The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
by fate, from whom she had parted in such anguish of spirit nearly five
years back. For, in good truth, she saw now, not Richard Calmady her
son, her anxious charge, whose debtor--in that she had brought him into
life disabled--she held herself eternally to be, but Richard Calmady
her husband, the desire of her eyes, the glory of her youth--saw him,
worn by suffering, disfigured by unsightly growth of beard, pallid,
racked by mortal weakness, the sheet expressing the broad curve of his
chest, the sheet and light blanket disclosing the fact of that hideous
maiming he had sustained--saw him now as on the night he died.
Captain Vanstone, meanwhile reassured as to the newcomer's discretion
and docility, applied his mind to his patient.
"See here, sir," he said, banteringly yet tenderly, "we were just
getting along first-rate with these uncommonly mixed liquors. You
mustn't cry off again, Sir Richard."
He slipped his arm under the pillows, dexterously raising the young
man's head, and held the cup to his lips.
"My dear good fellow, I wish you would let me be," Dickie murmured.
He spoke courteously, yet there were tears in his voice for very
weakness. And, hearing him, it was as though something stirred within
Katherine which had long been bound by bitterness of heavy frost.
Vanstone shook his head.--"Very sorry, Sir Richard," he replied.
"Daren't let you off. I've got my orders, you see."
The bold and kindly eyes had a certain magnetic efficacy of compulsion
in them. The sick man drank, swallowed with difficulty, yet drank
again. Then he lay back, for a while, his eyes closed, resting. And
Katherine stood at the head of the bed, out of sight, waiting till her
time should come. She folded her hands high upon her bosom. Her thought
remained inarticulate, yet she began to understand that which she had
striven so sternly to uproot, that which she had supposed she had
extirpated, still remained with her. Once more, with a terror of joyful
amazement, she began to scale the height and sound the depth of human
love.
Presently the voice--whether that of husband or of son she did not stay
to discriminate--it gripped her very vitals--reached her from the bed.
She fancied it rang a little stronger.
"It is contemptibly futile, and therefore conspicuously in keeping with
the rest, to have taken all this trouble about dying only, in the end,
to sneak back."
"Oh! well, sir, after all you're not so very far on the return voyage
yet!" Vanstone put in consolingly.
Richard opened his eyes. Katherine's vision was blurred. She could not
see very clearly, but she fancied he smiled.
"Yes, with luck, I may still give you all the slip," he said.
"Now, a little more, sir, please. Yes, you can if you try."
"But I tell you I don't care about this business of sneaking back. I
don't want to live."
"Very likely not. But I'm very much mistaken if you want to die, like a
cat in a cupboard, here ashore. Mend enough to get away on board the
yacht to sea. There'll be time enough then to argue the question out,
sir. Half a mile of blue water under your feet sends up the value of
life most considerably."
As he spoke the sailor looked at Katherine Calmady. His glance enjoined
caution, yet conveyed encouragement.
"Here, take down the rest of it, Sir Richard," he said persuasively.
"Then I swear I won't plague you any more for a good hour."
Again he raised the sick man dexterously, and as he did so Katherine
observed that a purple scar, as of a but newly healed wound, ran right
across Dickie's cheek from below the left eye to the turn of the lower
jaw. And the sight of it moved her strangely, loosening that last
binding as of frost. A swift madness of anger against whoso had
inflicted that ugly hurt arose in Katherine, while her studied
resignation, her strained passivity of mental attitude, went down
before a passion of fierce and primitive emotion. The spirit of battle
became dominant in her along with an immense necessity of loving and of
being loved. Tender phantoms of past joy ceased to solace. The actual,
the concrete, the immediate, compelled her with a certain splendour of
demand. Katherine appeared to grow taller, more regal of presence. The
noble energy of youth and its limitless generosity returned to her.
Instinctively she unfastened her pelisse at the throat, took the lace
coif from her head, letting it fall to the ground, and moved nearer.
Richard pushed the cup away from his lips.
"There's some one in the room, Vanstone!" he said, his voice harsh with
anger. "Some woman--I heard her dress. I told you all--whatever
happened--I would have no woman here."
But Katherine, undismayed, came straight on to the bedside. She loved.
She would not be gainsaid. With the whole force of her nature she
refused denial of that love.--For a brief space Richard looked at her,
his face ghastly and rigid as that of a Corpse. Then he raised himself
in the bed, stretching out both arms, with a hoarse cry that tore at
his throat and shuddered through all his frame. And, as he would have
fallen forward, exhausted by the effort to reach her and the lovely
shelter of her, Katherine caught and, kneeling, held him, his poor
hands clutching impotently at her shoulders, his head sinking upon her
breast. While, in that embrace, not only all the motherhood in her
leapt up to claim the sonship in him, but all the womanhood in her
leapt up to claim the manhood in him, thereby making the broken circle
of her being once more wholly perfect and complete, so that carrying
the whole dear burden of his fever-wasted body in her encircling arms
and upon her breast, even as she had carried, long since, that dear
fruit of love, the unborn babe, within her womb, Katherine was taken
with a very ecstasy and rapture of content.
"My beloved is mine--is mine!" she cried,--"and I am his."
