed union between Lady Kildhurm and the Red-Bearded one. Therefore its destiny was bound up with that of the Kildhurms; but whether for weal or for woe was a question as to which different people held different opinions. Some said that, since from evil no good could come, and since Lady Kildhurm had died in sin, the tree that sprang from her blood was an accursed growth instinct with a demon of violence and mischief, and sure, sooner or later, to work harm upon its human kindred. Others, on the contrary, maintained that the charge against Ursula was--in its blacker construction, at all events--a calumny; that he of the Red Beard had been a priest or a monk in disguise, and that the intrigue in which the two were concerned had for its object nothing worse than the furtherance of some religious scheme. Consequently, urged these charitably-disposed persons, the blood which fertilised the planted acorns was the blood of innocence wrongfully accused; and might be expected to carry with it a blessing rather than a curse.

But hereupon the first party would reply that, whether Ursula were guilty or innocent of the crime charged against her, there could at all events be little doubt that she had taken her own life, and no doubt at all that the latest words she spoke to her husband were a deliberate curse. Now, it was a fact established upon Scriptural authority that the evil effect of a curse descends from father to son even unto the third and fourth generation--and this, whether the person who pronounced the anathema desired such an amplification of it or not: curses being like demons, which, once evoked, are not easily laid again. Upon the whole, therefore, it seemed probable that the Kildhurms would fare badly with their oak; yet it appears never to have occurred to anybody to try the effect of rooting the oak up, or cutting it down. But very likely nobody would have been found venturesome enough to act upon the idea, even had it been suggested. Such a proceeding, under the circumstances, would have been regarded as little better than murder, if not a good deal worse: for although Dante could scarcely have been familiar to the Kildhurm family, and still less to the peasantry of that epoch, a belief was widely prevalent that if an axe should be laid to the tree, or so much as a twig torn off it, blood would flow from the wound. And to such a pitch was this grotesque notion carried, that during many years the dead leaves and fallen boughs of the oak are said to have been religiously buried, as if they had been veritable human remains. I do not care to vouch for the truth of this legend, but that it should have existed even as a legend is significant of the serious light in which the whole matter was viewed.

It was during Sir Ralph's lifetime that some local Mother Shipton produced the famous prophetic verses which were ever thenceforward quoted when the Oak and its attributes came up for discussion; and as to the true meaning of which a great deal of speculation and dispute were rife. What may have been the merits of the question can be inferred only from the sequel; but meanwhile it is certain that the prophecy itself so far appealed to the pride or interests of the Kildhurm family, that they caused it to be engraved upon a silver disc, and hung round the bole of the tree by a silver chain. There is no evidence of this chain and the disc ever having been removed; and the story goes that they were gradually overgrown by the substance of the tree; until, by the time the prophecies were ripe for fulfilment, the silver record of them had disappeared. The verses, according to the most trustworthy accounts, ran somewhat as follows:--

Here stand I, Kildhurm's Oak, Ne'er to fall by age or stroke; E'er Two Hundred Years be run, Death of three and wealth of one.

At the period to which these verses are assigned, the Kildhurms had no lack of worldly goods, so that the concluding words might have seemed uncalled for. But they did not long continue to lack significance. For, after King Charles had suffered on the block, and the Protector ruled over England, those Englishmen who had favoured the dead King's cause were bound to suffer both in life and lands. Sir Ralph, as we know, had already paid the former penalty; but his surviving relatives were constrained to pay the other. In addition to a fine in money of many thousands of pounds they were deprived of by far the larger part of their landed possessions; nothing, indeed, was left to them but half a dozen acres of barren land, and the Tower of Kildhurm itself. Of course it was a cause for thankfulness that the Tower was not taken too; it was not every Royalist, in those days, who could boast of owning a roof to cover him. Probably, on the other hand, the Kildhurms could have got on better, from a practical point of view, with a little less stone and mortar and a little more gold. All but two or three of the servants had to be dismissed; the domestic expenses had to be cut down to the very lowest figure; and there was the once rich and powerful family, now reduced to half a dozen persons all told, living in one corner of a castle capable of accommodating fifty guests with their retinues. It was a fine place, no doubt, for children to play at hide-and-seek in; but a sad place for the elders who remembered the glories of the past.

The Oak had now completed its first half-century, and was already a noble and stalwart tree. It was an object of almost religious care on the part of the family: they cherished for it the same gloomy and perverse sort of pride that other old families do for the exploits of some godless ancestor, or for some hereditary vice or physical defect in themselves. A low railing had been built round the tree to protect it from careless and irreverent approach, and the little space of turf therein enclosed was kept scrupulously free from rubbish. The tree, however, possessed so much vigour of its own, that it would have flourished under the most adverse circumstances. It bade fair, if opportunity were given it, to become one of the great oaks of England. The trunk was modelled on lines of exceeding strength; the lower main branches, three in number, diverged from one another at equal angles, and extended their level lengths so far that the seaward limb overhung the verge of the cliff. The foliage was thick and dark, and the leaves, in autumn, if seen against the light, showed a deep tinge of crimson. Rain could not penetrate through their manifold living roof: and the shadow they cast upon the ground beneath is said to have been so sombre and so cold, that even in the greatest heat of summer it would strike a subtle chill through the blood. Those persons who had the temerity to take a nap in this shadow, or even to stand in it too long, were visited by appalling dreams, and generally got an ague which lasted them the rest of their lives. It should be noted, however, that these untoward effects did not occur in the case of the members of the Kildhurm family who, on the contrary, were fond of lingering about the tree: seeming to be sensible of a brotherhood with it, and to be agreeably affected by that which others found hurtful: insomuch that the children were brought to lie in their cradles beneath the boughs; and as they grew towards youth, their favourite playground was there.

In winter, when the tree stood forth stripped of its leaves, the peculiarities of its conformation were disclosed. Above the three main boughs already described, the trunk rose nearly erect for a considerable height, and put forth two thick limbs, which, after growing outwards nearly horizontally for half their length, thence ascended perpendicularly with a sudden crook like an elbow; and finally divided and spread abroad in smaller claw-like branches. The effect, therefore, as viewed from a suitable distance, was as if a gigantic but distorted human figure were standing upon the lower trunk as a pedestal, and were uplifting above its head two long and rigid arms. Were those arms raised in defiance of heaven, or in supplication to it? Did they threaten mankind below, or scatter benisons upon them? These may have been disputed questions among the people of that age. Doubtless the popular imagination, stimulated as it must have been by the many wild stories current about the Oak, had much to do with giving the semblance of reality to these human-like attributes; and the Kildhurms themselves, having little except the tree left to put them in mind of their former dignities, would naturally do what they conscientiously could towards heightening the mystery and the interest which surrounded it. Nevertheless, after all proper and due allowances and deductions have been made, much still remains which, to say the least of it, is singular and suggestive, and which in an era unenlightened by electricity and evolution may well have seemed portentous.