Captain Vanstone was on his feet and half-way across the room.
"Man alive, but it hurts like merry hell!" he said, as he softly closed
the door.
CHAPTER III
CONCERNING A SPIRIT IN PRISON
Upon those moments of rapture followed days of trembling, during which
the sands of Richard Calmady's life ran very low, and his brain
wandered in delirium, and he spoke unwittingly of many matters of which
it was unprofitable to hear. Periods of unconsciousness, when he lay as
one dead; periods of incessant utterance--now violent in unavailing
repudiation, now harsh with unavailing remorse--alternated. And, at
this juncture, much of Lady Calmady's former very valiant pride
asserted itself. In tender jealousy for the honour of her beloved one
she shut the door of that sick-room, of sinister aspect, against
brother and friend, and even against the faithful Clara. None should
see or hear Richard in his present alienation and abjection, save
herself and those who had hitherto ministered to him. He should regain
a measure, at least, of his old distinction and beauty before any,
beyond these, looked on his face. And so his own men-servants--Captain
Vanstone, capable, humorous, and alert--and Price, the red-headed,
Welsh first-mate, of varied and voluminous gift of invective--continued
to nurse him. These men loved him. They would be loyal in silence,
since, whatever his lapses, Dickie was and always had been--as
Katherine reflected--among the number of those happily-endowed persons
who triumphantly give the lie to the cynical saying that "no man is a
hero to his _valet de chambre_."
To herself Katherine reserved the right to enter that sinister
sick-room whenever she pleased, and to sit by the bedside, waiting for
the moment--should it ever come--when Richard would again recognise
her, and give himself to her again. And those vigils proved a searching
enough experience, notwithstanding her long apprenticeship to service
of sorrow--which was also the service of her son. For, in the mental
and moral nudity of delirium, he made strange revelation, not only of
acts committed, but of inherent tendencies of character and of thought.
He spoke, with bewildering inconsequence and intimacy, of incidents and
of persons with whom she was unacquainted, causing her to follow him--a
rather brutal pilgrimage--into regions where the feet of women, bred
and nurtured like herself, but seldom tread. He spoke of persons with
whom she was well acquainted also, and whose names arrested her
attention with pathetic significance, offering, for the moment, secure
standing ground amid the shifting quicksand of his but half-comprehended
words. He spoke of Morabita, the famous _prima donna_, and of gentle
Mrs. Chifney down at the Brockhurst racing-stables. He grew heated in
discussion with Lord Fallowfeild. He petted little Lady Constance
Quayle. He called Camp, coaxed and chaffed the dog merrily--whereat
Lady Calmady rose from her place by the bedside and stood at one of the
dim, shuttered windows for a while. He spoke of places, too, and of
happenings in them, from Westchurch to Constantinople, from a nautch at
Singapore to a country fair at Farley Row. But, recurrent through all
his wanderings, were allusions, unsparing in revolt and in self-abasement,
to a woman whom he had loved and who had dealt very vilely with him,
putting some unpardonable shame upon him, and to a man whom he himself
had very basely wronged. The name, neither of man nor woman, did
Katherine learn.--Madame de Vallorbes' name, for which she could not
but listen, he never mentioned, nor did he mention her own.--And
recurrent, also, running as a black thread through all his speech, was
lament, not unmanly but very terrible to hear--the lament of a creature,
captive, maimed, imprisoned, perpetually striving, perpetually
frustrated in the effort, to escape. And, noting all this, Katherine
not only divined very dark and evil pages in the history of her beloved
one, but a struggle so continuous and a sorrow so abiding that, in her
estimation at all events, they cancelled and expiated the darkness and
evil of those same pages. While the mystery, both of wrong done and
sorrow suffered, so wrought upon her that, having, in the first ecstasy
of recovered human love, deserted and depreciated the godward love a
little, she now ran back imploring assurance and renewal of that last,
in all penitence and humility, lest, deprived of the counsel and sure
support of it, she should fail to read the present and deal with the
future aright--if, indeed, any future still remained for that beloved
one other than the yawning void of death and inscrutable silence of the
grave!
The better part of a week passed thus, and then, one fair morning,
Winter, bringing her breakfast to the anteroom of that same sea-blue,
sea-green bedchamber--sometime tenanted by Helen de Vallorbes--disclosed
a beaming countenance.
"Mr. Powell wishes me to inform your ladyship that Sir Richard has
passed a very good night. He has come to himself, my lady, and has
asked for you."
The butler's hands shook as he set down the tray.
"I hope your ladyship will take something to eat before you go
down-stairs," he added. "Mr. Powell told Sir Richard that it was still
early, and he desired that on no consideration should you be hurried."
Which little word of thoughtfulness on Dickie's part brought a
roundness to Katherine's cheek and a soft shining into her sweet eyes,
so that Honoria St. Quentin, sauntering into the room just then with
her habitual lazy grace, stood still a moment in pleased surprise,
noting the change in her friend's appearance.
"Why, dear Cousin Katherine," she asked, "what's happened? All's right
with the world!"
"Yes," Katherine answered. "God's very much in His heaven, to-day, and
all's right with all the world, because things are a little more right
with one man in it.--That is the woman's creed--always has been, I